Cindy R. Lobel, an urban historian who did pathbreaking research on the economic and social elements of life in 19th-century New York through the lens of food and eating, died on Oct. 2 in Manhattan. She was 48.
Her death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was caused by breast cancer, her husband, Peter Kafka, said. She taught history for the City University of New York at its Graduate Center and at its Lehman College campus in the Bronx.
By 2003, when Professor Lobel earned her doctoral degree in history from the City University, culinarily inventive and locally sourced delicacies had become an American obsession. Bookstore shelves were filling with popular treatises on the culture of food and eating. But few historians had researched the subject from an academic standpoint.
About a decade later, she published her doctoral dissertation, “Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York” (2014), which examined the way technology, consumerism, infrastructure, class, race, gender, public policy and the market influenced what, where and how New Yorkers ate in the 1800s.
“It was immediately recognized as a critically important book by academics,” said Carol Berkin, a professor of history for the City University at Baruch College and the Graduate Center.
Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Sam Roberts wrote, “In workmanlike prose, she uses food as a prism to explore social and cultural trends that, perhaps surprisingly, resonate in debates of today, which sometimes mistakenly suggest that ‘industrialization and agribusiness is new to this generation.’ ”
Among her observations on gender norms, Professor Lobel wrote that women willing to eat in restaurants three steps down from street level were once considered “of ill repute,” Professor Berkin said.
Megan Elias, the director of the Boston University gastronomy program, said, “Cindy was established as a historian who came to her research of food through her research of cities and by doing so, she helped legitimize the entire field of study.”
Professor Lobel’s book, “Urban Appetites,” was “immediately recognized as a critically important book by academics,” said the historian Carol Berkin.CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times
Her book earned the New York State Historical Association’s Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Herbert H. Lehman Prize for distinguished scholarship in New York history, awarded by the New York Academy of History.
Simply ordering a run-of-the-mill dessert with Professor Lobel could quickly turn into a lively history lesson, Mr. Kafka, a journalist, said.
“She could tell you about ice cream,” he said, “when it was introduced in New York, how technology made it possible to get refrigerated food to people of different social and economic class, whether it was traditionally enjoyed in public spaces, restaurants or homes.”
Professor Lobel also worked as a guide on food tours and helped create a walking tour on the history of Alexander Hamilton’s legacy in New York.
Cindy Renee Lobel was born on Oct. 1, 1970, in Philadelphia, the youngest of four girls, to Arthur and Kaaren (Spivak) Lobel.
After attending the private George School, in Newtown, Pa., she received an undergraduate degree in history from Tufts University in 1992.
Before joining Lehman College in 2005, she had one-year visiting assistant professor positions at Barnard College and Connecticut College in New London.
She learned she had cancer in 2017 and maintained a blog chronicling the day-to-day indignities, agonies, optimisms and dark amusements of living with the illness.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her sons, Benjamin, 10, and Jonah, 8.
At her death, Professor Lobel was working on a book about the importance and prevalence of oysters in New York in the 1800s, with a focus on Thomas Downing, a well-to-do black man who was the city’s leading purveyor of oysters at the time. Friends and colleagues are hoping to finish her book.
