The desire for a simpler life in the country, filled with the excitement of living like pioneers, spurred Novella Carpenter’s parents to move away from the Bay Area in the 1970s. While their countercultural back-to-the-land experiment ultimately fell apart, the underlying idea persevered, and, in the midst of working on her master’s degree at UC Berkeley, Carpenter decides to dig a garden and start raising turkeys, rabbits and pigs. Only the difference is she’s not farming out in the middle of nowhere; she’s raising food on a vacant lot behind her apartment on 28th Street in Oakland.
“Looking back on my parents’ history and comparing it to my present,” she writes, “I recognized that if my parents were Utopia version 8.5 with their hippie farm in Idaho, I was merely Utopia 9.0 with my urban farm in the ghetto, debugged of the isolation problem.”
Carpenter’s adventurous memoir, developed from a series of online essays at Salon.com and a blog, offers a contemporary restaging of the agrarian American dream. Over two seasons’ time, Carpenter explores her relationship with eating in and around an inner-city garden in the run-down Ghost Town neighborhood.
Despite its name, the place brims with life, and a diverse group of curious neighbors show up with questions for the white woman raising plants and farm animals in the inner city. Although her encounters with them sometimes seem cursory (and even imaginary), Carpenter says she’s chosen a bustling, “second-rate” city to escape the loneliness of rural life and to find bars, shops and a vibrant community, where she meets fellow farmers, urban scroungers and a chef at Eccolo in Berkeley. But the bulk of “Farm City” is not about her peers or predecessors; it’s about Carpenter, a self-proclaimed renegade and urban squatter pursuing both a degree in journalism and “playing at self-sufficiency.” She’s the type of person who drives a dirty Mercedes around with her boyfriend to pick pig food out of Chinatown garbage bins while simultaneously ruminating on the soft, agrarian sentimentality found in “Little House in the Big Woods.”
Carpenter enthusiastically captures bees, drives live pigs to a butcher and pulls weeds from a nearby lot for chicken feed. Each of the book’s three sections follows the joy, humor and violence involved with plopping a bunch of farm animals down on an urban lot. Her birds turn their heads upward at the sound of police helicopters. A boy named Cornrows catches her runaway pig. And before Thanksgiving turkey, she stands under Interstate 980 with a hatchet and a vat of hot water.
Raising food, eating food
“Farm City” is sort of “The Simple Life” in reverse: Rather than wealthy socialites mucking manure on a farm, the memoir depicts an educated country girl giddily exploring the heart of the city. When she visits Eccolo, Carpenter realizes the shirt she’s wearing is dirty and stained.
Her expanded series of diarylike entries creates a strong sense of place and explores the narrowing gap between raising food and eating it. Carpenter prods the intellectual trappings of the Bay Area’s mantra of “eat, fresh, local, free-range critters” and the fad of defining ourselves by what we eat with a critical examination of both the foodie’s elitism and the locavore’s solemn devotion to food.
In doing so, “Farm City” offers a refreshing take on the sustainable food movement – introducing the ethical and logistical ambiguities involved in food choices without too much of ethical high ground cultivated in many back-to-the-land primers, diet guides or muckraking exposes. Her backyard project lacks a specific, well-defined mission for social change, which, given the kind of individualism manifest in the back-to-the-land movements, may be an unlikely prospect anyway. Early on, Carpenter expresses skepticism about changing the way other urban residents view food and agriculture, especially for those neighbors unlike her, who haven’t willingly chosen poverty.
Economic realities
And here’s where Carpenter’s experiment in downward mobility begins to unravel. Her attempt to explore fresh, local food as a “poor scrounger with three low-paying jobs” unfortunately includes little about how three low-paying jobs financed grad school and a farm. Overlooking the economic realities and omitting other practical steps to implementing an urban homestead might disappoint those seeking to replicate her experiment, but it leaves room for the inevitable development of a Utopia version 9.5. (In fact, Carpenter is working on “The Complete Urban Farmer,” a hands-on guide co-written with Willow Rosenthal, scheduled for publication in the spring of 2010).
The fast-paced account of the day-to-day drama unfolding in one backyard in Oakland makes “Farm City” more than just a whimsical, next-generation hippie farm in the ghetto and transforms Carpenter’s personal experience into a broader, more engaging inquiry into our culture’s complex relationship with food.
This article appeared on page J – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle