Move over Martha. There’s a new high priestess of growing your own food in town, and her name is Novella Carpenter. Who needs a palatial estate in suburban New York when you have a run-down apartment in the middle of a city with an empty lot behind you? If you have ever read Michael Pollan’s seminal Omnivore’s Dilemma and wondered if maybe you too could raise chickens (and perhaps kill them for dinner), take a look at Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter, a former student of Pollan’s who set up her own urban farm on a gritty dead-end street in Oakland.

I first met Novella Carpenter at the Taste3 conference in Napa where she gave a rousing and hilarious talk and slide show about her urban farm adventures. Clearly, this is a woman obsessed. (At Taste 3 Michael Ruhlman introduced her as insane; after reading her book I would have to agree.) Not content to just raise her own chickens, keep bees, and garden in her limited urban space, she moved on to ducks, geese, turkeys, rabbits, and even the more challenging, pigs. Who the heck raises two red Duroc pigs in a postage stamp-sized backyard in the city? They may be cute to start, but as Novella and her boyfriend were soon to find out, they have voracious appetites and they quickly grow very, very big.

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