New York City COVID-19 Food Studies Web Collection
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Abstract
New York City COVID-19 Food Studies Web Collection is made of archived websites that detail the impact on COVID-19 on food communities in New York City and at New York University, beginning in 2020.
Historical Note
In March 2020, non-essential businesses throughout New York City closed in an effort to contain COVID-19, a respiratory virus that first identified in December 2019. The virus and the closures disproportionally affected systematically excluded groups, such as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, Asian American Pacific Islander, and LGBTQIA+ communities. Restaurants and other public venues were closed to indoor dining and could only offer delivery and take-out; later many closed permanently. Chinatown restaurants were harshly affected, not only due to closures, but due to an increase in anti-Asian racism and xenophobia. Street vendors also suffered, due to lack of commuters and minimal protections. Early in the pandemic, restaurants also provided free meals to essential workers and other food workers changed their business models to remain in business. In late March 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) which, in addition to other government assistance, helped keep restaurants and small businesses open.
Closures also led to unemployment, which increased the need for food aid programs. Both governmental and mutual aid food programs sprung up to assist food insecurity, especially for children who depended on school meals and Black, Lantine, and immigrant communities whose food insecurity was excerabated by the pandemic. The NYU community also provided courtesy meal programs for food insecure students and quarantining and isolating students.
Summer 2020 also led to the expansion of outdoor dining as part of the New York City reopening program. Indoor dining returned in August 2020, which led to debate between the financial needs of businesses and minimizing the spread of COVID-19. In 2022, vaccine requirements led to conflict between diners and restaurants. As of this writing in June 2022, the pandemic is still an active part of life.
Arrangement
Websites are arranged alphabetically by creator.
Scope and Contents
New York City COVID-19 Food Studies Web Collection is made of archived websites that detail the impact on COVID-19 on food communities in New York City. It documents the effects of the pandemic on New York University's campuses and their surrounding food communities, their shifts in cultural, economic, and social practices around the city, and their organizing and response efforts, with an intentional focus on Black and Indigenous People of Color, Asian American Pacific Islander, and LGBTQIA+ communities.
Food communities documented in the collection consist of food workers, farms and their workers, food non-profits, food vendors, farmers' markets, private and community gardens, alternative food sources, mutual aid networks, community refrigerators and food pantries, restaurants, and soup kitchens. The collection focuses on issues of food justice and food scarcity through a lens of race and class. within NYU's staff and students and in the greater New York City community.
Subjects
Conditions Governing Access
Open to researchers without restrictions.
Conditions Governing Use
This collection is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use materials in the collection in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).
Preferred Citation
Identification of item, date; New York City COVID-19 Food Studies Web Collection; MSS 607; Wayback URL; Fales Library, New York University.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Websites were selected by curators Jasmine Sykes-Kunk, Janet Bunde, Michael Koncewicz, Shannon O'Neill, Nicholas Martin and web archivist Nicole Greenhouse through the use of Archive-It. Archive-It uses web crawling technology to capture websites at a scheduled time and displays only an archived copy, from the resulting WARC file, of the website. The accession numbers associated with these websites are 2021.034, 2021.035, 2021.036, 2021.037, 2022.030, 2022.042, 2023.062, 2024.048, and 2025.003.
Physical Characteristics and Technical Requirements
Due to technical or privacy issues, archived websites may not be exact copies of the original website at the time of the web crawl. Certain file types will not be captured dependent on how they are embedded in the site. Other parts of websites that the crawler has difficulty capturing includes Javascript, streaming content, database-driven content, and highly interactive content. Full-Text searches of archived websites are available at https://archive-it.org/organizations/567.
Facebook was inconsistently captured due to crawling technology limitations.
Google Drive documents were captured but do not playback.
Take Down Policy
Archived websites are made accessible for purposes of education and research. NYU Libraries have given attribution to rights holders when possible; however, due to the nature of archival collections, we are not always able to identify this information.
If you hold the rights to materials in our archived websites that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may maintain accurate information about these materials.
If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on this website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), you may request the removal of the material from our site by submitting a notice, with the elements described below, to the special.collections@nyu.edu.
Please include the following in your notice: Identification of the material that you believe to be infringing and information sufficient to permit us to locate the material; your contact information, such as an address, telephone number, and email address; a statement that you are the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed and that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement that the information in the notification is accurate and made under penalty of perjury; and your physical or electronic signature. Upon receiving a notice that includes the details listed above, we will remove the allegedly infringing material from public view while we assess the issues identified in your notice.
Appraisal
Robots.txt (a piece of code designed to limit crawler activity within a website) was ignored. Unless noted, the collection was rescoped to allow for Google documents and videos embedded in the website.
About this Guide
Processing Information
In September 2020, curators Jasmine Sykes-Kunk, Janet Bunde, Michael Koncewicz, Shannon O'Neill, and Nicholas Martin selected websites on New York City arts response related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection was maintained by Nicole Greenhouse. Maintenance of the collection consisted of rescoping due to missing captured content, redirects and content drift, missing embedded materials (such as videos or attached Google documents and pdfs), and other materials created by selected entities that is related to the pandemic. The finding aid was created in Spring 2022 and description was standardized across the collection.
