"novella carpenter" news and stories

Prosciutto from Big Boy the pig. Photo: Rebecca Winters.

"What happened to the rats on your property?" someone asks urban farmer Novella Carpenter.

"I have a theory that my pigs ate the rats," Carpenter says. Realizing that her audience has been munching on slices of said pig's hindquarters, she laughed. "So enjoy some delicious prosciutto!"

Farmers are reputed to have a tough streak. They step over piles of excrement, battle gargantuan hogs and, of course, have to earn a living. Carpenter, author of "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer," seems no exception. She lives in the city, not the country, "so I can get Chinese food at 2 a.m."

The two 300-pound hogs she raised in what she calls the Oakland, Calif., "ghetto," also enjoyed Chinese takeout. She read about her adventures in urban farming on a Brooklyn, N.Y., rooftop adjacent to a 6,000-foot, 30-crop rooftop farm built by Goode Green and tended by farmers Annie Novak and Ben Flanner.

Dumpster diving, fish guts and the cost of rooftop farming, after the jump.

With all the information in the news these days about the importance of eating locally and organically, the folks out there who can't afford to add these sometimes pricier ingredients (during the summer months, local farmers market produce is comparable or cheaper than its supermarket brethern) to their shopping lists start to feel sadly left out of the movement.

Novella Carpenter, freelance writer and urban farmer living in California's Bay Area has found a way to keep her costs low and her food as local as possible (last summer she spent a month living only on that which came from 100 yards of her front door). The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran an article by Carpenter in which she interviewed a foodie acquaintance who was finding ways to eat healthy, local, organic and (admittedly) slightly fancy foods, all on a fairly limited budget. It's an interesting read and a good source of eating inspiration.

Source

These days most folks have heard about the 100 Mile Diet, a style of eating awareness that challenges folks to only eat food that is grown or produced within 100 miles of their home. Novella Carpenter, a writer and filmmaker out of California recently upped the ante and spend the month of July adhering to a 100 Yard Diet. She has a small urban farm in Oakland (who knew that you could farm so close to San Francisco) on which she raises a bunch of vegetables, in addition to pigs, rabbit and some fowl (although most of her flock was killed earlier in the summer by an unknown predator). She also keeps honey bees at a friend's farm a bit further out of the city.

She blogged the whole experience at City Farmer (here's the link to her first entry, then just read forward from there). Other than a very small taste of prosciutto, she stayed true to her diet for the entire month. Her approach certainly takes local eating to an entirely new and impressive level.