Farm City_ The Education Of An Urban Farmer Part 12

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 relations.h.i.+p 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 tree-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 s.h.i.+pped 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, 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. 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: "b.u.t.ter, 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 relations.h.i.+p.

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 sweats.h.i.+rt 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 is something more shameful than carelessly eating or wasting food: wasting people. All the crackheads and the prost.i.tutes, the junkies and the homeless, in my neighborhood-they are evidence of far bigger problems than mere nourishment. something more shameful than carelessly eating or wasting food: wasting people. All the crackheads and the prost.i.tutes, 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 pa.s.sed through her tiny village. To the embarra.s.sment 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 cla.s.sic 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 b.u.t.ter, she added. Benji said that at that point, the mollusk was usually removed from its sh.e.l.l to have its p.o.o.p sack excised, then stuffed back into the sh.e.l.l. 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 ch.o.r.es 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 gra.s.s 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 the 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 pa.s.s 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 carca.s.s. 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.

After the body was clean of offal, I cut it from the coat hanger, leaving two white rabbit paws hanging in the plum tree. I felt a surge of nostalgia for this moment. Here I was, like a peasant woman, killing my supper, white furry paws hanging among dark plums, me wearing a bright blue ap.r.o.n with a pair of kitchen shears in the front pocket. The mise-en-scene of the tree, the bench below it, a mat of nasturtiums twinkling in the shady spot, the propagation table with trays of small sprouts emerging.

I understood everything about the dinner I would have that next evening, after the meat rested for a day. I had seen the rabbits born, I had carefully fed them fresh greens and snacks from the garden, the Dumpster of Life, and Chinatown. I even knew their personalities. This white rabbit had been the largest of the group-and the bully, always beating up his smaller brothers and sisters-so he made the most sense to kill first.

I hesitated at the entry to the garden, in that boundary between farm and city. Across the street, near the vestibule of the abandoned building, there was a crackhead guy on his hands and knees, searching for something on the ground. He stood up and walked around in circles, examining a dollar bill, ripping off the corners.

I've never been scared of this man. He has never talked to me or even approached me. But today, with the body of the rabbit still warm in my arms, I felt as if I might actually scare him. If he looked over at that moment, if he could think clearly, if he could see what I had done, would he be just as disgusted with me as I was with him? I would explain that I was very hungry and needed comfort. And perhaps he would say the same to me.

Not wanting to scare the downstairs neighbors, I swaddled the slightly b.l.o.o.d.y carca.s.s in my blue ap.r.o.n and carried it upstairs, thinking about my mom. When my sister and I were children, Mom was making the most of her situation. And wasn't that what I was doing, too? Another restaging of the uniquely American fascination with the agrarian lifestyle. Looking back on my parents' history and comparing it to my present, 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.

I cheated and used salt to make a brine to draw the blood out of the rabbit. Before I submerged it, I admired the rabbit's lean lines. The saddle-the meaty back section-is the prize cut, and many restaurants serve only that. As hungry as I was, I wouldn't be wasting anything. The back haunches looked well exercised, plump. I put the fur and the head in the freezer for when I got around to learning how to tan the hide using the brain-an old Davy Crockett-era trick. One day I'd make an awesome rabbit-fur-lined sleeping bag. The entrails went into a hole I dug next to a fig tree-they would provide nutrients.

My plan was to invite Bill for dinner. For the past three weeks, I had been eating to survive, mostly grazing while in the garden, so we weren't eating together much. It felt important to be making a whole, hot meal, and I was proud to share the meat of my labors with my beloved Bill. Though he is a scruffy auto mechanic who would be happy to subsist solely on burritos, he happens to have one of the best palates I've encountered. He can sense the presence of secret herbs in fancy restaurant dishes, artfully describe a perfectly ripe peach as if it were a vintage wine.

With the rabbit, there was plenty to share, and so I was doing what a primate hunter does with a big kill: distributing it. A chimp researcher mentioned in The Primal Feast, The Primal Feast, Craig Stanford, noted that "chimps use meat not only for nutrition; they also share it with their allies and withhold it from their rivals. Meat is thus a social, political, and even reproductive tool." Craig Stanford, noted that "chimps use meat not only for nutrition; they also share it with their allies and withhold it from their rivals. Meat is thus a social, political, and even reproductive tool."

I had been working on the bad-breath thing (flossing maniacally), and I hoped that once I shared some meat with Bill, he would, well, you know, give a little back. Only Bill wasn't a chimp. The meal had to be good if I was going to get any.

The next day, I followed my sister's recipe, which came via Mamie. While I fried the rabbit pieces in duck fat, I thought about my sister. She had her own version of utopia, too. She had gone from an SUV-driving, Botox-using Los Angeles lifestyle to a happy, quiet existence in a rural French village. Perhaps it was her hippie DNA expressing itself, or maybe Mamie's thrifty influence, but in France, Riana had gotten into crafting her own soap and making her own cloth diapers. We were both planted in places wildly different from Idaho, and yet our hidden traits were coming out, adapting to make something new.

Once the pieces of rabbit had turned golden, I poured a bottle of my wine over them. In a 350-degree oven, the meat cooked for an hour with sprigs of thyme and cloves of garlic. I set the table and called Bill to dinner. I served generous portions of the rabbit: two pieces of the saddle for each of us. I spooned a few stewed plums and some sauerkraut next to the rabbit.

We sat down for our first meal together in a long time. The meat was flaky but firm, and redolent of garlic and herbs. Bill took a bite, and I watched him carefully.

"This is better than chicken," he said, smacking his lips and slicing off another piece of juicy meat. Then, be still my heart, he gave me a sloppy kiss before stuffing more rabbit into his mouth.

It was the most flavorful rabbit I had ever eaten. While I chewed, I couldn't help but think of the white rabbit that had been killed so that we could eat. I was thankful that he had been born and thrived on my farm. His flesh became my flesh.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

In the end, they got Bobby.

I wasn't there, but a graffiti artist on our street told me about it.

The city came again and dragged away the numerous abandoned cars and collected the belongings Bobby had built up since the last purge. The man with a clipboard was there again, and when Bobby walked over to him, the police arrived and arrested Bobby.

They told him if he didn't stay off 28th Street, they would put him away. "We're all doing something illegal on this street," I said to the graffiti guy.

"s.h.i.+t, yeah."

"I've got all these animals, you're tagging buildings, Lana had that speakeasy, Grandma has her underground restaurant. . . ."

"But Bobby was out in the open," he said.

Someone power-washed the street. A FOR SALE sign went up near where Bobby had once lived.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

On day twenty-five of my monthlong experiment, I pa.s.sed by Grandma's and saw a new sign posted. Another fish dinner. My mouth watered, remembering the tender catfish, the golden cornmeal coating. I had to tell Bill, because someone had to enjoy that food. When I got home, he was in the tub.

"Want a dinner from Grandma?"

He nodded.

"Fish or chicken?"

"Fish."

About ten minutes later, I found myself seated in Grandma's kitchen, looking through her photo alb.u.m. Her kitchen was small but orderly, with colorful oven mitts decorating the walls and a lethal set of knives above the stove. Cast-iron pans bubbled with oil. I was late, but Grandma was willing to make me up a meal.

I sat breathing in the cooking smells through my pangs of hunger-or not hunger, exactly, but a heady desire to eat something besides a salad or rabbit or apples.

"I'm making meatloaf and potatoes tomorrow," she told me as she bustled around, breading the catfish, then dropping it into the hot oil. "I wish I had some collards."

Could I have imagined her words? I mean, I had hoped that things were going to work out like this, but . . .

"Er-I have a whole bed of collards," I said.

"Did you hear that, Carlos?" Grandma yelled, and brought Carlos into the room. He was tall and skinny and wore a red baseball hat. He had had a stroke, so he was legally blind.

"I have a big bed of collards. I could harvest them for you tomorrow," I offered.

"Good," Carlos muttered.

"I have some Swiss chard. I could bring that, too," I said.

"No. Do. Not. Bring. Swiss chard," Carlos a.s.serted and walked back into the front room.

"He hates chard," Grandma whispered. "Now, I can pay you for the collards," she said.

"No, no," I said. "You just make me one of your dinners. We'll trade."

My dad had told me that hunters often experience a sort of giddy high upon making their kill. As I walked down her stairs, past the flowers and the pebbles, and then past her boys, I experienced a thrill that must be similar to the hunter's high. Tomorrow, I was going to eat, and eat good.

The next morning, after my usual meal of grated young pumpkin and a mug of minted green tea, I went out to the lot and harvested the entire bed of Southern Georgia collards. They had been growing for four months now, but unlike the lettuce, they loved the heat and were still thriving. Also, I had been side-dressing them with rabbit poo. Every week I had cleaned out the rabbits' cages and tossed the black circular t.u.r.ds next to the collard plants. The greens had grown lush and large; their big leaves sucked in the sun and grew larger and larger.

For lunch I had my usual salad, with lettuce, roasted beets, a boiled egg, a bit of leftover rabbit, and an apple. Around two o'clock, I finished soaking and was.h.i.+ng the collards and walked them down MLK to Grandma's house. The four grocery bags full I carried would eventually melt down to just one pot of greens. When I handed them to Grandma, she squealed.

Later, I went back to collect my dinner and brought Bill with me.