Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers W [Paperback]

New York, the city of money, glass, and concrete, seems like no kind of place to produce food. Yet in this smart, funny, and beautifully written book, Robin Shulman places today's urban food production in the context of hundreds of years of history, tracing the changing ways we live and eat. As Shulman tells the story of New York's ability to feed people, she also shows the things we've always longed for in the cities that we build: closer human connections and a sense of something pure. 
     Food, of course, is about hunger—but it's also about community. With humor 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.

Chapters on honey, vegetables, meat, sugar and so forth follow present-day artisans and gardeners while exploring the past....[Shulman] found that even in the city, food producers are essential, connected parts of their communities.
—New York Times 

A buzzing, savory, lively world comes to life in Robin Shulman’s extensively researched 'Eat the City'...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.”
—Washington Post

The author has employed her skills as a writer and journalist to pull off a rather impressive feat: She has used food to chart the city's evolution, and to argue that it owes its greatness as an international crossroads, l£-