Eat the City(4)
AS I continued to research this book, my conception of what I was writing changed. Taking the subway to meet people young and old, poor and rich, native-born and immigrant, I realized that I was uncovering an unseen city of thriving food production, full of practices that most New Yorkers don’t share and aren’t even aware exist. Unbeknownst to many chroniclers of the city, these practices have continued over time. I began to see how the history of food is geography, immigration, culture, urban planning, science, technology, education, health, real estate, economics: the history of the city itself. This book is about all of those things, but it is most of all about how people express and share the impulse to create and sustain.
People know this city for its ostentatious displays, its speed of life and change, its ability to tear things down and build back up. I was more interested in the intimate, homely city where food creates community, as among a few people netting tiny silvered fish near the mouth of the Bronx River, or founding a newfangled, old-style butcher shop where the butchers show the customers new cuts of meat.
Food, of course, is about hunger. We eat what we miss and what we want to become, the foods of our childhoods and the symbols of the lives we hope to lead.
And so many people continue to labor in a sometimes hostile environment to create something small, pure, odd, personal, transitory: food.
HONEY
SUNDAYS IN THE SUMMER, Andrew Coté 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, Andrew will tell you that in cities, beekeeping is more complicated. You’ve got to find a place to install a hive—perhaps some unused roof or flower-filled community garden—and lobby co-op boards and garden members to approve. You’ve got to make arrangements for access at least once every few weeks. You’ve got to carry around heavy protective clothing to keep from getting stung—many times—as a single bee stinging emits a scent that alerts other bees to join the attack.
In a crowded city, you have to work especially hard to prevent a swarm, a hive reproduction technique whereby half the bees in a colony fly off to find a new home and cluster for hours or maybe days in some tree—or, in the case of New York, one of many treelike structures, such as a traffic light or a street sign in front of the Bulgari jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. It looks like the stuff of horror films: a ball of 30,000 bees flying through the air making a noise like a buzz saw, Andrew will say. People get scared. Nearby businesses can’t operate, and crowds gather to stare. A beekeeper can head this off by dividing the hive in two when it’s particularly populous and active—but the timing has to be right. In case of error, Andrew and other experienced beekeepers set up a swarm hotline where anyone can leave a voice message that gets sent as a text alert to phones including Andrew’s. He will grab his beekeeping gear and rush over. Like a hooded superhero on a utility ladder, he will trap the swarm and spirit the bees away to a new hive.