Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (31 page)

With the stomach back in its bag, I went out to the garden, dug a hole near the base of a struggling fig, and dropped the pig stomach into its final resting place. The bag went into the garbage, where it would undoubtedly become one of the millions of pieces of plastic flying around a landfill somewhere close by. I would not be reusing it.

The liver dish emerged from the oven. I let it cool. It looked beautiful, with the lacing of caul fat dressing up the top of the dish. When I spread some of the dish onto a cracker, it tasted like chalk and blood. It was edible but disappointing: a failure. I somewhat salvaged things by feeding the chickens the
foie de porc rôti.
They went straight to work on it. And though they ate it, I noted that it wasn’t with particular gusto.

On the last day of our pig processing, Chris and I went for a walk to scrounge some herbs—wild fennel and rosemary—to stuff into a rolled pork loin. We just walked down to the train tracks, where they were growing like weeds, and clipped fronds here and there.

We passed Chris’s Volkswagen van, an unlikely vehicle for the owner of a very fancy restaurant. But then again, Chris was very unlikely. One day when we were talking about lettuces, I told him that I brought salad to the former Black Panthers. Chris got very excited. He grew up in Chicago and was outraged when Fred Hampton—a charismatic young Black Panther leader—was shot in his bed by the police. Although Chris looked as white as the pork back fat, I later discovered that he was part black. His mother was a light-skinned African American who had decided to pass as white. Chris, wanting to get closer to his roots, had looked up the Panthers and what they had been doing and had become politically active himself.

We began picking fennel fronds, and talk turned to urban farming. “I’m not really making a difference,” I told Chris. “But Willow and City Slicker Farms, they’re doing something that’s actually providing people healthy food.” Then Chris told me about urban farms that had come before mine. At Chez Panisse, they had relied on urban gardens to grow most of their special lettuces and greens.

“One of the gardens used to be around the corner from a muffler shop,” Chris said. “And the lady would arrive—always late—at the restaurant, driving this postal jeep with the greens.” Chris paused and smiled at the memory. “We were so cute,” he said. “Then we’d wash them very well to get off the muffler smell.” There were people raising chickens and bees for honey for the restaurant.

“I think there are townhouses there now,” he said when he told me where the urban farm had been.

Back in the kitchen, we washed the fennel well and soaked it in a sink before cutting it finely. Chris found a strange yellow spider on one of the fronds. It was the same color as fennel pollen. While I continued chopping, Chris wandered outside to let the spider go free.

With a giant restaurant skewer, he poked a hole along the bones of the rack of pork loin, and I stuffed it with the freshly cut herbs, packing them in with the handle of a wooden spoon.

How can a restaurant owner be so nice? I wondered as I drove home, the rack of pork loin for twenty in the back of the car. Sure, we had bartered and I had promised to give him one of the prosciuttos made from Big Guy, but this still seemed to be a deal that weighed heavily in my favor. I drove by the intersection where the urban farm had been. Yup, townhouses. They were gray and tall and had lots of parking.

I thought about Chris and his restaurant. From the outside, it was high-end dining, but in the kitchen was a gang of freaks: Leslie the Chinese American pastry chef, who wanted a pig skull on her bike; the pickle-mad Samin; and Chris, onetime radical now teacher. That I was accepted into their tribe made me realize that my identity as urban farmer bridged two worlds, made me an aberration. I might have been a little like the yellow spider Chris saved from the fennel frond.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Little Girl’s fate had been different from Big Guy’s.

I went back up north to pick her up from Jeff’s butcher shop, where she had been dismantled in the American style, by a man who had, I couldn’t help but notice, a signed letter from President George W. Bush posted on the wall of his meat locker, praising him for this and that. The butcher wasn’t there, but his neighbor had come over to let me into the cold room.

“You’re from Oakland?” she said. “You’ve come a long way to get this pig butchered.” Like a traitor, I said, “That’s because no one in the city knows how to do anything.”

She laughed and nodded. After watching Chris trim a pork shoulder of its bone and make soppressata, I knew that city folks know how to do something. I don’t know why I said it. In fact, only in the city could I have pulled off feeding my pigs gourmet food. And only in the city were there Italian-trained butchers who were willing to share their knowledge with a novice pig farmer.

The woman wheeled out a dolly stacked high with milk crates filled with pig pieces all wrapped in plastic, then covered with white paper with handwritten labels like BONELESS PORK SHOULDER, GROUND PORK, PORK RIBS. I was thankful for all that meat—it ended up filling an entire upright freezer we borrowed from friends. The butcher had also, per my instructions, saved and wrapped up the bones, the fat pieces, the feet, and the trimmings.

All that wrapping, though, didn’t have much soul. The butcher had used a band saw to take the pig apart, so the meat left few hints about pigness—the lines were straight, not organic; square-shaped. Little Girl ceased to exist. But Big Guy, in the form of his giant hanging butt, had become immortal, in a way.

This soullessness is not how it has always been in America. On Samin and Chris’s advice I had read Edna Lewis’s essay “Morning-After-Hog-Butchering Breakfast,” an elegy about traditional Southern hog butchering. After the slaughter, cleaning, and hanging of the pigs in the December cold, Lewis remembered, “we waited with impatient excitement through the three days of hanging; we were all looking forward to the many delicious dishes that would be made after the hogs were cut up—fresh sausage, liver pudding, and the sweet delicate taste of fresh pork and bacon.”

I had also recently run across a copy of
Little House in the Big Woods,
by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which fueled this nostalgia. I decided I would try some typically American moves with Little Girl. So I took one of the hams, unwrapped it from its swaddling of paper and plastic, and submerged it in a brining solution for ten days. I released a slab of belly and began the process of making bacon: I cut the big slab into three smaller sections and rubbed them with a little pink salt, kosher salt, pepper, and maple syrup, then placed them in the fridge to marinate for a few weeks, flipping them every other day to spread the brine evenly.

And so Big Guy and Little Girl were still alive, in my heart and in my daily to-do list, just like at a Southern hog butchering, where Edna Lewis remembered that “as soon as the hogs were butchered, a series of necessary activities ensued that kept the whole community busy for at least a week or more.” I made almost daily trips to the restaurant to flip prosciuttos, roll and hang pancettas, and monitor the salamis made from Big Guy. I also checked on the Little Girl ham and checked on the belly bacon every day.

I did often wonder: Why did Chris Lee help me?

We talked about it while making lardo, our last task.

“You know, you’re really lucky,” said Samin.

We were watching Chris remove some skin from a piece of back fat that we were going to rub with salt and fennel and hang in the walk-in.

“I know,” I said. “Look at me, I’m an asshole, just watching Chris do all the work.”

“You said the magic words,” Chris said.

“What did I say?” I asked.

“You said you had two pigs.”

“Chris hates it when people come to the front of the restaurant and want to sell him stuff,” Samin explained.

“But you said you had two pigs,” Chris said, “so I had to talk to you.”

Chris told me that he had thought I was some kind of rich-lady hobby farmer who lived in some rural area and wanted advice on raising pigs. When he met me and realized I was some poor hobby farmer from the ghetto, he was intrigued.

I had to give something back. One day I slipped the pastry chef a wrapped package of Little Girl’s feet. She yelled in delight: She was going to make a special stuffed Chinese pork recipe that her grandmother used to make.

I gave another chef some pork bones to take home to braise and make into a stock—something I had done at home with delicious results. Never underestimate the deliciousness of pork stock. Since it was getting to be fall, the stock was genius for making soups and stews. The baking bones also filled our house with wonderful odors. I tried to give Chris’s son good advice on cool colleges for wee punk rockers—like Reed in Portland or Evergreen in Olympia. I promised Samin I would help her with her writing. As for Chris, I figure I still owe him one. A big one.

In the middle of the pig mania, Dante called me on my cell phone.

“Hi. I wanna buy a rabbit,” he said.

I was riding my bike to the restaurant and nearly fell off.

“Who’s this?” I asked, thinking Bill was playing a joke.

“The kid who came over with my friends and we saw the pigs,” he said. Then I heard the phone clattering and a woman’s voice came on. “I’m Dante’s mom, Gwen,” she said.

“Hi, Gwen. Is it OK for Dante to get a rabbit?” I asked.

“Yes. He’s been talking about it for months,” she said. “And he saved up his money.” Dante, it turned out, was a little entrepreneur who funded his own cell phone, clothes, and hairdos.

We made arrangements to meet.

The whole family showed up—Dante and his mom, sister, and brother.

I took them out to the deck so he could pick his favorite rabbit. After cradling all the contenders, he chose a soft, light brown male. I gave him an extra cage I had and a small bag of food. His brother and sister also held rabbits.

“I’m going to save up and buy one, too,” Dante’s brother said.

I ended up charging Dante $5. I told him how to hold the rabbit, how to change the bedding, how to fill the waterer. He nodded when I told him all these things. He was a sharp kid.

I knew that Dante just wanted a pet, but I couldn’t help but see him as a future urban farmer. As he and his family walked home I watched them from the deck with a sense of pride I couldn’t explain to myself.

As the days grew short and the nights cold I fired up my barbecue and sprinkled it with wet hickory chips. When the white smoke billowed up, I placed my slabs o’ bacon on the grill and left them to inhale smoke for hours.

Then, after another day in the fridge to firm up, I cut a few slices and fried them for breakfast. Homemade bacon is nothing like store-bought. Mostly because it just isn’t perfectly square. Bacon factories, it turns out, use molding machines to convince the meat to form a perfect rectangle. My knife wasn’t very sharp, either, so the slices were fairly large.

As I sat down to breakfast that morning with a gleam in my eye, poised to put a wavy piece of pork belly into my mouth, I thought of my Las Vegas bacon-eating frenzy oh so long ago. How could I have known that I would end up here, exhausted by five months of pig-raising effort and finally getting to eat something that I had transformed from mundane to extraordinary? I sank my teeth into the unctuous fat, the crispy meat. It was just as bacon should be—smoky and sweet, salty and peppery.

Bill walked into the kitchen, sleepy, his hair tousled. He had been bummed that we had to wait a few months before we could cut into the salamis and slice up the pancettas that were hanging in Chris’s walk-in. But the bacon was ready to go.

“How is it?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Pretty eff-ing good.”

He chomped on a piece, then wolfed it down and grabbed another. We were finally enjoying the fruits of our labors. The hard work of feeding two pigs had paid off. Bill and I kissed in celebration, both of our mouths salty and sweet from the bacon. I fired up the cast-iron pan again to make more bacon, and as it fried, filling our kitchen with the scent of sizzling pork, we never felt so lucky. We had achieved the heights of urban farming together. The meat—it was official—was amazing. God, we were unbearable.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

In October, well after all the pork was salted away and I had stopped visiting the restaurant, a sign went up in front of the squat garden. FOR SALE, it read. There was a phone number, and I called it. They would like to sell it for $488,000, the agent told me. I laughed at this price and told her it was a lot in the middle of the ghetto. I didn’t tell her who I was.

“Well, that area is in transition,” she said.

It was true. I had just the other day spotted a team of ultimate-Frisbee players in the abandoned schoolyard. A group of artists had moved into Lana’s warehouse and turned it into an art gallery. And a Whole Foods had just gone up a few blocks away.

“It’s zoned commercial,” she told me. “You can put condos up.” Assuring her that I didn’t have that kind of money, and if I did, I wouldn’t build condos, I hung up, shaken.

By the winter solstice, the sign still hung in front of the lot. Someone—not me—had knocked it halfway down. To celebrate another year almost over, I threw a party. I served the salami and lardo that I had made with Chris, and the wine I had left from the winemaking party with Jennifer and Willow.

There’s a Portuguese saying: The happiest times in life are the first year of marriage and the week after you butcher a pig. The bounty had been overwhelming, and the happiness extended to months. There were sixteen salamis, four pancettas, two coppas, four lardos, and two prosciuttos hanging in the walk-in at the restaurant.

As they were ready I would take them home to eat—and distribute. My prosciutto, Chris agreed, could stay at the restaurant until it was ready. In our own freezer were the American cuts: pork chops, ground pork, spareribs, and pork back fat. We had another side of pork belly to make bacon with, and another ham—the first one had been outrageous. We had hosted six dinner parties over the past few months, one featuring a banana-leaf-wrapped pork loin, another with pork tacos from slow-roasted spareribs. We had even hosted a sausage-making party.

This was the party where we would debut the salami and the lardo, which had taken three months to cure in Chris’s meat room. He had devoted a special section of the meat cave to my meats. I even made a special tag for it: a purple N highlighted by yellow marker.

I had sent my mom, for the solstice, a fennel-spiked salami. She sent me an e-mail raving about it. “I’m slowly slicing off pieces, savoring it,” she wrote. I gave Mr. Nguyen a slab of pork ribs. I sent my sister the most quintessential American product: leaf lard. I had rendered pieces of back fat over one day, slowly draining off the fat, which melted on a low flame. It was pure white, like porcelain. I was thankful for sharing, for redistributing the pork. Otherwise, I was going to balloon up just like one of the pigs.

For the party plate, I sliced everything as thin as possible. Whispers of salami, slivers of lardo. The guests packed into our cramped kitchen and snarfed up the food. I couldn’t decide what made me happier: having seen the pigs eat so happily, months ago, or watching my friends do so now. My salami, I thought, was as good as Chris’s—the fennel seeds shined through and blended with the meat flavor perfectly. Little cracks of pepper and hot paprika in the other dazzled our palates. The lardo—cool, salty, sweet—soothed the heat.

A few guests wanted to hear how I killed rabbits on my farm, and so I narrated their death. I also told the story of how I met Chris for the hundredth time and, like my mother, never grew tired of the telling. We poured the homemade wine and offered guests tastes of the fall honey harvest. I felt slightly embarrassed at the riches in our larder.

By midnight, almost everyone had gone home. A few late-nighters drank the last of the wine and considered our couch.

I walked outside to feed the rabbits, my usual ritual before turning in. The deck quivered with activity. I tossed some bok choy salvaged from the Dumpster from a bucket. The rabbits pounced and nibbled on the greens. Going to the Dumpster now, postpig, was a rather sad exercise. We left so much more than we could take.

I was a little drunk and felt a bit melancholy. At one point the deck had been a hangout for humans. Then it hosted bees and a container garden. At the moment, it was a rabbitry. I loved this place because from here I could view our whole street—the hustlers and the artists, the families with their struggles.

A neighbor turned the corner holding a black bag filled with beer. Joe and Peggy were taking their dog out for a walk. The monks had been preparing a feast all day. The garden was pensive this winter. Someone had set up a table covered with stuffed animals and baby clothing marked with a FREE sign just off MLK, right next to the battered FOR SALE sign.

These past few years had been strange ones, perhaps, for a place known as GhostTown. All of us—the Vietnamese families, the African American teenagers, the Yemeni storekeepers, the Latino soccer players, and, yes, the urban farmers—had somehow found a way to live together. To share and discover our heritage with one another. But now I could feel that an end, or a change, was afoot in this almost new year.

People will come and go. Animals will be birthed and die. Food and flowers will be plucked from the earth, friendships made. Bullets will be fired. Houses will be boarded up, then sold to be fixed up. Innumerable sodas and malt liquors will be purchased from Brother’s Market, and many of them will be consumed in the street. Weeds will feed animals that will then feed humans. Dice will be thrown. Children will grow up and move a few blocks away from their parents’ house. Incense will be burned, fire-works set off, trash hurled from a moving car. A man will start a new life in a van he can call home. A grandmother will sell dinners of fish she caught and cooked herself. Looking back on it, we in this neighborhood were all aberrations of a sort. No one would have bet on any of us.

I was playing the part of an undertaker again. The body before me was that of an urban farm. Before long, I imagined, I would leave it, with more nutrients, more plants in the soil for the bulldozers to unearth. But in leaving it, I would take it with me, too. Not just in my body, which had ingested its riches and grown strong in the working of the farm, but in my spirit—all the things I had learned, my singing heart, my smile lines, my aching bones. I hadn’t truly owned any of this place. It had owned me.

And now I was just one of the many ghosts in GhostTown. I sprang up here only because it was the perfect intersection of time and place, and, like a seedling, I took advantage, sucked up the nutrients that I could find, forged relationships with others in order to grow, bathed in the sunlight of the moment.

I had been lucky during these past years. Somehow, all the forces had aligned to make my life full and abundant. I had arrived at a time when an abandoned lot could be taken over, a backyard turned into a place to keep animals, connections between humans made. This time had now passed.

My farm will eventually be bulldozed and condos will be built. Bill and I will move somewhere else. Where, undoubtedly, we will first build the garden. Then set up a beehive. Then chickens . . . Being part of nature connected us to the past, the present, and the future.

And who knows, maybe a few neighborhood kids like Dante will pass by the units and tell someone who doesn’t care, “There used to be a farm here.” Maybe the peach trees planted in the parking strip will remain, and a hungry urban forager will cherish the ripe peaches someday. The soil here will be uncommonly abundant, and maybe someday a strange-looking vegetable will sprout here again, when the moment is ripe.