Eat the City - A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders,

Zusatztext 77566559 Informationen zum Autor Robin Shulman Klappentext 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.1 HONEY Sundays in the summer, Andrew Cote likes to hive hop, collecting honey. Sometimes he takes the subway from his apartment on the Lower East Side, his smoker and his bag of hive tools banging against his thigh as he walks. But mostly he drives a white Toyota Tundra pickup abuzz with bees hovering over the truck bed, where their honey has been stashed. They will travel with the truck for hours, from one borough to another, seeking to reclaim what is theirs in a scene out of an urban Winnie-the-Pooh. Andrew curses his way through traffic, flips one-handed through a giant ring for keys to the next rooftop hive building, and parks wherever he can find a space. Much of city beekeeping is vertical work. Up a narrow stairway in the dingy darkness, carrying tools to hives on a roof in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Down six flights of stairs from rooftop hives on a different building on Second Avenue, balancing heavy, oozing frames of honey. Back outside, truck full of honey, when someone pauses and stares at the buzzing bees still lingering above the truck, Andrew says, “We’re out of here,” and guns the motor. When a cruiser slows down and a cop yells out the window, “Is that honey?” Andrew cheerfully calls, “Legal since April 2010! Want to try?” While hobbyist beekeepers usually maintain just a hive or two, Andrew practices a particularly muscular brand of urban beekeeping, managing forty hives on rooftops, terraces, and balconies, and in yards and gardens in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. A fourth-generation beekeeper, Andrew is a kind of honey lord with a petty honey fiefdom, supervising a network of hundreds of novices he has taught and mentored in the city. He sells boxlike hives he makes himself, along with packages of bees as starter kits. At the New York City Beekeepers Association that he helped launch, he presides over monthly meetings, which routinely draw the illuminati of the beekeeping world--great beekeepers, authors of books on honey, artists focused on bees. To hear Andrew tell it, honey-making is a hustle. It’s nothing like producing wine or cheese, where you mix careful quantities of ingredients together, monitor temperatures and chemical processes, and tend a thing while it becomes something else. In beekeeping, your job is observation, fraud, and theft. You set up conditions (a good clean hive, water, a supply of nearby flowers) so the bees feel equipped to plan for the future. Sooner or later, your bees will fly forth and suck nectar from flowers, spit in enzymes that thicken and preserve it, and construct cells of wax in which to store it as food for the long winter. Driven by instinct that looks like artisanal zeal, they will use their tiny wings as fans to cool the wax in summer and warm it in fall. Many die. You, on the other hand, just pry open the lid of the hive, which the bees, perhaps foreseeing such crimes, have sealed shut with a sappy glue they extract from plants. You knock out the bees with a dose of smoke and seize their waxen provisions. And then you’re out, with nary a sting. You’ve got honey. Of course,...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Robin Shulman, SHULMAN ROBIN
• Editore: Crown Publishing Group
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 21.05.2013
• EAN: 9780307719065
• ISBN: 978-0-307-71906-5
• Pagine: 352
• Dimensioni: 132 mm x 203 mm x 20 mm
• Categorie: Guide e manuali > Mangiare e bere > Libri di cucina a tema; Scienze umane, arte, musica > Storia