Novella Carpenter

How much food can you really grow in a city? You’d be surprised.

July 12, 2009|Devra First

It’s a tug many of us feel: We love the city, with its culture, nightlife, and buzz. But we crave the peace of the country, where we can dig and plant and feel connected to nature. We can’t have them both, so we choose.

But Novella Carpenter is a have-them-both kind of person.

The author of the new book “Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer” (Penguin), Carpenter grew up in rural Idaho, the child of hippie homesteaders. As an adult, she yearned for the sense of community she felt there, but not for the isolation. Then she moved to inner-city Oakland, Calif., and a bridge between the two lifestyles presented itself: a vacant lot. Soon she was growing her own vegetables and raising bees, chickens, pigs, and rabbits, befriending homeless people and drug dealers and nearly getting mugged by neighborhood teens. “It’s natural to me to be farming in the city, pulling up carrots as BART goes by,” she says. “It’s like a little joke.”

Urban farming is becoming a movement, Carpenter says, particularly among young people who want a connection with their food but don’t relate to the ideas of the previous generation. “The elitism of the slow food movement makes people who are younger want to barf,” Carpenter says. “Alice Waters doesn’t speak for us.”

Why farming, why the city, why now? Carpenter spoke to us recently by phone from Oakland.

Ideas: What is the appeal of urban farming over rural?Carpenter: You get to do these things that are very city-like - go to shows, go to bars, live close to friends. In the country, that doesn’t happen. You have to drive everywhere. I feel there’s isolation in the country. Urban homesteading is a great combination. In marine biology, there are intertidal zones. There’s the ocean and the shore, and then there’s that region in between that is the most diverse and bounding with life and energy. When you have a rural process going on in the city, it opens up all these different things to happen.

Ideas: It brings you into a different relationship with your neighborhood, for example.Carpenter: If I hadn’t done the farm, I wouldn’t have ventured out much. There’s a lot of fear in rough places where there are drug dealers and stuff. But it’s not so cut and dry. A lot of drug dealers are actually really nice people. I learned lessons - yeah, this person does something that’s illegal but is not a horrible person. That was good to know.

Ideas: What are you producing now?Carpenter: We just harvested. We did a big dinner at [Berkeley restaurant ] Eccolo. We opened up a prosciutto we had made that was hanging for 18 months. I brought really delicious chicory, carrots, tons of lettuce; there were a few fava beans left. We’re gearing out of spring and into summer.

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