Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

  That night, for the first time ever, Bill and I threw open the Dumpsters with our hearts—and minds. Will they eat, we wondered, these soggy pieces of Chinese doughnut? I discovered: yes. These chunks of leftover duck from the restaurant window in which everything exudes a steady flow of oil, including this duck head? Yes. Wontons and dumplings covered with, somehow, frosting? Yes. Grapes? Yes. Watermelon? Yes. Egg-fried rice? Yes, yes, yes.

  Bill and I anxiously unloaded our two buckets of slop from the car. We had never collected such a disgusting assortment of salty and sweet, meat and vegetable. But pigs, I had heard, were omnivorous, and so we were respecting that.

  When we walked through the gate to the backyard, we were greeted by two grunts—one deep, demanding; the other softer, questioning. I hefted a bucketful of Chinatown into the metal washtub trough. The pigs began feeding before the second bucket was empty, so I ended up pouring a load of grapes and wontons over their heads and watching it all bounce off their shoulders and land on the straw-strewn ground.

  Their focus was amazing. While they ate, the pigs let out small sighs of approval. Their lip smacking was audible. At times, they would stop chewing and simply suck up the juices from the trough through their nostrils. They were the best dinner guests ever.

  The pigs stopped eating for a moment and gazed up at us. Their mouths moved continuously; their chins were smeared with frosting and grease. Now that I thought of it, these pigs had probably never had food like this before. They had probably only had their mother’s milk, a few handfuls of pig chow, and maybe a rotten apple. Now they were eating Chinese—like good urban pigs.

  The rabbits had always been too finicky to eat any old Dumpster item. Like too-cool teenagers, they looked at me with disbelief when, after a bad night at the ’ster, I would offer them a semi-soggy head of lettuce. One sniff, and they’d hop away. The lettuce would quietly rot, untouched, until I finally scraped it out of their cage. The chickens were only slightly less choosy. But the pigs, I was happy to see, would clearly eat anything.

  Bill and I, coated with Dumpster grime, looked at each other in wonder. What had we gotten ourselves into? When the pigs discovered, at the bottom of the trough, the lopsided cake we had dredged from the Yummy House Bakery, they let out peals of delight louder than the squealing brakes of a municipal bus. They bit each other’s ears in order to get a bigger share of the cake. I made a mental note for next time: more cake.

  Reassured by these eating machines, I knew that—with the help of a pork-motivated boyfriend—it was going to be easy to raise pigs in Oakland. We had seen enough evidence in Chinatown to make our case: All that food could support several pigs. I would soon learn, though, that in this moment of self-satisfaction I was forgetting one key thing: these pigs would grow. As they steadily gained weight they would demand more food than I could ever have dreamed.

  That night they wiggled into the barrel together, sleeping head to ass, a drift of wood shavings dusted over their little bodies like a blanket.

  A few days after the 4-H auction, my mom called to check on how the pig farming was going.

  “I told Dr. Busaca about your pigs,” my mom began, “and he said, ‘I remember pigs in Oakland.’ ” She laughed at our family dentist’s humor.

  “Really? There were little pig farms around here?” I asked, missing the joke. I had been reading that many American cities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had pigs within city limits. They served as living garbage disposals—and sometimes, disgustingly, sewer digesters. In New York City, I read in Pigs: From Cave to Corn Belt, the Bowery district had many a pig: “Hog pens projected into the crooked streets. The slaughterhouses were erected astride the ditch outside the wall [of the city], the waste being carried slowly and malodorously down the East River.”

  Less gruesome sounding was Pig Keeping Council, started after the First World War. According to Michael Hough in City Form and Natural Process, “Since the bulk of edible waste came from the cities, pig and poultry keeping naturally evolved as a major urban activity. . . . Pig keeping spread on to bombed sites, in back streets and allotments and included policemen, firemen and factory workers among the devotees.” By 1943, Hough reported, there were 4,000 pig clubs, with a total of 110,000 members who kept 105,000 pigs in London.

  So I wasn’t surprised to hear that there had been pigs in Oakland. Getting excited, I imagined acres of hogs down in the flatlands. I wondered how the pig farmers took care of odors, a new problem I had to solve myself. I became a little dizzy—I was repeating history over and over again.

  “Not real pigs,” she said. “Cops.”

  “Oh!” I said, my bubble popping, and laughed at my literal-mindedness. I had forgotten that, as a matter of course, political activists like my mom had regularly referred to the police as pigs. The moniker was also used by the Black Panther Party, whose newspaper often dressed up a cartoon pig in a police uniform. In her book Framing the Black Panthers, historian Jane Rhodes describes one of these cartoons, which had the caption “A Pig is an ill-natured beast who has no respect for law and order, a foul traducer who’s usually found masquerading as a victim of an unprovoked attack.” This cartoon stuck, and people like my mom—and her dentist—used the term liberally.

  When I was growing up—and as I learned more about farming—I had been hungry for stories about my mom’s time on the ranch in Idaho. I now recognized that I was looking to find my heritage through these rural stories. But the longer I lived in Oakland, the more I wanted to know about my adopted city as well.

  Since my mom and dad had both lived in the Bay Area in the 1960s—she as a political-science student at UC Berkeley, my dad as a classical guitar player in Oakland—I would have thought that they would have lots of stories to tell. They even lived together in West Oakland at one point: after they met in Mexico (my mom still insists that it’s not a good idea to meet your life partner while on vacation), they shacked up near the Port of Oakland, about twenty blocks from where I live today.

  But neither of them could remember much about Oakland back then. My mom had a vague memory of buying tamales from the lady living next door to them, but that was all. My dad said they lived near some Black Panthers and wannabe rock musicians, but when pressed, he couldn’t recall much else. Luckily, I had Melvin Dickson.

  When I dropped off some lettuce at the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party office one day, I mentioned to Melvin that I was interested in hearing more about Oakland’s history.

  “We called West Oakland Chocolate City,” a rumbling voice called from across the room. Melvin, fumbling with the bag of lettuce, smiled and introduced me to his friend Ali, who sat at a table in the corner of the office. He was short, about sixty years old, and wore a black beret.

  “There were black businesses, nightclubs, a major jazz scene down there,” Ali said about Oakland’s 7th Street in the 1940s and 1950s. The railroad porters—men who cleaned the elaborate, hotel-like train cars and served those who traveled in them—formed one of the country’s first black unions. The Black Porter’s Union was headquartered in West Oakland, a major nexus for the railroad lines. From those stable, well-paying jobs sprang a community. But it wasn’t just African Americans, Ali said; there were Norwegians and Chinese people, too—a multiethnic community in which people mostly got along.

  “But they broke it up,” Melvin said, sighing.

  “They” was the city of Oakland and the federal government and something called urban renewal, Melvin told me. First came the construction of Oakland’s main post office, in the heart of the burgeoning black community. Though the post office was supposed to provide jobs, the leveling of homes with tanks, actual military tanks, alienated many. And when the jobs did come, there were only a few.

  Then came BART, which used eminent domain to raze hundreds of homes and businesses. To cap off the destruction, they built an expressway and highways 24 and 980 through predominantly African American neighborhoods. Melvin and Ali said this so-
called development bisected communities, ruined businesses, and destroyed the close-knit community that had thrived for years. There was no question that these neighborhoods had been slated for destruction because they were the least politically powerful. Later came the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

  Melvin and Ali got out a photo history of the Black Panthers and paged through it with me. Here was Lil’ Bobby Hutton, killed by the police though he was unarmed. Here was a Black Panther rally, everyone sporting a gun. Violence begetting more violence.

  Riding back to my farm in GhostTown, I took Shattuck instead of Martin Luther King, which led to a newly developed corner of North Oakland called Temescal. Several new restaurants had opened up—high-end Mexican, a fancy bakery, a pizzeria with a wood-fired oven. A booming economy in the Bay Area was fueling the revitalization, and new condos were sprouting up here and near downtown Oakland. Art galleries and coffee shops opened their doors, and Oakland’s new face—white, professional, artistic—came in. Suddenly, this was the place to be. I liked that I could finally get a decent cup of coffee nearby, but there was something unsettling about all the new development.

  When I turned west onto a street that led to Martin Luther King, I rode under the overpass—an uneasy corridor, especially at night, although the acoustics were good for singing—and entered a different world. I passed by Bobby and his homeless encampment along the BART tracks. The bullet-hole-riddled walls of Brother’s Market. The shuttered houses that ran along the highway. The decrepit signs for businesses that were no longer. I suddenly saw my neighborhood for what it was: an artifact, an abused landscape. But it could morph again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  On a May night, Bill and I hit rock bottom. At least we hit it together. As a crisp evening breeze blew we stood on a sidewalk in Chinatown, looked both ways, then hurled open the lid to the garbage bin in front of Yick Sun fish market.

  A few weeks after we bought the pigs, I found a book—Small-Scale Pig Raising—and I had been learning all about them. With the book’s help, I had pieced together that we had bought a eunuch and a virgin. A barrow, technically, is a castrated male. A gilt is a female who hasn’t had babies. We had purchased shoats (thirty- to fifty-five-pound adolescent pigs), not piglets, as I had been calling them. I had also read that the human alimentary tract and human metabolism are very closely related to those of pigs. That’s why people take pig-thyroid medicine and why pig valves are used for human heart transplants.

  Besides these little tidbits, I had also read in Small-Scale Pig Raising that young pigs need protein. Lots of it. The book mentioned that Norwegian pig farmers long ago fed their pigs fish in order to fulfill their protein requirements. This made the pigs taste fishy, though, so the Norwegians “finished” them for a few weeks on a diet of corn or fruit to remove the fish taste.

  Nobody does this anymore, of course. Most pig farmers feed their hogs “rations”—pellets containing a mix of corn and soy. There’s a special feed for each stage of a porker’s life. Pelleted feed was not on our pigs’ menu, and I hoped this would make the pork taste better. But I realized that, as much as they liked our fruit-and-cake diet, it wasn’t going to get them the protein they needed.

  Fish guts would.

  In the center of the Yick Sun garbage can, a black bag quivered with liquid. Bill, as bold as ever, ripped it open. We almost fell down from the fishy blast emitted from this tear. After a few seconds of head ducking and dry heaving, we peered into the bag. Fish heads, guts, scales, tails. I lined up a bucket, and Bill sloshed out a measure of the fish guts. A sickening, chunky stream came out. Some of it splattered onto my glasses, and I yelped.

  Just at that moment, a homeless man we sometimes see in Chinatown approached. He appeared to be crying and shaking his head at us. Normally he asks us for change when we encounter him, and we’ve also seen him sleeping in doorways. I looked up from our focused fish-gut pouring and saw him walking toward us, a crumpled dollar bill in his hand. He couldn’t speak, but once he got to us, it was clear: he wanted us to have this money. In the eyes of this man, we had not just hit bottom, where he hung out. In his eyes, we were clearly in much worse shape than he was.

  I started to giggle. Bill pushed his hand away. “It’s OK, man,” he said. We had to refuse the money a few times before he finally shuffled off.

  Was it really OK? I wondered on the drive back home, fish guts sloshing in the backseat.

  Based on the pigs’ reaction, the fish guts were an unqualified success. The squeals of delight were louder than those that any Yummy House Bakery cakes had elicited. The pigs sucked and snorted up the glorious bloody fish guts, chomped on the heads, sampled the mackerel livers, and licked every scale off their trough. Though this was good news for the growing pigs, a shadow of resentment crossed my mind. We’d have to keep going back.

  To keep from becoming completely resentful, I had to remind myself again why we were doing this. Pork, glorious pork.

  Pork, according to Jane Grigson, the British author of the definitive Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, is a historic meat: “European civilization—and Chinese civilization too—has been founded on the pig.” Pigs, I had read, have lived with humans since 4900 BC, in China; some scholars suggest that they were domesticated far earlier than that.

  We owe our delicious breeds of porkers to a man named Robert Bakewell. Around 1760, he crossed the plump, short-legged Chinese pig with the long-legged European boar. The result, according to Grigson, was pigs “too fat to walk more than 100 yards.” Using these portly pigs, Europeans carried on their centuries-old tradition of making salami and prosciutto and curing lardo, the back fat of the hogs.

  In America, pigs arrived with explorers and missionaries. These porkers met the cruder needs of the American pioneers, namely, for salt pork and bacon, preserved forms of pig meat that wouldn’t rot and traveled well. Bacon crossed the plains with the pioneers; barrels of salt pork were sent down the Mississippi River.

  Our breed of pigs, the Red Duroc, I had read, was created from a cross between the Jersey Red, brought from England in 1832, and the Duroc breed, brought from Portugal in 1850. In History of the Duroc, author Robert Jones Evans raves about the Jersey-Duroc breed: “He had within his makeup the characteristics that were bound later to make him a leader in swine production. There were strength of character, ruggedness, prolifacy and the ability to put on pounds of pork on forage and concentrated feeds. The Duroc has been developed through more than three quarters of a century of careful consideration for these qualifications, necessary to make the best machine to convert grain and grass into pounds of pork on foot.”

  With the knowledge my swine would be big producers, I imagined that I would be able to go either way—fancy, high-end salumi (the broad term for Italian cured meats) like prosciutto and salami—or smoke-cured hillbilly bacons and hams. Despite the trauma of fish-gut harvesting, I was sure it would be worth it.

  A few nights later, Bill and I hosted a campfire dinner party. So many of our friends and friends of friends wanted to see the incongruous sight of pigs in our Oakland backyard that we figured it would be prudent to host a meet-and-greet. Kind of like a debutante ball for the pigs. I had found a woodworking shop that would gladly part with as many bags of wood shaving and sawdust as I wanted, so before the party, I sprinkled an extra bag in the pigs’ yard to sop up fishy odors and their natural hoggy twang.

  It was funny what people brought as gifts for the pigs: cabbages and turnips—what they thought were prototypical pig foods. Bill and I took the Germanic gifts and kept quiet about the fish guts, duck heads, and Yummy House cakes we fed them.

  “So do you have a giant freezer?” a tall surfer-carpenter asked me as we stood in the pig area.

  It was the first tour of the evening. Five or six pig admirers had gathered outside the gates while the rest of the party sat by a campfire in the lot. It was a cool, clear spring evening, so clear we could see the stars, even in Oakland. The pigs had heard the commotion
of the tour, and though it was well past their bedtime, they emerged from their barrel, hoping for a snack. We could see their breath in the night air.

  “I’m going to dry-cure most of the meat,” I told the surfer-carpenter, and tossed the pigs a cabbage. “You know, prosciutto, salami . . . ,” I said, as pompous as a mother planning a Harvard education for her two-year-old.

  The smaller pig nosed at the cabbage as if it were a green ball, and the two chased it around the pig yard. All eyes turned to them. In only a few weeks, they had probably doubled in size. Taller and fatter. Their bellies, which were destined to become bacon, were getting a good layer of fat. Their legs were building muscle, and I couldn’t help but think of all those hanging prosciutto legs one sees at a good Italian butcher shop. The pigs, seeing there would be no good food, stomped back to bed.

  Though I sounded confident, secretly I had no idea how, in fact, any of my plans for the pigs would work. I had zero salumi-making skills. Though I had spent some time inhaling jamón ibérico in Spain and snarfing up salami from Armandino Batali’s tiny salumi shop in Seattle, I knew that eating was not making.

  But my ignorance went even further than the holes in my salumi-making skill set. I also wasn’t quite sure how, following the old tradition of “when the nights grow longer and the days colder,” I would kill the pigs. Somehow I couldn’t imagine executing them with a gun as Carla Emery suggested. Her book had a bull’s-eye diagram drawn over a cartoon of a pig’s head and the words “Shoot here.” That image had once made me laugh, but now I looked at it with a growing sense of despair.

  Henry, a friend who grew up in Cuba, stood off to the side of the pigpen. I sidled up to him.

  “Have you ever . . . ?” I asked, pointing to the barrel where the pigs were settling in.

  Henry cleared his throat. “Oh, yes,” he said. “My uncle raised pigs in his backyard in Havana.” Cuba had and continues to have a pretty hard-core urban-agriculture scene; people there regularly raise hogs and chickens in urban settings. In fact, the longer I did my urban-farming thing, the more I learned about the history of this practice all over the world. In the developing world, urban farming is a way of life. Shanghai raises 85 percent of its vegetables within city limits. According to Alternative Urban Futures, 28 percent of urban families in Poland engage in agriculture. In Tanzania, the government encourages the cultivation of every piece of land in the city of Dar es Salaam, where residents regularly grow vegetables and raise dairy animals and poultry.