Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (26 page)

“Well, he was showing me the backyard, and he went to point to the chickens, and one of the pigs came running over, making this loud noise. . . .”

I could guess—Big Guy and his infernal
bouf bouf
.

“And Wilfrid froze in his tracks, blinked twice, and then shook his head.”

We both started laughing at that.

Wilfrid was an immigrant from one of the poorest countries in Africa. Benin probably had, like China and Ghana, a robust urban farming scene. Maybe he had no idea how abnormal my urban farm—his urban farm—was. Or maybe it was that I paid the rent on time, didn’t deal drugs, and had planted a beautiful vegetable garden next door, thereby notably increasing the value of his property. Some might argue I had been causing a bit of gentrification myself. But the pigs—and their odors—had put a stop to that.

Once the landscaper finished installing the lawn, I let the pigs out from behind their gate. They immediately fell onto the lawn, snorting and rolling in the lush green grass. They loved the suburbs! I snapped some photos of the ridiculous sight of two pigs on the brand-new lawn. A lovely smell wafted over from the honeysuckle that wound through the chain-link fence.

RECIPE FOR PIG’S LOAF

Take 5 loaves of Dumpster bread.
Add water.
Add apples.
Squeeze in some miso.
Stir until loaves are soft.
Don’t serve hot—their shrieks of pain are unbearable.

I stood at the stove and cooked for the pigs before I left for a quick trip to New York to meet with some magazine editors. I had finally started to make a living by writing articles, subsidized by work at the biodiesel station. In the last year I had quit my other jobs, at the plant nursery and the bookstore.

I filled nine white buckets with bread, apples, and grains—three for each day I would be gone. Before I caught my early morning flight, I did the rest of my chores. The turkey poults and Willow’s chicks had been sleeping in the movable chicken pen. When I went out to feed them, I discovered that one of the little brown turkeys had been crushed by the others. Its body was cold and stiff.

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” I said, and picked him up. Though it was June, the weather was still quite cold at night.

The other birds rustled around, jostling for food, ignoring their fallen friend. The pigs would like to eat this little guy, I thought, staring down at his lifeless, matted-feathered corpse. Then the poult moved—just a slight flutter of the wings—and opened his beak, as if he were gasping.

It takes an hour to get to the airport via BART. I had fifteen minutes left to do the rest of my farm chores, eat breakfast, and finish packing before I had to leave. I grabbed the baby turkey and stuffed him down my sweatshirt. He felt like a cold tamale next to my heart. I zipped up so the turkey’s head peeked out, and I breathed great gasps of warm air across his head.

Deciding that it was too cold—and dangerous—at night for the turkeys to live outside, I gathered the rest of the poults into a bucket and carried them upstairs. I created an impromptu brooder out of a wooden box we had found Dumpster diving. The other three turkeys were fine with their new home and didn’t seem to miss the chickens. Ice Boy was still not looking so good, though. I threw a few items into my bag, contemplated taking a cab, and finished feeding the rabbits and hogs. With forty-five minutes to get to the airport, I finally set the cold turkey under the light and ran out of the house. He stretched his wing just a bit, and I thought: That turkey’s toast.

I barely made my flight. In the small bathroom of the plane, I noticed that I had a small puddle of turkey poo on my shirt. Not an urban-farming high point. All this rushing around to get too much done depressed me. Rushing around was part of city life, but I hated when it interfered with the farm animals. If I had more time, I would have been able to save that turkey poult.

On the train from Newark to New York City, I got a call from Bill.

“There’s probably a dead turkey in that box—you should take it out before it starts to rot,” I told him, and explained how the turkey had gotten chilled and trampled.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I just see four turkeys running around our living room, making a lot of noise.”

“Beep-beep—beeeeeeep,”
I called with joy over the phone, earning perplexed looks from my fellow passengers. Bill responded with the same turkey call.

After this near-death experience, I made a silent pledge to move a little bit slower, to take my time. I did live in a city, but the stakes were too high to be careless. When I arrived at my hotel, a summer rainstorm hit. I ran through the rain and felt like a god. I had to resist telling the guy at the desk about my victory over death on a farm in Oakland.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

By August, Big Guy and Little Girl had outgrown their barrel and were sleeping outside under the stars. Then one day Big Guy decided he wanted to sleep in the chicken house. He squeezed his increasingly large girth through the chicken-sized door opening, rooted around the straw, and lay down to sleep. Little Girl slept in a nest of sawdust outside the chicken house.

The next morning, Big Guy pried himself halfway out of the chicken-shack door and found himself stuck. I was dumping the slop buckets into the trough when I saw him struggling. I giggled at his problem—it was very Pooh-Bear. But Big Guy wasn’t some soft teddy bear. In a panic that Little Girl might get more food than he, he made two tremendous lunges and took the door off its hinges. It crashed to the ground, the safety glass shattering, just as Big Guy wiggled out of the way. Free of the door, he made it to the trough, snorting and biting Little Girl’s ears.

The pigs had certainly changed my perspective on calories: I was constantly seeking more of them. If I went out to dinner, I loaded up on the rolls left in the bread basket, the mediocre leftover curry, the too-salty pasta. The pigs wouldn’t mind. Bill took to grabbing discarded Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets from a nearby McDonald’s garbage can. People stared, it was true, but how could one explain?

Mr. Nguyen, perhaps telepathically sensing the great hunger lurking in our backyard, had come over cradling a pink bag of rice. “Chickens?” he said, and pointed to the backyard. He was going to love this. I motioned for him to follow me back. He admired the new lawn and the shredded bark the landscapers had installed.

When he saw the pigs, he yelled, “Oh, wow!!” I had never seen him so excited. “In my country,” he said, “we have a lot of pigs.”

I’d heard that even in big cities, many people in Vietnam kept pigs. After I showed him our porkers, every few days I would see Mr. Nguyen crisscross the streets and venture into our backyard with a bulging pink bag of leftover rice or noodles.

Every Sunday night, Bill and I headed for our ritual dives in high-end Oakland and Fourth Street in Berkeley. “I wish we could just drop them off here,” Bill said, waving at the Eccolo Dumpster—“them” meaning the pigs—“and come back in two months.”

Instead, we jumped out of the car and sorted through the trash. Our shirts got splattered with tomato juices; under the gloves, our wrists were smeared with olive oil; and rotten peach juice coursed down our arms. If we had had time to think about it, we would have realized that we had become these pigs’ bitches.

Bobby was telling me how to kill a pig: “First we’d make a fire under a big metal thing, like a tub, a barrel.”

He’d waved me down as I had ridden my bike by his encampment off 29th Street. He pretty much lived permanently in a green belt that ran along the highway and the BART tracks, although the city would come every few months, clean out his collected items, and chase him off. A day or two later, Bobby would return and simply start over again. I’d admired the stuffed animals that lined the fence in front of his place, and before long our conversation had turned to hog killing in Arkansas.

He continued: “Then someone would shoot the hog in the back of the head, then they’d stick it—with a knife or something sharp, get all the blood out.” Bobby stood next to the door of the fence. The grade of his steep encampment was almost thirty degrees—he pitched a tent up against a wild plum tree. Stacks of collectibles littered the area.

“But how did you get the bristles and hair off?” I asked.

“OK, OK.” Bobby put his gnarled hands up to slow down my questions. “Then we’d take the hot water, and we’d pour a little onto the pig’s skin and pull off the hair. Then do another spot, then another, until it was all pulled out.”

“You didn’t dip the whole pig into a big vat?” I asked.

“Too heavy—how would you do that?” He crinkled his eyes at me.

Bobby hadn’t talked to my mother, who in her pioneer days used a backhoe to loft the dead hog upward and dip him into a fifty-five-gallon barrel of almost boiling water. But my parents had the advantage of living next door—about five miles up a windy road—to some professional hog farmers. The Spelt family hosted an annual pig slaughter, and the first year my parents had pigs, they were invited to bring theirs and share the chores.

“The women were all inside cooking,” my mom said over the phone, dis missively, “so they couldn’t believe it when I went outside and helped the men.” She wanted to see the action, help and learn, not stir the beans. Other than the backhoe, their method was the same as Bobby’s: shoot, stick, dip, scrape.

Having this ritual taking place in my backyard, especially in light of its new suburban look, was becoming increasingly hard to imagine. And considering that my key advisor was a grizzled homeless man, my original charcuterie concept seemed impossible. Salami and prosciutto? I might have to settle for some hacked-up pig meat.

When I turned to the library for assistance on making charcuterie, I realized that, in this case, a book was not the proper way to go about learning. The duck prosciutto I had made on the advice of a book had turned out to be edible, but it definitely wasn’t like the stuff I had tasted in France. It’s not as if I could learn a two-thousand-year-old skill by following some diagrams.

I found the answer to my conundrum, like most things that summer, at the Eccolo Dumpster. As I was rummaging again in its bounty, a young sous chef emerged and wanted to talk about the pigs. He had heard about us from the suit-wearing manager.

I told him about the porkers’ powerful hunger, the job of feeding them, and my vague plans about processing them.

“You should talk to Christopher Lee,” he said.

“So I’ve heard.”

“He’s here all the time. Best to come in the morning,” he said before disappearing back into the kitchen.

The next day, still deluding myself that I would be preparing four hundred pork sausages in my kitchen and stringing salamis from my fireplace come September, I bought a meat grinder at Sur la Table.

Eccolo happened to be right next door. It was a beautiful August day, sunny and clear. The San Francisco Bay, just a few blocks away, sent sea breezes down the tony shopping center’s streets. Eccolo’s patrons sat on the restaurant’s sunny patio, eating salads and dipping bread into olive oil.

Fuck it, I thought, and I pulled open the front door and walked into the hushed dining room. It smelled of almond-wood smoke and braised meats. The restaurant was fancy. It seated fewer than fifty. The linen was tasteful, as were the fresh-flower arrangements. Near a big wooden bar was an open kitchen that allowed patrons a view of the chefs at work. All I knew about the place was that it was a descendant of Chez Panisse, the original California-cuisine restaurant.

I was wearing clothes that I considered nice, but compared to the people at the tables, I was basically wearing pajamas. I also noticed that my shirt-front was splattered with beet juice from a salad I had made for lunch.

A blond hostess wearing all black greeted me: “One for lunch?”

“Um, no,” I stammered. “I was told that I should talk to Chris. . . .”

“About?” She smiled.

“I have two pigs!” I blurted out.

“OK.” She looked a little flustered and disappeared into the kitchen.

It was around 3 p.m. A few people were sitting in the dining area sipping predinner cocktails. I checked the bottoms of my shoes, which were waffled with the fragrant muck of the pig yard.

Though I felt vulnerable and slightly embarrassed, the fact that I had been in Eccolo’s Dumpster somehow gave me a mental advantage. A chef’s secrets—and disgraces—revealed themselves in the Dumpster. I had seen the stock-soaked bay leaves, the woody cardoon stems, the herb-roasted-chicken carcasses. One night in their Dumpster, I had found two huge hunks of meat that had been rejected for some reason. I carried them home like trophies and cooked them in a vat of boiling water with Dumpstered cabbage. The pigs loved it. They didn’t mind an extra dose of protein, or being cannibals. I had witnessed—and salvaged—a chef’s failure. It was as if I had gone through Chris Lee’s underwear drawer. And now we would meet.

Then he was before me, tall with a head of snow-white hair as soft as goose down. He looked to be around fifty-five. He had kind eyes but seemed slightly annoyed. I hadn’t prepared for what I would say. I didn’t even know what my goal was in talking to Chris.

“The other night,” I started, “I was in your Dumpster and one of your chefs said I should talk to you.”

“Oh?” he said.

“Yes, well, I’ve got these two great big pigs in downtown Oakland,” I said, opening my arms to show just how big they were, “and I’ve been feeding them with your restaurant scraps, so I thought we should meet.”

“Why are you doing that?” he asked, squinting his eyes. “Keeping pigs in downtown Oakland?”

He had me there. I had all kinds of reasons. Because I’m an ecofreak, because of bacon, because I can’t bear to see food wasted. In a way, the answer was: because I could. I told him about the urban waste stream that I was tapping regularly. The bread Dumpsters, the high-end Mexican, the Chinatown bins. He seemed impressed.

“I don’t like wasting food, either,” Chris said. “I kept chickens for years and would bring them scraps from the restaurant.”

“And I want to feel close to my food,” I said, “to see what it means to raise it—and kill it.”

He nodded his head.

“In France, I learned of a humane way to kill a chicken,” Chris said. “With a sharp knife, they would reach into the chicken’s mouth, just under the tongue, and cut an artery.” His large brown eyes went a little bleary. “You hold them, and they just go limp in your arms and twitch a little.”

“It’s solemn,” I observed, thinking of Harold.

“Yes,” he said, and we both touched our hearts.

I didn’t know what else to say.

“When you have a whole pig,” he said, “you get the complete picture.”

I nodded as if I understood. I had come only to confess to Dumpster diving in his compost bin but found myself blurting out, “Teach me how to make salumi, how to make hams. I’ll give you one of the legs from the biggest pig to make proscuitto.” It was a Rumpelstiltskin kind of deal, but it was still in my favor.

“Maybe I can help you.” Chris looked skeptical. Despite my clear insanity, he and I arranged a tentative plan. He made salami on Mondays and Tuesdays. It’s a two-day process, and I would be allowed to watch.

Before I left, Chris gently shook my hand. Like an idiot, I said, “Your Dumpster is just wonderful, Chris. Thank you. Keep it up!”

“We have it cleaned once a month,” he assured me, and disappeared back into the kitchen. Off I went, stained shirt and all, visions of salamis dancing in my head.

Back at the farm, I heaved a bucket of slop to the pigs. I was gripped by fear: What if they don’t taste good? I fretted. A chef like Chris would have a sensitive palate. Would he recognize a Chinatown fish funk? I scratched Big Guy’s head and gently tugged on Little Girl’s big floppy ears. They grunted their approval of the bucket of peaches with loud smacking sounds.

It was month four of the pork project, and being the pigs’ bitch wasn’t so fun anymore. I was exhausted. They were eating four full-sized buckets of food a day. Foraging for them had turned into a part-time job. Every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday, Bill and I trolled the Dumpsters, desperately seeking enough food for their maws. On those nights, we would fill the car with a dozen buckets full of slop, unload them into the pig-feed staging area in the squat lot, and dole them out until it was time to dive again.

The idea of buying the pigs food never crossed my mind. Well, once—one day I asked the lady at the store where we bought our cat food if she sold pig chow. “No one has ever asked me that,” she muttered, and then went back to her invoicing project.

I took the meat grinder upstairs and thought about grinding Little Girl up. It seemed rather horrific. Thank god Chris Lee, a wise elder, would guide me through this, with the most respect possible.

A couple of days later, I ran into Chris while in his Dumpster.

“Can I help you?” he asked from behind the gate in his most withering tone.

“Chris, it’s me, it’s Novella,” I called, and came around to show my face.

“Oh.”

“I just scored at the cheese shop,” I reported. In our desperation, we had branched out even further and started hitting delis, grocery stores, and a cheese store. I had been relieved at their bounty.