A pig in Queens is raised on leftover mash from a brewery in Brooklyn. Empty lots become vegetable gardens that uplift Harlem, leading to so much development that the gardens themselves are threatened. A Brooklyn beekeeper is baffled after discovering the honey he has harvested is electric red — until he realizes his bees are drawn to the sweet syrup produced by a neighborhood maraschino-cherry factory.

In “Eat the City,’’ author Robin Shulman illuminates the circles of life within New York’s local food movement, and how today’s purveyors have ingeniously, if not always wittingly, adapted the traditions of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of food production in the city, with its teeming acres of cement and dense thicket of forbidding regulations.