Eat The City

"Robin Shulman immerses herself in the heart of New York, finding hidden gardens, wineries, abattoirs, and apiaries in the most unexpected places. Through her personal stories, she convinces us that in order to live and eat in a city, we must understand where our food comes from and how it is made." – Alice Waters

“Eat the City is about the men and women who came to New York City--now and in the past--and planted gardens, harvested honey, made cheese, and brewed beer and made New York what it is today. Robin Shulman uses their stories to bring this rich history to life and to reflect on the forces that brought immigrants and their food traditions to this city. Not all of these stories have happy endings, but they inform, move, and inspire.” --Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of What to Eat

"Robin Shulman introduces us to today's trendy fooderati, and then reveals--through careful historical research--that growing food in the city isn't so new after all." --Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City

“Robin Shulman’s Eat the City locates a new point on the urban grid: the intersection of the man-made city and the abundance of the natural world. This overlooked New York is home to rows of corn, collards and okra in formerly burnt-out lots, shady rooftop vineyards, and Brooklyn honeybees fed on industrial nectar, courtesy of the local Maraschino cherry plant. Laced with surprises, Eat the City describes the human impulse to harness nature and turn it into food, even in the most unlikely surroundings.” –Jane Ziegelman, author of 97 Orchard

With beautiful detail, Shulman tells the tale of a city, however rich or poor, that has always wanted to eat well. From a Harlem numbers house that lured gamblers with city-grown produce to a hipster butcher transforming a corner of Williamsburg, Eat the City reminds us that New York’s true foodies live in every corner, in every class, of every borough. –Tracie McMillan, author of The American Way of Eating

“Robin Shulman shows the farms beneath the feet of New Yorkers, the animals plodding to their slaughter across midtown streets, the fish being caught, the sugar cane being refined in the dangerous, enormous factories of Brooklyn along the East River. Hers is an industrial, social, political, and of course culinary geography of the city, with finely observed portrait of the people, young and old, who are intent on following the footsteps of forebears they might not know they had--not just in farming, fishing, butchering, and brewing but in calling for social justice for everyone who produces food. Her delightful tour should inspire many more people, in many cities, to follow in those footsteps.” Corby Kummer, author of The Joy of Coffee and The Pleasures of Slow Food

“I loved every word of Robin Shulman’s new book, Eat the City. It is a lovely, well written and fascinating account of people who built and continue to build New York through its food production, cultivation and creation…Shulman has an ability to move back and forth through time and space. She moves seemingly effortlessly between past and present in order to set the amazing stories of the people she writes about within an historical context. That is an amazingly difficult thing to do well.” – Suzanne Wasserman, Ph.D., Director, the Gotham Center for NYC History/CUNY