Robin Shulman’s Eat The City is an important but deeply fun romp through the history and present of urban agriculture and all other manners of gathering food in New York City. Maybe it’s because Shulman’s day job is a serious journalist whose byline appears in such august periodicals as The New York Times, Washington Post and The Guardian that the tone of Eat The City is wonderfully light, where others tend to tackle the subject of urban agriculture with an earnestness that precludes humour and playfulness. As serious as her subject is (and the author is about it), Eat The City is a great summer read. Whether your a resident, a habitual tourist (like me) or a complete stranger to Manhattan, Brooklyn and the outer boroughs, it will change how you think about America’s great metropolis. When I caught up with Shulman, who hails from Southern Ontario and lived in Toronto as a teenager, at GFR’s ‘Davisville Studio’ (a.k.a. Grano – grazia mille, Roberto) to shoot the video below, I hadn’t quite made it past the introduction, and Shulman guides us patiently through the idea behind the book and some of the more interesting things she found out.
Can’t see the video? Click here.
Malcolm Jolley is a founding editor of Good Food Revolution and Executive Director of Good Food Media, the non-profit organization that publishes GFR. twitter.com/malcolmjolley. Photo: John Gundy.
