Subway Noshing Gets a Zine
"Subway Schmutz." (Hannah La Follette Ryan)

Subway Noshing Gets a Zine

In "Subway Schmutz," photographer and Subway Hands creator Hannah La Follette Ryan explores the controversy around eating on the train.

When was the last time you ate food on the subway? On a Saturday in June, a confused woman who only spoke Russian offered me a small packet of thin, seeded crackers on the 2 train, a thank you gesture after I tried to help her figure out which stop was hers. She insisted I take them; I complied. I didn't catch anyone giving us a dirty look as we crunched, but that might have happened if we'd been snacking at, say, peak commuting hours—because depending on who you ask, what I considered a brief and sweet exchange was actually an unhygienic faux pas.

Photographer and educator Hannah La Follette Ryan explores that divide in her new zine "Subway Schmutz," a collection of images she's captured over the past decade as part of her ongoing photography project Subway Hands, where she documents the daily lives and commutes of New Yorkers via iPhone shots of their hands. The effect is tender, intimate, fairly anonymizing, and extremely compelling. As of this writing, more than 415,000 people currently follow the Instagram account where Ryan showcases the project. 

OK, this one is actually pretty bad. (Hannah La Follette Ryan)

"Subway Schmutz" features New Yorkers eating on the train, plus snippets of interviews about subway dining with people like author Hua Hsu, New York City Department of Transportation Press Secretary Vin Barone, food journalist Helen Rosner, "unofficial talent scout" New York Nico, street photographer Trevor Wisecup, and the Nuts4Nuts CEO (more on that huge get later).

Ryan said that since releasing the zine (which is available for purchase via Instagram DM), she's encountered the full spectrum of train eating opinions—the major throughline being that everyone she talks to has a take. "I was at the bank yesterday, and when the banker was helping me, it came up that I'm a photographer. He asked what I was working on, and I mentioned 'Subway Schmutz,' and we had a really spirited discussion about the ethics of eating on the subway," she told Hell Gate. "He was born and raised in Brooklyn, and he was like, 'Of course you can eat on the train. People who are from New York get that.' But then he was like, 'Well, you can't eat crab legs with your hands on the train.' And I told him it was funny he mentioned that because one of my contributors did witness that."

I talked to Ryan about her personal take on subway eating, what we learn about each other from a stolen glance around the train car, and what a certain mayoral candidate had to say about the project.

"Subway Schmutz" is a riff on Subway Hands, in analog form. (Hannah La Follette Ryan)

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