Urban food production is more diverse than most people know. Here are some of the New York food producers I met while researching my book Eat the City.
Baron Ambrosia
Justin Fornal, also known as Baron Ambrosia, taps a tree for syrup in a park in the Bronx. He leaves the taps in the trees for several days, and then returns to the park to find a pail full of syrup. No one has ever questioned him about his activities.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Mercurial Beekeeper
Beekeeper Andrew Coté and his assistant Kimberly White open up a hive on a Manhattan rooftop near 14th Street and Second Avenue. Coté practices a particularly muscular brand of beekeeping, with more than 40 hives on rooftops in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. But he’s known as much for his temper as for his work ethic. “He’s like an angry bee,” says one fellow beekeeper.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Mystery of the Red Bees
Beekeeper David Selig got into honey because he loved both its sweetness and its sense of place: Bees, collecting nectar and pollen from flowers, skim what they need from the environment and transform it into something you can taste. One day he noticed that his bees in Red Hook, Brooklyn, had taken on an unusual red color.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
Mystery Solved
Not only did the bees look red—their honey did too. Selig eventually figured out that the bees had been flying to a nearby maraschino cherry factory to collect high-fructose corn syrup colored with Red Dye No. 40.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Mushroom Hunt
At a meeting of the New York Mycological Society, everyone places what they’ve collected on the table for others to view and classify. Some are edible, but many are poisonous, and jaded mycologists swap battle stories about surviving accidental ingestion of the most toxic kinds.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
Meat School
Tom Mylan teaches a pig butchering class at his Brooklyn shop, the Meat Hook. Mylan names each part of the pig—the neck, the shoulder, the top butt, the picnic ham—as he separates it from the body, and he shares accrued bits of wisdom, like the fact that “young animals have better-tasting brains.”
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Butcher Show
Mylan cuts up a pig as part of a demonstration at the New Amsterdam Market in Manhattan, attracting crowds of cheering onlookers.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Mozzarella Matriarch
Georgiana DePalma Tedone started making mozzarella daily when she was 16 and continued into her 90s at her shop in the Williamsburg neighborhood. (Tedone died in 2011.) Every day, Tedone got up at 2 a.m. to make the cheese according to a method so secret she wouldn’t allow anyone to observe it or even discuss it.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Turkey Tender
Pablo Negron feeds two of his ducks in the Bronx. People who keep poultry in the city often do it for eggs, meat, cockfighting, or company. Negron sometimes collects eggs from his birds but is mainly interested in their companionship.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Sugar Garden
Jorge Torres, who grew up cutting cane in the sugar fields of Puerto Rico, now grows sugar cane in a Bronx community garden. He is part of a generation of Puerto Ricans who came to New York as jobs in the Puerto Rican fields were disappearing.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Great (Urban) Outdoors
A group of friends from Guyana net-fishes for Atlantic silversides near City Island in the Bronx. They freeze the tiny fish they catch and cook them up in the winter to eat while watching football together. “We have friends who were born here—they don’t like to leave the block,” one of them said. “We’re not like that. We like to go outdoors. We came from a country where everybody spends time outside. We love the openness.”
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Townhouse Trellis
Latif Jiji is a Jewish refugee from Iraq who planted a grapevine in his backyard that now extends all the way to the roof of his four-story Upper East Side townhouse. Each year, his family makes more than 100 bottles of wine from their home-grown grapes at home, as Latif’s father did in Iraq.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
The Grape Peddler
A man sells grapes for winemaking at the Brooklyn Terminal Market. Grape sellers used to go door to door in the Italian neighborhoods of Brooklyn, since virtually every household made wine. It was even habitual for landlords to give Italian families a spot in the cellar to keep their barrels.
Photo by Robin Shulman.
How do people living in cities feed their hunger? For most, it’s a question of buying food. For some, it’s a matter of growing, collecting, fermenting, or hunting it.
I got my first glimpse of urban food production in New York when I was 17 and living on a drug-plagued block in the East Village, where many buildings had burned to the ground, leaving vacant lots. One day I noticed a dozen people shoveling and sweeping the lot next to my apartment building, intending to plant a garden there.
Advertisement
Soon, I found myself waking up to the creaky call of a rooster who strutted around the garden, eating neighbors’ kitchen scraps—until one day he fell silent, having been sacrificed for a pot of chicken soup. In a short period of time, the far east of Fourth Street had gone from buildings to prairie to a small working farm.
Years later, the East Village had gentrified, and the roosters on my old block were gone—but elsewhere in the city, others were beginning to keep chickens as backyard pets. It looked as though one way of urban food production was disappearing and another was being invented. But there were more kinds of food production in New York than I had ever realized.
For my book Eat the City, I spent six years taking the subway deep into the boroughs to meet people who grow vegetables, fruits, and mushrooms, who fish and forage, who go clamming and trapping, who collect honey, who produce cheese and yogurt, who make beer, wine, liquor, and liqueurs, who keep goats for milk, and quails, ducks, and chickens for eggs, and who butcher city-grown rabbits, turkeys, roosters, and pigs. I paged through old letters, journals, drawings, photos, and books related to brewing, meatpacking, and the sugar trade.
While I was reporting, I took as many photographs as I could of the food producers I met and their goods. Above you'll find some of my pictures showing just a few of the surprisingly diverse ways New York feeds itself.