Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page A

lavender, thyme, rosemary, chives, strawberries, cape gooseberries, tomatoes, basil, mints, and other culinary plants would provide some sustenance for the bees. But fourteen stories up, with the wind and the height, and without any other obvious food sources, no one knew if the bees would make it.
    As it turned out, the bees did just fine. Garcelon was able to harvest 380 pounds (172 kilograms) of honey—that's over 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of honey per hive—that first year. As we looked out over the parapet toward Lake Ontario, Garcelon suggested that maybe the bees forage on a small chain of little islands, just opposite downtown in Lake Ontario known as the “Toronto Islands,” or, perhaps they went as far as the Don Valley, a slash of greenery over three miles away.
    In 2009, Garcelon and his beekeeping team doubled the number of hives to six, but it was a cold, wet summer. The harvest was a mere 425 pounds (193 kilograms). He'd just harvested and bottled honey two weeks before my visit. As he handed me the jar, he warned that it wasn't a good idea to open it on the roof near the hives. Honey is food for bees, so they're pretty interested in it, and an open jar of honey is just a bad idea. Of course, all these rules are common sense when you think about them. But they were rules picked up along the way, sometimes the hard way. An early-morning television media event to announce the hotel's rooftop hives concluded with a reporter wanting to taste some honey on the roof but ended with him running off-screen on live morning television.
    Safely indoors, I cracked open the jar of urban Toronto honey. The late-season honey was a beautiful translucent amber color, tasting a bit like buttery caramel or toffee. Not surprisingly, the menthols and spiciness of lavender and mint were apparent in the Fairmont Royal York hotel honey. It was also rather thick and sticky.
    One of the joys of honey, I discovered as I traveled around and sought out “city honey” from places like Paris, Versailles, London, andVancouver, was the different seasonal tastes and terroir expressed in the jars. By terroir , I mean that the unique characteristics of honey (or wine for that matter) are influenced by the interplay of the weather that year, the specifics of the geography of the place, the season it was made and harvested, and the inherent geological attributes that play out in the year's production. The small pot of Versailles honey, for instance, was thinner and clearer, almost oily, but in a delicious “clarified butter” kind of way. It, too, had mint and lavender top notes but without the caramel undertones of the honey I got in Toronto. Vancouver honey was intensely floral and sweet, characteristics that most likely came from the apple blossoms in the nearby rooftop herb garden and orchard. They were a snapshot of the variety and flavors that the bees had sampled, like a season suspended in liquid sunshine.
    Another joy of tasting urban honey was the layering of flavors due to the variety of flowers that were encapsulated in each jar. Late-season honeys tended toward these darker, rounder flavors, while early-season honey had higher-pitched sweetness and subtler floral notes. But it's not just the variations caused by the different seasonal blooms; city honeys are known to contain hundreds of types of pollens, whereas rural honeys, especially those near monocrop fields, can contain less than a dozen.
    I was becoming an urban honey snob.

A s I flew into Los Angeles, California, on a clear June day, I tried to map out the flats, farm belts, and orchard lands that drew the great caravans of migrants west during the Dust Bowl years, as well as the giant commercial enterprises that now lure people from Mexico and Central America to work the strawberry and tomato fields, to pick oranges, and to harvest avocados. But the approach over the greater Los Angeles area became a geography lesson of another sort. The continuous urban landscape where