Eat the City

A New York journalist takes a fondly nostalgic, immensely useful look at half a dozen key food commodities that used to be vital to the economic makeup of New York City and are making a comeback: the subtitle says it all, A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York. Not so long ago some combination of the city’s bustling five boroughs produced the largest markets for the country’s vegetables, processed meats, sugar, beer, fish, and wine (kosher), yet space constrictions and gentrification gradually eclipsed most of them, until a certain recent strain of committed urban farmer found ways to bring them back. Shulman surveys each of these markets in turn, starting with honey, whose hives were outlawed in 1999, allowed again since 2010, thanks to the city’s active beekeeper’s association and dozens of vibrant species of bees that supplement their nectar diet with spilled Cokes and Red Dye No. 40 from the nearby Brooklyn maraschino cherry factory. In Harlem she tracked an “agronomist-about-town” who has grown all kinds of vegetables in stray plots over 40 years; in Queens, she visited immigrant-run slaughterhouses that let the customers choose the animals first, the Old World way; and in Brooklyn she uncovered the story of sugar as once the city’s most important industry. Shulman was heartened to find four breweries struggling to operate (where there used to be 125), and she noted how all over the city, people continue stubbornly to fish. Shulman’s playful mélange of history and journalism celebrates the city’s return as a neighborhood food festival. (July)