Over two seasons' time, Carpenter explores her relationship with eating in and around an inner-city garden in the run-down Ghost Town neighborhood.ĭespite its name, the place brims with life, and a diverse group of curious neighbors show up with questions for the white woman raising plants and farm animals in the inner city. "Looking back on my parents' history and comparing it to my present," she writes, "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."Ĭarpenter's adventurous memoir, developed from a series of online essays at and a blog, offers a contemporary restaging of the agrarian American dream. Only the difference is she's not farming out in the middle of nowhere she's raising food on a vacant lot behind her apartment on 28th Street in Oakland. While their countercultural back-to-the-land experiment ultimately fell apart, the underlying idea persevered, and, in the midst of working on her master's degree at UC Berkeley, Carpenter decides to dig a garden and start raising turkeys, rabbits and pigs. The desire for a simpler life in the country, filled with the excitement of living like pioneers, spurred Novella Carpenter's parents to move away from the Bay Area in the 1970s. By Novella Carpenter (Penguin Press 276 pages $25.95)
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