by Adam Gopnik
“Well, don’t you think that someone who isn’t prepared to fill out a few questions isn’t—don’t you have to question their commitment to caring for a chicken over the winter?”
“Yeah, I guess so. But it’s a long thing. All these questions.”
The Garden of Happiness has the semimagical ability, common to any place in the city with trees and plants and animals, to secede from its environment and become what most of the world is, a bit out in the country somewhere. A hen in the coop starts clucking. A scruffy pit bull in a neighboring yard begins to growl and then bark. Undiscouraged, the hen goes on clucking, and a second hen joins her. Together they drown out the dog. The sun shines down through the arbor on the chicken committee, and the animal sounds drown out its complicated pleadings.
I had come to the Garden of Happiness not only to see a New York City chicken committee in operation but also to get myself a chicken to roast. This was why, a few moments later, I was trying to arrange, privately, for a hit on a fowl. Getting a chicken that has been raised and slaughtered in New York City is harder than it might seem, with laws and bylaws entangling the transaction: I wanted to eat a chicken that had been raised in the city, and insiders who cannot be named said that, though the City Chickens are raised strictly for their eggs, in private a poultry whacking could be arranged, for a price. I had been set up with a chicken keeper I’ll call Freddie.
“Looks like you’ve got, you know, chickens,” I said, sidling up to him in what I imagined to be the best Washington Square marijuana-buying manner, as we stared at his coop.
“Yeah.” Long pause.
Euphemism, I saw, would get you only so far in the poultry-whacking game. “I was wondering if maybe, on Friday or Saturday, you could get me a chicken,” I said. “You know. The kind that people can eat.” I tried to give the words a Sopranos-like significance.
“Yeah, I understand,” Freddie said, not making eye contact. Another long silence.
“So.” I took a deep breath. “So, uh, you think there’ll be a chicken?”
After another pause, he said, with exactly the kind of ominous serenity you want in a hit man, “Why not? Come on Saturday. You be there. There’ll be a chicken.”
I felt unreasonably pleased with myself; the chicken was going to be hit, and I would pay for the action.
I was arranging to kill a Bronx chicken as part of a project that I had begun a month or so before—to spend a week eating only food grown or raised within the five boroughs of New York City. “Localism” is a movement that has rules, Web pages, and books devoted to it. Its central idea is that one should try to eat only things grown within a narrow “foodshed” around one’s own home, and in the past decade localism has been the subject of a couple of folksy, how-we-did-it books, records of how their authors nailed down their diet to the local goods: Plenty, by Alisa Smith and J. B. Mackinnon, which recounts the authors’ yearlong experience of eating only from a foodshed around their Vancouver home, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, which tells of a similar dogmatic diet, undertaken for a year around Kingsolver’s house in southwest Virginia.
The point of localism is to encourage sustainable agriculture by eating things that nearby friends and farmers grow or raise and that don’t have to be shipped halfway around the world, guzzling fossil fuel, to get to your table. The rules generally involve eating within a radius of a hundred or sometimes three hundred miles, and are undertaken in places, like Berkeley and the Pacific Northwest, that have a lot of nice produce and plump animals within their circles.
You go local in Berkeley, you’re gonna eat. I had been curious to see what might happen if you tried to squeeze food out of what looked mostly like bricks and steel girders and shoes in trees. I wanted to do it partly to see if it could be done (like an episode of what would be called on ESPN “X-treme Localism”), partly as a way of exploring the economics and aesthetics of localism more generally, and partly to see if perhaps the implicit antiurban prejudices lurking in the localist movement could be leached away by some city-bred purposefulness. If you can eat that way here, you can do it anywhere.
I enlisted Gabrielle Langholtz, then of the Greenmarket, a young woman of awe-inspiring purposefulness, and she at once came up with a list of possibilities: vegetables from farms in Staten Island and Brooklyn, honey from rooftops, and eggs seemed plausible, too. It was the other proteins, she noted, that would be the problem, and this had led me to the chicken committee.
We began with honey. David Graves is a keeper of rooftop beehives in New York City, tending fifteen hives and colonies around town. His rooftop honey is one of the ornaments of the Greenmarkets, and so he is a walking human-interest story, who trails his news clips behind him as bees do their sun dance. We were looking at a rooftop vegetable garden, on the eastern fringe of SoHo, that belonged to the film producer Chris Goode and his wife, Lisa. The garden, which stretches across the entire rooftop, just under the watchful gaze of the clock on the old Police Building (which stopped a couple of months earlier, one of its faces at 3:40, the other at 4:35), grows tomatoes and basil and zucchini and squash and green beans and watermelon—enough for a SoHo sect of survivalists. It also hosts one of Dave’s beehives.
“It could be a little strange if the bees swarmed,” Dave admitted. I had asked if his bees ever alarmed anyone. “I mean, that could be a little unnerving to people on a city street. It’s not dangerous at all, but it would look like hell—a bunch of bees swarming around a stoplight.”
Bees, Dave explained, fly two to three miles each day in search of nectar and then return to the hive. In New York, they favor the nectar of ginkgo, sumac, linden, a tree called Chinese Scholar, and Japanese knotweed. New York honeybees live for around forty-five days, and their queen for two or three years. “New York honeybees have the same life span as other honeybees, but they work longer hours,” he said. “You can get between sixty and a hundred and forty pounds of honey per season from one rooftop hive. My record is a hundred and forty, from a hive on the Upper West Side.”
The beehive sits at the center of the roof. Dave opened it, cautiously, and we looked in together. It was like looking down into a New York office building from above: several thousand bad-tempered coworkers racing around and muttering. Dave tasted the honey. “That’s linden,” he said. It was New York honey: strong, spicy, and extremely sweet. He looked slightly abashed. “I didn’t use to like the taste of it. And it’s definitely not the Berkshires.”
There was a time, not so long ago, when New York City was far more self-sufficient in food. As Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias document in their fascinating book Of Cabbages and Kings County, Brooklyn not only was the breadbasket of the city, well into the late nineteenth century, but also made a quick, successful agricultural right turn, replacing grain with intensive vegetable and fruit cultivation. It was only with the coming of the truck farms in New Jersey and other points west, in the early twentieth century, that New York became largely dependent on imports; in recent years, thirty percent of our fruits and vegetables have come all the way from California.
New York’s abundance lingers on as rumor and memory, but the city’s ground is intrinsically fertile, and I decided next to get a sense of the natural wealth of New York by eating things that are growing here by accident. “Why don’t you try foraging Central Park with ‘Wildman’ Steve Brill?” Gabrielle suggested. Steve, she explained, could point to everything savage that there was to eat in the city. I was taken with the idea of using the Park as a kitchen garden, like those country friends who scamper into the yard for fresh-cut basil.
A Sunday or two later, I found myself, with my children, following Steve on one of his encyclopedic tours of New York’s edible nature. The children had been ornery when I announced my local eating plan.
“I’ll eat New York food,” Olivia, who was then seven, said. “But pigeons I will not eat. Squirrels I will not eat.”
“Squirrels make a very delicious dish, called Brun
swick stew,” I offered. “And pigeons are squab. You see them on the best menus.”
“Anything city-colored, that looks like it could actually live in New York, is being thrown out,” said Luke, who was twelve. “Gray things. Brown things. We don’t eat anything that blends in with the sidewalk. It needs to stand out from its surroundings.” The strictures seemed daunting but the possibilities fresh.
“Now, this is wood sorrel,” Brill was saying, bending over a little patch of weeds at the edge of the path that led toward the Park entrance at West 107th Street. “These are completely delicious! They taste just like lemonade!”
Everyone knelt down to taste them. A few meditative moments, ready to spit it out. Then: “Hey, this is good! It does taste like lemonade.”
Wildman Steve Brill looked pleased, but unsurprised. He has had the fortitude to eat out of the Park for decades. Mushrooms and black cherries, field garlic and sassafras—he can construct entire meals around things he finds growing ferally near West Seventy-second Street. He is known for his Smokey Bear hat, his baggy pants, his borscht belt jokes.
“This is lamb’s-quarter,” Steve was saying, clearing a path to what, to the unknowing eye, looked just like the desultory weeds where the softball ends up after the fat kid with glasses you’ve stowed in right field watches it go by. Lamb’s-quarter turned out to be a matte-green plant with arrow-shaped leaves.
“But now you have to be careful,” he went on. “You see this?” He picked through the underbrush and found, alongside the lamb’s-quarter, another, equally agreeable-looking weed. He held it up. “This is white snakeroot,” he explained. “White snakeroot is completely poisonous. In the early days of the country, cows would eat it and it would get into their milk, creating what’s called milk sickness. A fatal disease. Who knows how this changed American history?” No hands went up. “Abraham Lincoln, that’s how. Abraham Lincoln’s mother died of milk sickness caused by this very root. So you have to be careful to distinguish between lamb’s-quarter, which is good, and white snakeroot, which, if you eat it…” He paused and then played Chopin’s Funeral March on an improvised kazoo made of his lips and his right hand.
The children looked dubiously at the plastic bags they carried, stuffed with wood sorrel and lamb’s-quarter. New York kids, they had learned the logic of safe and shaky blocks, but the logic of poisonous plants alongside wholesome ones was outside their experience.
Wildman Steve Brill went on to show us an almost unbelievable variety of edibles in Central Park: purslane leaves, the Asiatic dayflower (“tastes like string beans”), poor man’s pepper (“tastes like radish”), sassafras (“tastes like root beer—you can actually make root beer out of it!”), field garlic, even a kind of “artist’s mushroom,” which you can’t eat but makes a wonderful sketchbook if scratched on.
“We should ask him what pigeon tastes like,” Olivia said darkly. “He looks like a pigeon-eater.”
“He’d probably say it tastes like chicken,” Luke told her. “That’s what they always say.”
Finally, it was time for a lunch break, and Steve and his dutiful followers settled down on the rocks and the lawn near the 107th Street entrance to eat what they had gathered plus a few slices of healthy-looking whole-grain bread. Luke stood up. He pointed with the urgency of a shipwrecked sailor spotting a sail. Just visible at the edge of the Park was a sign reading “West Side Deli.” The Deli in the Distance! While our wholesome fellow-scavengers were looking elsewhere, we sneaked out of the Park and returned to hide in a small copse, so that the kids could gorge on a turkey hero with mayonnaise and potato chips and Snapple drinks. Then they returned to the group, a smear of orange around the mouth the only sign of their impiety.
Localism is a movement made of pieties. The cult of seasonality was a taste that evolved into a politics; localism is essentially a politics attempting to create a taste. It is built on the conviction that the industrial economics of food growing and delivery are bad for us and bad for the planet, but it also has an implicit moralistic attitude that prefers small country patches over big urban deserts.
It is possible to have localism without nostalgia, though, and Gabrielle urged me to look into the tilapia-farming program at Brooklyn College. I took the subway out and met with Martin Schreibman, a biologist who has helped pioneer an ambitious project to create an enclosed system of fish farming, which could serve as a model for urban aquaculture in the future. If the ethic of the pure localist is in part reactionary, Schreibman’s is scientific-minded, with Lex Luthor–like overtones: he dreams of giant translucent fish tanks surrounding our cities, where we would breed our own dinner in a ring of virtuous water.
“The demand for sustainable protein is the demand of this century,” Schreibman told me. “Somehow we’re going to have to produce enough protein to feed our population, and we’ll have to do it in urban locales, because the costs of transportation are going to become prohibitive.” He has spent most of his life at Brooklyn College, beginning as a student, in the fifties. He had been interested in problems of endocrinology and had started using fish as genetic models (“Rats are just terrible to work with,” he said, a New Yorker’s reaction), and then he had become as interested in the problems presented by raising fish as in doing the experiments the fish were being raised for.
“Tilapia is one of the easiest fish to raise,” he explained. “It’s an ancient, ancient fish—it’s the fish eaten at the Last Supper. It’s a warm-water fish, and it’s not carnivorous, so you don’t get the problems of input that you do with, say, salmon.” As critics of the aquaculture industry never tire of pointing out, far more fish-mass has to go into feeding a farmed salmon than you get from the salmon itself. “The green revolution presented problems,” he said. “Hey, we’re still dealing with the mishegas presented by the Industrial Revolution! That doesn’t mean we should reverse the Industrial Revolution, since it was a solution to the problems of poverty that preceded it. Does the blue revolution”—addressing global water issues—“present problems? You bet it does! Does that mean we should give up on it? Of course not.” Schreibman has a vision, oft-repeated in his writings, of reviving the dying cities of New York State by making them centers of aquaculture, so that Rochester tilapia would be a government-certified item, like Bresse chickens, but he has had a frustrating time getting the state government to adopt it.
“Meanwhile, we’re getting flooded with Chinese aquaculture, and we have no idea what the fish are fed or what conditions they’re raised in,” he said. “This”—he made a gesture taking in the farmed fish—“is going to happen, and it’s going to happen quickly. The question is if it’s going to happen here, and happen in a way that we can oversee and control.”
Schreibman showed me around the Brooklyn College fish farm, which feels, well, very basement: high windows and humid air and the whiz-kid sense of somebody’s science-fair project percolating downstairs, below the kitchen. There is a Rube Goldbergian series of barrels and pipes, which bring the water into the fish tanks and cycle it back out again into shallow basins, where it gets used to grow plants, which can, in turn, be used to feed the fish—or us. There are even some related projects, where “ornamental” fish, seahorses and clownfish, are being raised. The tilapia swim in dense, dim schools within their barrels—oddly ominous shapes in the green water, the future in fish. Schreibman gave me a few filets for the urban table.
As we got ready for our week, we had Greenmarket herbs growing on our windowsill; knew we could forage in the Park, and so had a source for homemade root beer; were pulling plenty of local honey; owned some tilapia. But we wanted produce from a real farm, too. So, on the Fourth of July, Gabrielle and I and the children went out to the two working farms that we had found within the city limits: Decker Farm, in Staten Island, and the Red Hook Community Farm, in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Decker, fifteen minutes across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge from midtown, is a small place, smelling of damp earth, that is farmed by a handful of Mexic
an émigrés who work in a pizza parlor nearby. The Mexicans discovered, upon arriving in Staten Island, that they missed farming—missed Mexican things like jalapeños and tomatillos and fresh cilantro. They work their plots on days off, nights, and weekends, and they loaded us down with poblanos and hot and sweet peppers. (The only farm-grown food used at the pizza place is basil.)
The Red Hook Community Farm, just around the corner from a new Fairway Market, is more socially ambitious. It is a three-acre urban farm reclaimed from an old asphalt playground, with soil piled high. It looks like a Bruce McCall drawing of a pastoralized New York, the asphalt playground with a farm just dropped on top, and a twenty-foot-tall chain-link fence running around it. Begun as a kind of reclamation project for young people, it has become a farm that supplies many of the local epicurean joints with arugula and collard greens. “Twenty teenagers work here each week for a ten-week session,” Ian Marvy, the farm’s director, said. “We sell to the community, and we also sell, at a good profit, to the restaurants that have come to Red Hook in the past few years. Farming in Brooklyn reconnects kids to the earth. We bring schoolkids here from all over the city for a day’s program. Most of them have no idea that vegetables come out of the ground.”
Ian went on, “We try to run the farm organically. Our compost is composed almost entirely of manure from the Bronx Zoo. We use the manure of herbivores, like zebras and elephants.”
I looked at him for a moment, wondering if this was an urban-farm poker-faced joke, but he assured me that it wasn’t. I asked if we could taste the elephant manure residually in the food.
“Yes, you can,” he said. “I mean, we have a dark chlorophyll flavor in all of our vegetables, and I really think that you can taste the concentration of nitrogen. It’s a New York taste.” I looked at the turnips with new respect. Along with turnips, we collected super-spicy arugula, squash, and green beans, and drove back home.
