New York is not a city for growing and manufacturing food. It’s a money and real estate city, with less naked earth and industry than high-rise glass and concrete.   Yet in this intimate, visceral, and beautifully written book, Robin Shulman introduces the people of New York City  – both past and present – who  do grow vegetables, butcher meat, fish local waters, cut and refine sugar, keep bees for honey, brew beer, and make wine. In the most heavily built urban environment in the country, she shows an organic city full of intrepid and eccentric people who want to make things grow.  What’s more, Shulman artfully places today’s urban food production in the context of hundreds of years of history, and traces how we got to where we are.

In these pages meet Willie Morgan, a Harlem man who first grew his own vegetables in a vacant lot as a front for his gambling racket. And David Selig, a beekeeper in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn who found his bees making a mysteriously red honey. Get to know Yolene Joseph, who fishes crabs out of the waters off Coney Island to make curried stews for her family. Meet the creators of the sickly sweet Manischewitz wine, whose brand grew out of Prohibition; and Jacob Ruppert, who owned a beer empire on the Upper East Side, as well as the New York Yankees.

Eat the City is about how the ability of cities to feed people has changed over time. Yet it is also, in a sense, the story of the things we long for in cities today: closer human connections, a tangible link to more basic processes, a way to shape more rounded lives, a sense of something pure.

Of course, hundreds of years ago, most food and drink consumed by New Yorkers was grown and produced within what are now the five boroughs. Yet people rarely realize that long after New York became a dense urban agglomeration, innovators, traditionalists, migrants and immigrants continued to insist on producing their own food. This book shows the perils and benefits—and the ironies and humor—when city people involve themselves in making what they eat.

Food, of course, is about hunger. We eat what we miss and what we want to become, the foods of our childhoods and the symbols of the lives we hope to lead. With wit and insight,Eat the City shows how in places like New York, people have always found ways to use their collective hunger to build their own kind of city.

About Robin Shulman

ROBIN SHULMAN is a writer and reporter whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, the Guardian, and many other publications.  She lives in New York City.

Editorial Review

When roving reporter Shulman came home to New York in 2005, she marked the occasion and permanence of her return by “literally plant[ing] roots” in a small garden. She soon realized, though, that she was more interested in finding out more about the urban back-to-the-land trend she observed around her. So she set out to interview the foodies and “hipstavores” who engaged in the agricultural activities that made up the city’s food underground. She talked to beekeepers who kept hives on city rooftops; gardeners who cultivated fruits and vegetables in vacant lots; butchers who cut up Queens-bred livestock; beer brewers from Brooklyn and winemakers from Manhattan; and fishermen and crab catchers who caught their meals from the East River and New York Harbor. Shulman also began intensive research into the history of victuals in the city, and she discovered that the do-it-yourself agricultural practices were more than just reactions to a struggling economy. They were also in keeping with the city’s rich food-producing heritage and a reflection of the newcomers who “insisted on their own vision of the good life, in which food comes from trusted hands: their own or their neighbor’s.” What makes Shulman’s narrative so captivating is the way she emphasizes the relationship human beings have with an urban environment that at first glance is anything but farm-friendly. – Kirkus Reviews

“Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Trappers, Hunters, Foragers, Slaughterers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beeekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York” by Robin Shulman

The Washington Post Book Review – September 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

A buzzing, savory, lively world comes to life in Robin Shulman’s extensively researched “Eat the City.” The subtitle reads like a recruitment post at Monster.com, but the collective efforts of those producers are compelling stuff. The book provides what’s missing from much of the breathless media coverage of New York’s modern food artisans: culinary context. Europeans who landed in what became New York Harbor found hillsides red with strawberries and 12-inch oysters in the waters? That’s history made delicious.

A mere 50 years or so before the butchers of Williamsburg became rock stars, “cows, pigs and sheep were still walking through Midtown Manhattan streets en route to massive slaughterhouses,” Shulman writes. Today’s urban farmers in Harlem might be surprised to learn that late-17th-century Queens was one of the biggest vegetable-producing regions in the colonies. [Read the full article...]

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The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

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