Once we were home, I proudly placed the box on a scavenged old-fashioned schoolchild’s desk in the middle of the squat garden. I was tempting fate and the owner of the lot, but I knew the bees would be happier down in the garden. Plus, they probably would have stung the new resident rabbits on the deck. I removed the T-shirt from the hive entrance and watched happily as the golden specks investigated their surroundings, landing on my carefully tended garden, then flying into the sky for a better view.
A few days later, I walked by Brother’s Market on my way to get weeds for the chickens, ducks, and geese. Bill and I hadn’t gone Dumpster diving lately. Mosed, the shopkeeper, was outside enjoying the sun. When he saw me, he pointed at the buckets. “What do you do with those?” he asked.
“They’re for my chickens,” I said.
“Where are these chickens?” he asked, sure that I was quite insane.
“At the farm down there,” I said, and pointed at the lot, which you could see from Mosed’s doorway.
“Where?” He peered.
“Come on,” I said, “I’ll show you.”
As we walked the half block to the garden I explained that I had chickens, ducks, bees, and rabbits. His ears perked up when he heard me say bees.
“In Yemen, we have the best honey,” Mosed declared. “The best beekeepers in the world are Yemeni.”
I nodded. Most of the liquor-store owners in GhostTown and West Oakland were from Yemen. I was told they were able to avoid being robbed because it was well known that they were armed to the teeth. And, indeed, a few months later, when a drive-by shooting occurred at Brother’s Market, Mosed and the other shopkeepers returned fire.
“You’ll have to try our honey,” I said.
“Where are you from?” he asked suddenly. He didn’t mean which town or region in America, he meant my roots.
Usually white people like me don’t have to talk about “where they come from.” I wanted to answer his question, but I wasn’t sure: I’m an American; I’m from nowhere and everywhere.
I thought of my mom—a liberal ex-hippie born in Newport Beach, California, maiden name Schultz, who now lives in the Pacific Northwest. My dad—a hermit from the wilds of Oregon who now lives in the woods in Idaho. All my grandparents were dead; I had barely known them. I was a slurry of German, Norwegian, and French stock. The question stumped me. I shrugged.
Mosed and I reached the garden, and the ducks and geese erupted into a burst of enthusiastic quacking. Their run ran along the fence next to MLK, and they usually spent their days calling out a similar greeting to all manner of passersby. I planned on mating the goose and the gander. I hoped to mate the ducks—white Pekins—with Willow’s Muscovy ducks, the goal being Moulards, the ideal cross, popular in France for making foie gras.
Mosed seemed noncommittal, certainly not impressed by my ducks or the garden. But his eyes lit up when he saw the beehive. A cloud of bees hovered near it, some coming, some going. While he watched their labors I brought him two kinds of honey from our cupboard.
The fall honey, harvested from my bees before they died out, was dark brown and tasted a bit of eucalyptus. “We call it red honey,” Mosed said, and sampled it. “And this is the white honey,” he added, pointing to the thinner version—what I called fennel honey—which Jennifer and I had harvested a few days before. He liked the red honey very much and offered to buy some. But the 100-yard-diet experiment was fast depleting the honey supply, so I had to say no—I didn’t have much left. I promised to sell him some from the next harvest.
As I finished the tour of the garden Mosed pointed to a fava bean plant. “We call this yaell,” he said. I yanked up the stalk, heavy with fat green pods, and handed it to him.
“Thank you,” he said, and hugged the plant.
Mosed disappeared down the street. He expressed an interest in some of the chickens, for meat. It was important that he got the chickens live, so he could kill them as the Muslim tradition dictated. I nodded and promised to look into it.
I didn’t know what I was or where I was from, but I did know that I would be happy to be Mosed’s farmer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
On day seventeen, in the car, Bill made an announcement. “I don’t want you to get upset, but ever since you started this experiment,” he said, “well, your breath stinks. Really stinks at night.” I had just picked him up from the BART station, and he had moaned that he was hungry, so I agreed to go to our favorite El Salvadoran restaurant just to keep him company.
“What does it smell like?” I asked as I focused on the road. We had just been talking about how it’s good to admit mistakes, and I was trying to take this new, somewhat unpleasant information in stride.
“I don’t know, I can’t describe it,” he replied.
“Sour? Like death?”
“Kinda dry-like.”
I’d wondered why he hadn’t been very cuddly lately.
“Maybe you should brush your teeth,” he said.
“I do brush my teeth!” I said. Toothpaste was allowed in the 100-yard diet.
“Oh. Well, don’t get mad.”
I wondered what could be causing this halitosis. If Bill said my breath stank, it must. He’s a low-maintenance guy who rarely brushes his teeth and washes his hair with bar soap.
Coffee—it had to be the coffee missing from my diet. “Maybe the acids from the coffee kill off the bad bacteria in my mouth,” I said. I really missed coffee.
“I don’t know.” Bill had been against coffee ever since he had quit two years before and started drinking green tea instead.
In addition to the halitosis, the experiment was taking a toll on how we spent time together. As with most couples, an intrinsic part of our relationship was eating—foraging, dining out, and cooking together. The sad fact was that the 100-yard diet was tearing us apart.
We used to eat out about three times a week, both of us exhausted after work and too tired to pull vegetables out of the garden to cook. I missed this connection, so I agreed to watch Bill eat at Los Cocos. The place was a hole-in-the-wall in a mostly Latino part of town. Little ladies patted corn masa full of cheese and beans, then slapped it onto the grill. Within moments, a delicious fat tortilla full of runny stuff—a pupusa—was served.
That night, the place was packed, and all the customers were grouchy and hungry. The little ladies behind the counter looked stressed out. Not being part of the exchange, I observed the place in a new way. It all seemed like a ruse—the tables, the chairs, a made-up world, a piece of theater.
Bill didn’t get his food for half an hour. I sat and watched the process of the restaurant as if I were in the bleachers of a tennis match. Someone ordered, sat down, ate chips, slumped over. When the food arrived, they gulped it down. I remembered the feeling. You’re so hungry you can’t enjoy the food—you’re just fulfilling a bodily urge.
Since I was subsisting mainly on grated pumpkin, stewed plums, and a steady dose of wine every night, I wanted to tap on the shoulder of the man in the corner who was done eating but had left half of his pupusa on the table and tell him how lucky he was to have enjoyed something so complicated and, from what I could remember from past visits, so delicious. I would point out that the corn that had made the masa had been pulled off the stalks, then ground into precious cornmeal. Or the beans, the glimmering black beans, had been threshed, gathered together, then stewed for hours in a pot, with a generous helping of lard, no doubt. “Cows have been milked for your meal,” I would shout, “so finish your food!” Yes, I had become totally obnoxious. Luckily I managed to keep all these thoughts to myself.
Restaurants weren’t my only problem. The Dumpsters were killing me. The Chinatown green bins, which Bill and I visited twice a week, were starting to smell extremely good to my food-deprived body. If I found an apple, I would pause to stare at it for several long minutes, trying to figure out why someone had thrown away a perfectly good piece of fruit. This apple—cousin to those I had been plucking from my own tr
ee—had started off as a blossom; a bee had landed and fertilization had happened; then the fruit had ripened through the spring and summer, until it was picked, washed, sorted, and shipped to the store. There it sat on the shelves, caressed by many hands, until it was tossed in the Dumpster. A baffling trajectory. Then I would hold up someone’s discarded takeout container and marvel at the full portion of kung pao chicken lying in a pool of orange goo. The goo looked so tasty, so forbidden. Why was so much food being wasted?
As I grew dizzy in the pupuseria thinking about the intricate, wasteful food spiral in which we all take part daily, I remembered M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, about cooking during the food rationing of World War II. After Bill shoveled down his beans and rice, we went home, and I dragged out my copy of the book.
I read the introduction a loud to Bill: “Butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted. . . . And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself.” I paused for dramatic effect. “When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts,” I finished triumphantly, trying not to direct my bad breath at Bill. He rolled his eyes.
My bad breath, my righteousness, my unwillingness to share—after only seventeen days, the 100-yard diet was really putting a strain on my relationship.
The next day, from my living room window, I watched a man shoot up. He hunched over in the vestibule of the abandoned brick building. It’s generally an area where people dump items they don’t want, and it sometimes becomes an impromptu bathroom for the desperate. I hadn’t seen it used as a shooting gallery before. The guy wore a hooded sweatshirt and sat on a bucket.
He stood, pulled his pants down, then sat back down. I was queasy. I suddenly felt ashamed about my foodie righteousness at the restaurant. There is something more shameful than carelessly eating or wasting food: wasting people. All the crackheads and the prostitutes, the junkies and the homeless, in my neighborhood—they are evidence of far bigger problems than mere nourishment.
To the chalkboard tally—
25 rabbits
4 ducks
2 geese
4 chickens
10,000 bees
68 flies
2 monkeys
—I added: 1 junkie.
When I was done writing, I peeked out the window again. The druggie was still out there, sitting with his pants down, asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Tour de France was on. My sister called to say that the racers had passed through her tiny village. To the embarrassment of her husband, she brought an American flag to wave. My sister sometimes wears a tank top that reads, in English, BULLETPROOF BABE.
She wanted to know how the rabbits were. The young bunnies had grown plump and cute and were driving their moms crazy. I finally took them out of the cages and let them run free on the deck, where they would fatten up.
Meanwhile, I was starting to look very thin. One friend used the word “gaunt” and made a sucking noise, drawing her shoulders up and in. It was true, my pants had gotten a little baggier than usual. I cinched my belt buckle on a never-before-used hole. I weighed myself at a pharmacy: 128, my high school weight.
After almost three weeks of vegetables and the odd sprinkling of duck, I was getting hungry for some rabbit meat. I had enjoyed the rabbit in France so much. The meat was tender and light, not heavy like the fatty duck. But I was, as I had initially worried, finding it difficult to kill, clean, and eat a fellow mammal.
Riana’s French in-laws—especially the eighty-year-old matriarch of the family—were rooting for me. She had given Riana the skinny on how to kill and clean a bunny. She used a pair of pruners to make a cut in its throat. To clean it, “Mamie says you just pull off its pajamas,” Riana reported.
These relatives were gold mines of culinary information. On the last day of my visit to France, I had bought some escargot plates at a flea market. Over dinner that spring night, I asked Chantal, Benji’s mom, about cooking snails. While taking a mental inventory for my newly hatched plan, I remembered that I had quite a few snails who lived and bred on my artichoke plants. I wondered if they might add a protein boost. But I had no idea how to cook them.
“You boil them,” Chantal said in English with a classic French accent. She looked like a small fox, with reddish hair and large brown eyes, seated at the table. Her hands were graceful and quick and punctuated her instructions. “First you keep them away from food—how do you say?” She looked at Benji. “Starve them. Then cook them in water for an hour.” Dress them up by frying them in garlic and butter, she added. Benji said that at that point, the mollusk was usually removed from its shell to have its poop sack excised, then stuffed back into the shell. Sounded easy. (I have yet to get that desperate, though.)
Chantal’s parents, Mamie and Grandpa, had been farmers and wine-makers, and they had raised rabbits their whole lives. When the Germans occupied France during the war, they took all of Mamie’s rabbits, including her breeding stock. The family nearly starved to death. That was why Mamie and Grandpa continued to raise rabbits into their eighties. Bunnies were a symbol of survival.
Although my parents didn’t depend on them for survival, their bunnies had been a good source of protein. One night I called my mom to get her thoughts on rabbit killing.
“Boy, did they multiply!” she said. “You have to kill them just to keep their numbers down.”
“So how did you actually do it?” I pressed. It’s one thing to hear a story about our childhood bunnies and my mom’s biology lessons on the farm, but another when I was going to have to execute one. The French could cut a rabbit’s throat, but I was sure I would botch that delicate operation.
“Well, I can’t believe I could do this,” she said, “but I’d bash them in the head with the blunt end of the hatchet, then chop their heads off.” And then, I imagined, she would pull off their pajamas.
“I still have the hatchet. Do you want it?” Mom asked. “It’s Swiss-made, just needs to be sharpened.”
On day twenty-two, the day before I was to do my first bunny kill, the hatchet arrived in the mail. I wondered if doing these things—reenacting my mother’s chores on the farm, learning about a process from my elders—would somehow help me understand better where I came from. As I looked at the hatchet, I giggled at the thought that most daughters are given their mother’s jewelry or silverware when they reach a certain age. I had received a dull hatchet.
I walked out to the deck and grabbed a white male rabbit from the litter. He squealed when I picked him up by the scruff of his neck, as if he knew his fate. I cradled him against my body, but he still struggled. Once we walked into the garden, the rabbit went limp. I set him on the grass under the plum tree. He sniffed and chewed on the round leaves of a nasturtium. He looked beautiful under the tree, as if he belonged there, as if he was home. His white fur contrasted with the dark leaves of the plum, his haunches resting on the orange flowers of the nasturtium.
I didn’t bash his head. I decided to put the hatchet on a windowsill—an art object/family heirloom. Instead, I used a method that I had watched, step by step, on the Internet.
I put the bunny’s neck under the wooden handle of a rake. Then I stood on the handle and pulled the rabbit’s back legs upward. There was a faint crunching sound as his neck dislocated. Knocked unconscious, the rabbit jolted a little. Then I cut his throat with a sharp pair of pruners. Bright red blood dribbled out onto his fur. I looked him in the eye the whole time, watched his eyes fade and become cloudy and opaque.
Killing Harold had been a Thanksgiving sacrifice, a mercy killing, and a coming-of-age for me as a farmer all rolled into one. This time I just really needed to eat. Though this experiment was a self-inflicted folly, eating a rabbit was going to erase my chronic hunger pangs and give me a few whispers of satiety. That made something that seemed barbaric—killing a cute bunny—very necessary.
I hung the rabbit in th
e plum tree to bleed. I used a coat hanger and tied the back legs with baling twine to make skinning the rabbit easier. I made a few hesitant cuts with a pair of kitchen shears until the pink flesh under the fur revealed itself. Then the pelt started to peel off, just as Mamie had promised. I had to make only a few more strategic cuts before the whole hide came off, inside out. Underneath was a layer of skin and blood vessels.
As I did the work I whistled and was only slightly paranoid that a neighbor would pass by and try to talk to me, figure out what I was doing, and run screaming from the scene. I was obscured by the plum tree but still felt a little exposed.
Once the fur was removed, it was just a matter of gutting. The entrails spilled out via gravity, making the word “offal” make a great deal of sense—they literally fell out, and they were kind of awful. I couldn’t believe how big the stomach was, but I shouldn’t have been surprised, as rabbits have several stomachs to digest all that vegetable matter. The bladder was see-through and held a tablespoon of yellow urine. Per the suggestions of the French, I left the kidneys attached, at the back of the carcass. I removed the heart and the liver, which consisted of four dark red lobes, and one small green sac (the gallbladder, which I would later separate out).
I killed and dressed (or undressed, as the case may be) my first bunny in ten minutes. A chicken takes at least thirty minutes, a duck over an hour—another benefit of the rabbit.
The rabbit started to look like those I had seen in the French market. His lines were good—he had plump haunches. To see the flesh that I helped make was a blessing.
I wondered how a vegetarian would have fared on this experiment. She probably wouldn’t have been as flip as I had been and would have carefully sown chickpeas and beans. But it’s hard to grow enough soybeans to make tofu on a small bit of land. I knew that I couldn’t have survived without eating the rabbits I had raised.
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