Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (23 page)

Safely behind the closed gate of their yard, the pigs seemed mildly curious but far from geniuses stomping out Morse code with their cloven feet, thank god. They ran around kicking up sawdust, as they had in the ring a few hours ago. The chickens came down from their roost to investigate their new houseguests. The piglets sniffed at the chickens, which caused a panic, and the chickens retreated back to the chicken house for the night.

The pigs were both Red Durocs. Durocs, sometimes called Jersey Reds, are known for quality fat production. These pigs had, even at their young age, the classic arched backs that one often sees in profile on meat-company labels. They had curly tails, but it was not a tight curl, and I noticed later that they wagged them when they were happy with a certain food item, or the sun was shining just right, or I was scratching their backs with a stick. The tails, then, did convey emotion.

As they checked out their surroundings they made quiet grunting sounds. I wondered if the city noises—a police helicopter circling the ’hood, someone yelling at the junkyard dogs next door—would be a shock to their system. They had, after all, lived in the deep country, all trees and pastures. But if they were disturbed by the city’s smells and sounds, they made no sign of it. Pigs, I was glad to see, were not very sensitive.

Besides being inspired by pork, Bill and I got the pigs partly out of sheer loneliness. Not only had Lana left and Bobby been removed, but the Nguyens had suddenly abandoned us. Their daughter, Phuong, had packed her car one day and drove to Los Angeles to start college. Their son, Danny, and Danny’s wife and baby relocated to an apartment across the street, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen alone. Accustomed to three generations under one roof, the couple had decided that the idea of staying in a two-bedroom apartment alone did not appeal. I tried not to take it personally.

So they moved to the other 28th Street, the one across the main drag and directly under the highway, to a room in a house with another family. (Meanwhile, Bill and I lived alone in our two-bedroom apartment yet bickered about closet space.) The Nguyens had moved slowly, packing up items and walking them over to the new place.

After two months and nary an apartment-viewing visitor, Bill and I had become very loud. We did laundry at two in the morning, played records at full blast. I clomped around the house in clogs, which I used to take off in deference to the Nguyens. And so when I happened upon the auction ad at the feed store, key in my mind was that there was no one around to mind a backyard swine addition.

A germ of the pig idea had been percolating in my brain ever since the successful Harold experiment. And the bounty we had discovered in the Dumpsters because of the rabbits had also gotten us thinking. A homegrown turkey or rabbit was delicious and made an amazing meal. A homegrown pig, on the other hand, would be delicious and would make hundreds of amazing meals. Homemade sausage, pork chops, all manner of charcuterie, honey hams, and finally, finally, I could face the gateway meat that had turned me from a vegetarian back to a carnivore: bacon.

Would a spider weave messages on her web urging me not to kill the pigs? Were they really as intelligent as everyone said—and would I end up keeping the beasts as seven-hundred-pound pets that would fetch my copy of the
Times
every morning? Or would the pigs turn me into Ma from
Little House in the Big Woods,
with me rendering pig fat and smoking hams all day? Of course it would be the latter—I knew myself well enough by then. A pragmatic farmer, not a soft sentimentalist. Right?

This endeavor was not without risks, however. One big one was flavor. Bill and I were betting that we could feed them from the city waste stream—the bread Dumpster, the Chinatown green bins. But I couldn’t find anyone who had actually ever done this. There were no books on the topic. Until we tried it, then, we wouldn’t know if it would work or not. Would Dumpster-fed pork taste gross? Would six months of pig husbandry yield undelicious pork? This was like high-stakes poker: heavy losses and heavy wins were both within the realm of possibility.

Bill and I looked at the pigs newly installed in their pen as they nosed around the corners of the area. Then they stood in front of their gate and smiled up at us expectantly. We read their minds: Where’s the pig chow? On cue, we jumped in the car and raced over to Chinatown.

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.