Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (24 page)

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.

Though most Americans believe in the separation of city and country, there are pockets of urban farming here—notably in Philadelphia, parts of Brooklyn, Detroit, and East Austin. In San Francisco, I had recently heard about a four-acre urban farm that sprouted up next to the highway. Willow’s urban farms were multiplying as well. Though most of us were small-time operations with less than an acre of land, added together, we made a considerable-sized farm. My role in this scattered-acres concept was, at least temporarily, the pig part of the idealized, rhizomatic farm. And like many urban farmers, I found myself in over my head.

“How do you kill them in Cuba?” I asked Henry, who has curly black hair and looks a little like Prince.

“We stab them in the heart,” he said matter-of-factly.

I nodded, and we went back to the fire to make s’mores.

Stab them in the heart? I thought, looking at Henry in the firelight. That’s so romantic. But it might be a little too intimate.

After our guests went home, Bill and I sorted through the rest of the food gifts for the pigs. Some of our friends, in pig ga-ga land, had lost their senses and brought perfectly edible food for humans. A bag of only slightly blemished peaches. Perfectly fine potatoes. We took these upstairs and ate them ourselves.

While I bit into an incredibly ripe peach, my two pig problems floated to the front of my brain. One was how to kill them. The other was, once that was done, how on earth would I process them? I had a little over five months to figure it out.

As the hills began to turn gold for the dry season and Bill and I settled into our twice-a-day pig-feeding routine, Willow came over to our house, her dark curly hair in braids and her car packed with chicken cages. It was late May and we were going on a field trip to Vacaville, a rural town an hour’s drive away, to buy some heritage-breed chicks. First, though, Willow had to meet the pigs—she had missed their coming-out party.

“Oh, they’re so wonderful!” she said. The pigs were snoozing in a pile of lettuce, the chickens politely scratching and eating near them.

“Yep, they’re the big concept,” I said, poking a stick through the fence to scratch their backs. “Now I’m a real farmer.” At parties lately I sometimes had to defend my urban-farmer identity. The term “urban farm” had become part of the popular vernacular, and many people—especially real, rural farmers—took umbrage at it. They were especially annoyed when the self-proclaimed urban farmers had only a few heads of lettuce and a pair of chickens. My definition of “urban farming” involved selling, trading, or giving the products of the farm to someone else. There couldn’t just be a producer; there had to be a separate consumer. A real farm also had to involve some kind of livestock.

When strangers at dinner parties questioned the legitimacy of the term “urban farmer,” I only had to show them a photo of me scratching the pigs’ backs with a rake, the auto shop lurking in the background, and the debate was over. My latest livestock acquisition made me feel complete, whole. Every scrap generated in our kitchen went to the pigs. If an egg had a crack, it went into the slop bucket. Stale bread, moldy fruit, rotten milk—all enjoyed deeply by the pigs. Because of our waste stream, raising pigs in the city made a huge amount of sense. And yet this image of me as Ye Olde Swineherder, while affirming that urban farming in America was a reality, also confirmed something else: I was, indeed, a bit nuts.