More on urban farming

My new Bookforum column is live today, and featured on the Bookforum home page as the Daily Review, so you can access it here or here. Whee! It’s about three urban farming memoirs–one by a former drag queen, one by a Brooklyn journalist, and one set in inner-city Oakland, CA. If that combination (or at least some part thereof) doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what will….

Friday Food Writers: Farm Writer Edition, Novella Carpenter

I’m working on my next column for Bookforum, which is about urban farmers (including one former drag queen named Aqua….stay tuned!). One of the books I’m reading is about a year old but it’s so good and interesting I’m including it anyway (plus it’s just out in paperback). Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer is about how she transformed a weedy, garbage-strewn abandoned lot behind her house in Oakland, CA, into an amazing farm complete with pigs, ducks, fruit trees, vegetables and a bee hive. You can learn more about Ghost Town Farm here, but meanwhile, on this glorious spring day, I want to share with you this awe-inspiring description of what she made from nothing. Oh, to live in California where the weather alone makes growing a Garden of Eden in your yard possible….

In our neighborhood, there was some greenery, mostly in the form of weeds. But when you walked through the gates into what I had started calling GhostTown Garden, it was like walking into a different world. There was a lime tree near the fence, sending out a perfume of citrus blossoms from its dark green leaves. Stalks of salvia and mint, artemesia and penstemon. The thistlelike leaves of artichokes glowed silver. Strawberry runners snaked underneath raspberry canes. Beds bristled with rows of fava beans, whose pea-like blossoms attracted chubby black bumblebees to their plunder. An apple tree sent out girlish pink blossoms. A passionfruit vine curled and weaved through the chain-link fence that surrounded the garden.

Happy Friday!

Slaughterhouses and small farms

One of the issues I never gave much thought to before writing Eating for Beginners was slaughterhouses–by which I mean how many there are, where they’re located, and what kind of red tape they have to deal with to process meat. Like many people, I was more concerned with how my meat was raised than with where and how it was killed, or what the expense in both time and money was to farmers when it came to slaughtering. I assumed that if I was choosing meat raised by responsible people, I was also avoiding the kind of horror-show slaughterhouses portrayed in movies like Food, Inc, and so I never bothered to consider much beyond the farming and feeding aspect of raising animals.

My eyes were opened when I spent time at Lovejoy Brook Farm in Vermont for the book, where one of the big issues that came up was how many slaughterhouses in the farm’s vicinity had closed. The result was hours and hours of interstate driving (and the ensuing gas bills) in order to have the animals killed and minimally processed (since applewood and the other places that buy from Fancy Meats from Vermont, the company Lovejoy Brook sells through, generally buy their animals whole). I was there in the winter of 2007, and apparently things have only gotten worse, not better. I was distressed by this article in yesterday’s New York Times, which basically lays out exactly the same problems I heard about back in 2007 (though of course I’m happy the issue is getting attention. One of the biggest frustrations I found in Vermont was small farmers’ feeling that no one with any real power was interested in hearing about the obstacles they faced, and yet all those people wanted to eat local since it’s now the thing to do). I wrote about mobile slaughtering units last fall, and it looks like maybe at last the issue is getting some much-deserved attention.

In sort of unrelated news, there’s a great post over on Sam Fromartz’s ChewsWise blog about the new Jamie Oliver show, Food Revolution, that has the food classes chattering away, including a link to the first episode. I highly recommend checking it out.

Locally slaughtered meat

Today I’m doing the last little edits on the chapters of Eating for Beginners (now set to come out next July, by the way) in which I write about spending time at the small Vermont farm where I met Lucy and Oliver, helping them tend to cows, sheep, goats and veal calves. One of the big complaints the farm’s owner had was that so many small slaughter houses have closed due to expense and the time wasted trying to deal with the USDA’s regulations. She sells her animals whole, but they still have to be taken elsewhere to be killed. It was Oliver’s job to get the animals from farm to slaughter house, which meant hours of driving every week since the closest slaughter house was two hours away from the farm.

In an amazing act of serendipity (aided by Twitter, which I’m finding to be a great way to get alerted to articles I might not find on my own), just as I was thinking about meat and nothing but meat, I discovered this article about a new trend in slaughtering, the mobile unit. Among other things, I learned that in 1976 there were 1665 slaughter houses in the U.S. and now there are 630, a decrease of more than a third. But what I really like about it is hearing farmers talk about their business and why they’re so happy this new invention exists. It reminded me of all the time I spent on farms doing research, and how much I enjoyed every moment of conversation in barns and fields and around tables after a long day of work.

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East Hill Farm: inside the small farm start-up

I’ve been meaning for a while now to post about East Hill Farm in Andover, VT a new operation being run by the young couple who were farm hands at one of the places I worked doing research for Eating for Beginners. Since then, they’ve moved on and they’re now deep into their first season of bringing back land that was originally a dairy  but had fallen mostly into disuse (though it is preserved through the Vermont Farmland Trust). The family that owns the land ran an alternative school there for about twenty-five years, and Lucy and Oliver, my friends, now live in the former school house, which has been converted into an apartment. They’ve started a business called Pastured Meats at East Hill Farm and are selling live lambs and broiler chickens. They’re also raising pigs–all while working full-time elsewhere. And you thought you were busy….

Here’s what Lucy wrote to me in May, when they were just getting settled in:

Things are good here. Life for Oliver and me has jumped up a thousand volts or so in the last week, as we now have two sheep with their lambs, 150 chicks, and 4 pigs. And full-time jobs. Oliver is working for the Census Bureau which he enjoys…the scheduling is erratic but the pay is great. I’m still working on the dairy and juggling lots of bottles for all the calves born lately. Our chicks arrived yesterday, peeping like crazy in the post office. Coincidentally, we had a frost for the first time in a while last night, but we rigged up a cozy little brooder and when I went in this morning to check, they were all bustling around, drinking and eating. Our pigs are hilarious. They are out in a pasture, rooting away. They are four boars (intact males), and they romp around, whacking into each other and snorting. We feed them old cheese and whey from the farm where Oliver was working over the winter, and old veggies that a local grocer leaves out back. The sheep are such high maintenance creatures, sweet but a lot of hassle for just four animals. One poor lamby has a bum foot (he came to us like that) and I’m worried that my only option is antibiotic…not organic, but it might be the solution. Oliver has been building portable shelters…one for the pigs, and two for the chicks when they are a leetle older and can go outside. Those are called “chicken tractors,” and they are so cool! They allow the chickens to be protected out on pasture.

After reading this, I couldn’t stop thinking about trying to mail some live birds somewhere.

Since May, they’ve processed their first batch of chickens for sale (if you live near Andover, head right over and buy one. Or two!), their sheep have escaped, they’ve wondered about haying, and picked raspberries for jam. I know all of this because they’ve also started a blog, which you can follow here. It’s an amazing, funny, completely candid look into the pleasures and problems of life on a small farm start-up and I recommend it to anyone who wants to know a little more about the kind of work I found out about researching Eating for Beginners.

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