When Novella Carpenter talks about pork bellies, she isn't talking about investing in futures contracts of pork livestock commodities. She is talking about the real thing. So real that, "My boyfriend and I ate so much pig we felt our own bodies had become like pigs."

With much self-deprecating wit, Carpenter spoke about her 2009 book Farm City, and her experiences as an urban farmer in Oakland, to about 50 people at the Community Center on Sunday.

Carpenter described how she had a craving to put in a garden and a vision for how it would look. So, after cleaning up the abandoned lot next to her apartment, she seeded vegetables and fruit, then realized she wasn't going to stop there. She would raise animals, too, because she liked good meat and couldn't afford it.

Carpenter brought to her decision a background probably unusual for many urban farmers: She is the daughter of back-to-the earth hippies who had raised her on an Idaho farm. They grew all their own vegetables and raised their own meat. 

On her Oakland "farm," she started with a box of mixed poultry younguns delivered in a carton by the U.S. Postal Service. She rigged up a brooder box in her living room and raised the chicks to adulthood.

She also raised two pigs and described with glee the daily rounds she made to dumpsters to glean gourmet goodies for her two gourmands. Day-old pizza was a favorite.

"It was too expensive to feed them pig chow, and here was all this great food going to waste," she said. However, as the pigs grew, so did the hours she had to spend dumpster-diving to keep up with her version of the expanding pork bellies.

The animals also ate into other parts of her life: her car, which became a slop bucket; her job; and whatever was left of her swine-free life. So the pigs were going to have to meet their maker.

The experience wasn't pleasant, Carpenter said. She found someone else to butcher the pigs so she could avoid that element. She insisted that all their parts be returned to her, including the heads.

A friend who owned a restaurant (she met him because she was the "crazy lady" who trawled his dumpster) said they would use the heads to make prosciutto. And so they did.

Carpenter said it took as long to write her book -- about 18 months -- as it did for the prosciutto to age. When both were unveiled at the restaurant, one was as successful as the other.

Underlying Carpenter's wit and unquestionable dedication to urban farming is a contradiction that bears a brief consideration.

Carpenter grew up eating animals her family raised and slaughtered. She talks passionately about the "human need for connection and long-term relationships" with animals, and has named her farm animals, because to do so feels like a mark of respect. 

But building relationships with animals whom you plan to kill requires a strong stomach, or maybe a tough philosophy about the hierarchy of biological need. Maybe that's what enables urban farmers to kill what they love.

People wrote critically to Carpenter after she published an article on Salon about raising and killing her turkeys. 

"And what do you suppose they were sitting down to eat at Thanksgiving?" she asked the Albany audience. Fair question and right to the point.

Therein lies the rub. Most of us have been raised in a culture where food comes from the grocery store. It is completely removed from living, breathing creatures. Novella Carpenter has the courage and the fortitude to take urban gardening to its logical utmost. Do you?

Sunday's talk was part of the fifth annual Albany Reads program sponsored by the city of Albany, the Friends of the Albany Library, the Albany YMCA, the Albany Community Foundation and the Albany Unified School District.