Eat the city

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