Free Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter Page B

over the edge by Emery’s book, I bought Agnes and three full-grown Golden Laced Wyandottes, beautiful gold- and red-feathered chickens who laid big brown eggs.
    These hens provided more eggs than we knew what to do with. I started to breeze past the egg section in the supermarket. Cold, white eggs were an affront compared to our warm brown- and blue-shelled eggs, so fresh they didn’t even need to be refrigerated.
    After two years of egg-laying service, Agnes was killed by a dear friend’s dog. We held a formal funeral, during which I distinctly remember swooning. A few weeks later the same dog dug up Agnes from her final resting spot and presented horrified backyard picnickers the ossified corpse as a gift. My beloved chickens were pets, almost human; I had never thought of them as meat birds.
    What I didn’t know then is that keeping chickens in Seattle had placed me squarely on the path toward urban farming. Chickens are the gateway urban-farm animal. Because of them, I would soon be learning how to kill and pluck a duck and a turkey. If smoking marijuana led to snorting cocaine, then chickens eventually led to raising meat birds.
    After I released the birds into the backyard, I officially updated our chalkboard tally:
    3 turkeys
3 ducks
1 goose
14 chickens
50,000 bees (they were doing really well)
74 flies (ditto)
2 monkeys
    A few days later, I came outside to find Lana, her sister, and her guinea pig, Maya, in the backyard. They had come over to see the new feathered flock. Lana was in love.
    “Wow, who’s that?” she shouted, pointing at the black turkey as she squatted down to admire his shiny, iridescent feathers. Glad to the get attention, he puffed them all out and made a huffing noise. His black tail feathers stood at attention.
    “That’s one of the turkeys,” I answered. “He doesn’t have a name,” I added pointedly—real farmers don’t name their meat animals. Another turkey, a small white and black female, was eating some corn. I couldn’t find the other male. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen him all morning.
    The preening black turkey glided in front of Lana. His head blushed blue. The sunlight made his feathers glow. “I don’t want to hear why,” she said, not looking at me.
    Lana was a strict vegetarian. I understood—I had once lived a meat-free life. Starting in high school with the refusal of a steak, I had forced my sister and mom to go vegetarian with me. I happily ate cheese sandwiches through my first two years of college and dutifully made earnest, bean-heavy meals from the Moosewood Cookbook.
    My fall from grace came in Las Vegas. There with friends over a college spring break, I looked at a Circus Circus breakfast buffet that included a ceiling-high stack of bacon and felt dizzy with desire. My years of resolve floated away, and I ate fifteen pieces in one sitting. I felt simultaneously awful and wonderful. Though the top of my mouth felt as if I had eaten a can of Crisco, all that protein gave me vivid dreams, and I had the energy of one of the Bull Ship Pirates from the hourly Treasure Island show.
    The next day, strolling down the Bellagio’s fake Greek pavilion and thinking about my next meat binge, I started to worry about the origins of the pig meat I’d eaten.
    The PETA videos and the anti-factory farm comic books that had been my vegetarianism’s inspiration weren’t easily forgotten—the wheezing pigs getting slapped around by mean (and probably underpaid) workers; the live baby chicks piled on top of one another in the Dumpster; the turkeys hanging from a conveyor belt as workers slit their throats one after another, as casually as turning a page in a book. In these settings, living beings—animals who love sunshine, fresh food, and taking naps in hay—became meat machines. In meat factories, the animals weren’t allowed to be truly alive, and that was wrong. Lana and I agreed on this point. However, I couldn’t believe, as Lana did, that