Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

  We cruised past restaurant row and slipped through a gate in the back where all the restaurants shared Dumpsters. We left the car running and scurried like rats to the yawning maw of waste.

  “What the hell?” Bill said, lofting an entire clear garbage bag filled with still-warm Spanish rice. Like idiots, we had brought only three buckets. Bill gently laid the bag in the back of the car. I took the plunge and fished out an entire pizza, only slightly burned. In five minutes we had found a squashed key lime pie, a bag of still-warm beans, and a container of old romaine lettuce.

  Even though it was approaching midnight, we felt like Vegas gamblers on a winning streak, and we weren’t going to quit while we were ahead. We continued on, driving to the bread-filled Dumpsters of Life for a suckle. They were filled to the brim, as usual. A few gutter punks sifted through the Dumpsters. One had climbed in. They saw us and started to scatter.

  “We come in peace,” I said when we got out of the car. We wandered up to a bin. In order to dissuade Dumpster divers, the bakery had been locking the lids with padlocks. I had figured out that the combination for the locks was the street number of the bakery. But the other scroungers and punks, when they found the locks, promptly cut them. The following night, new locks would appear. These were then broken. Someone scrawled the obvious on the side of the Dumpster in silver pen: THIS IS WAR. It looked like the bakery had finally surrendered; the locks were gone now.

  “Looking for something special?” I asked the kid with a mohawk and a nose piercing.

  “Cinnamon Twist,” he mumbled, tossing whole baguettes and bags of dinner rolls out of the way.

  This was the bakery’s holy grail, an eggy sweet loaf spiked with cinnamon that, best of all, came secured in a plastic bag.

  I grabbed whatever loaves were closest. I dropped a few on the dusty pavement, then picked them back up and threw them in the car. I looked back at the punks, who, watching me, seemed a little repulsed, not knowing we were there for the pigs. I waved as Bill snagged a few stale baguettes for the rabbits, and we were on our way. Though it was late, I wanted to hit one more spot.

  I had heard through the grapevine about a fancy Italian place on Fourth Street in Berkeley. Fourth Street is a luxury shopping district, complete with a Sur la Table, an Aveda cosmetics store, and bars that sell $20 glasses of wine. “Whole chickens,” my source—a fellow Dumspter diver who mostly scrounged for vegetable oil to power his car—whispered when describing the Dumpster at Eccolo.

  The pigs needed protein. Maybe they would prefer roasted free-range chicken carcasses to Chinatown fish guts. I know I would.

  We drove, under the cover of night, to Fourth Street. Bill idled the car, and I dashed behind the metal door to the Eccolo Dumpster. The rumor was true: fragrant, whole chicken carcasses. Pawing through the pile, I got so caught up in the bounty—fennel stalks, bread soaked in olive oil—that I didn’t notice when the gate creaked open.

  “Please explain to me what you are doing,” a man in a blue Italian suit demanded. I was caught.

  I placed the two chicken carcasses I clutched in my hand into the buckets and slowly turned to face him. The headlamp I used for nighttime foraging shined in his eyes. He raised an arm to ward off the beam, squinting angrily. I fumbled with the headlamp to turn it off.

  “Well . . . ,” I said, assessing the situation. I could lie, saying that I was a mother of five struggling to make ends meet. Then I decided that the truth is stranger than fiction. “I have two pigs, near downtown Oakland,” I panted. “And they’re really hungry.” Compliments get you everywhere, I knew that: “And this is the best Dumpster in Berkeley.”

  The man smirked. I could smell his very subtle cologne. I didn’t want to think about what I smelled like.

  “It’s a believable story,” he congratulated me, brushing his hands together. “Proceed.”

  I turned my light on and went back to foraging.

  “You know,” the manager guy said before shutting the gate, “you should really talk to Chris.”

  “Who’s Chris?” I asked, throwing some carrots into the bucket.

  “The owner and chef,” the man said as he walked away.

  “Why’s that?”

  “He might take an interest in your pigs,” he said mysteriously. He sauntered back into the restaurant to help sell more $35 pork chops.

  Buckets overwhelmingly full, Bill and I drove away. The Eccolo smells wafted around the car. I suddenly felt very hungry.

  “What’d that guy say?” Bill asked.

  “That I should talk to some guy named Chris.”

  The beans, the chickens, the bread—that was one fine meal for the pigs. And then some, because we got enough food to feed them for two whole days. If we could stockpile like that more often, we wouldn’t have to go Dumpster diving every night. The rabbits and chickens had never been this demanding. We had ventured out only twice a week for them. The pigs were another story. I did the math: assuming 2 meals per day, only about 260 meals left to find.

  In June, after almost four months of having no one living in the apartment below us—not even one call or visit from the Craigslist ad—our landlord decided to landscape the backyard.

  While the apartment had stood empty—and we had acquired the pigs—our landlords had been in their homeland of Benin. Wilfrid, the husband, often went to Africa on business and was a classic hands-off landlord. That is, until this harebrained landscaping project came up.

  They had decided that the backyard, which was a hard pan of compacted dirt, was the reason they weren’t getting any calls from prospective renters, not because the apartment was deep in a violent and crumbling ghetto. And so they wanted to install a lawn, some ornamental grasses and shrubs. I wasn’t sure who they wanted to live below us—some suburbs-loving couple? Not likely.

  Our landlords knew I kept chickens and rabbits and the periodic turkey. But I hadn’t informed them about the pigs.

  A red-haired landscaper was in the backyard when I got home from work. She was prepping the yard for sod. “You’ve got a little farm going on here!” she said when I rode up on my bike. The pigs grunted when they heard my voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “I planted some honeysuckle,” she said, and lowered her voice, “to cover up those barnyard smells.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I had been pouring a bag of wood shavings scrounged from the furniture company into their pen area every day to reduce odors, but there was still a whiff of swine in the air.

  “It’s great that Wilfrid allows this,” she said.

  “Well, I guess he just doesn’t know,” I said.

  “He saw the pigs yesterday,” she reported.

  “Really??” I leaned in, suddenly scared. A hollow fear gripped my heart. What if Wilfrid made me get rid of the pigs? I immediately thought that I would have to have a roasted-pig party. They needed to get bigger if I had any hope of hams and salami. “What did he do?” I asked.

  “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 ridicul
ous 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 al
l 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.