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. ...