Blood and Guts

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It’s one thing to rhapsodize about forging a connection to your food at the local farmers market. It’s another thing entirely to harvest that food from a rabbit hutch on the back porch. But while straw piles up in the crooks of the stairway, and sacks of soon-to-be-cured olives hang from the pantry ceiling, the home Novella Carpenter and her partner, Bill, share is far from rural: It’s a one-bedroom apartment in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Oakland, California. Counting the back porch, a small yard, and a vacant lot where Novella grows vegetables, it’s a complete, working farm in a very unlikely place.

On the winter solstice Novella slaughtered one of the turkeys she raised and let Meatpaper document the process.

Tell us about this turkey.

I think there were six turkeys who came to us, and he was one of four who survived. They had a nice little flocking relationship. The garden was one of their favorite places to go. They’d march down the sidewalk, and they’d hang out and play in the garden until it was time to go back to their area behind the house. When they were really little, one of the turkeys almost died. I came out one day and found him flattened and freezing. I picked him up and I brought him back to life, so maybe it was this one, I don’t know.

You can’t tell them apart?

No. There were three Bourbon Reds, and they all look the same.

You were vegetarian at some point, a real “meat is murder” person.

I must have been about 16. I can’t remember what it was I read, but my mom put a steak in front of me and I was like, “I just can’t do it. This is an animal!” Then I was a vegetarian for about two years in college. So all told, maybe four years. Not that long.

What do you make of that period now, looking back?

I think [my] philosophy was really juvenile. It’s hoping something doesn’t have to die. It’s very Babe or Charlotte’s Web. But the final, logical conclusion to being a vegetarian or vegan is that farm animals will cease to exist.

Some people have argued that a life lived for the purpose of dying is not a real life.

You could say that, but you’re ignoring human culture. [People] and domesticated farm animals are tied together. They’re interlocked; they’ve coevolved. We’ve made [farm animals] exist, and they’ve helped us survive. And so for me, it’s like, why don’t we keep up that beautiful tradition? Part of that tradition is dying, but part of that is surviving. Those animals continue to exist because of us.

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