Book Review: My Empire of Dirt by Manny Howard

Somewhere in or around 2007 I read an article in New York Magazine about a guy investigating the "Locavore" movement (only eating food grown within a few miles of your home) and the magazine challenged him to write about only eating food grown within a few feet of his home.  In other words, his backyard in Brooklyn.  I had lived in Brooklyn in the late 80s/early 90s and by 2007, living in Los Angeles, I was feeling the pull of my upbringing and dying for my own piece of dirt (I was still a year and a half away from getting my little 12x5 plot in Long Beach).  I recall liking the article.  I'd never forgotten it, actually.

When I was shopping around for something to use my two year old Amazon gift card on a few months ago, I stumbled on this title which stopped me in my tracks.  It could have been about backhoes and I might have been tempted to read it.  Those that know me well know that, along with my love of my garden, my cats and U2, I love Nine Inch Nails.  In the early "aughts", I spent a summer on the road following the band with a bunch of people I'd met on the internet.  It was one of the nuttiest things I've ever done and one of the most fun.  Every night, Trent Reznor closed the show out with a song called "Hurt"; a gut wrenching tale of failure and loneliness that Johnny Cash would go on to cover.   One of the lines is, "you can have it all, my empire of dirt'.  So, yeah, I hit "buy" on Manny Howard's book.  How bad could a book be that combined gardening and NIN lyrics???  

Um, BAD.

This book is brutal.  He's generally an unlikeable lout.  Granted, he seems like a good Dad, I guess.   He lets his kids bargain for the life of the ducks he'd planned to use for food and cooking fat.  But, he paints his wife as a shrew.  It's understandable that maybe his obsession becomes more about how to change the clay in his NY Borough backyard to mineral rich dirt, but once the "building of the farm" is done, he rarely seems to engage in the miracle of what is happening around him. 

His challenge is to eat for a month just from the farm.  And somewhere in there he decides that absolutely means animals for protein.  The problem is that he's woefully unprepared for anything that comes with that be it shelter, food, or upkeep.  He's always reading the "how to" book AFTER he's gotten the animals.  And what that results in is some pretty distasteful, dare I say, cruelty.  It isn't until the chickens he plans on killing start laying eggs that it occurs to him that maybe subsisting on a month of eggs to add protein to his diet might have been sufficient and he mail orders laying chickens.  As with the ducks, rabbits, and eating chickens, he doesn't have the proper laying set up or housing set up for them until he's had them awhile.  To add insult to injury, that move on the board (or farm as it may be) doesn't seem to stop the mishandling of the rest of his food animals.  But, every time an animal dies from said mishandling, he chalks it up to tough life on a farm and the book spirals down further into ugliness.

Look, I grew up a country girl, where the first day of any hunting season be it fishing, pheasant, or deer was an unofficial school holiday - farmer's kids had allowable absences.  And while I honestly understand and respect my friends who choose not to eat animal flesh, I am not a vegetarian (although I do my very best to eat humanely raised meat and eggs).  I never had the interest or desire to be the one shooting,  but I've walked the fields with my father quail hunting.  I learned how to clean and dress game birds at the feet of my grandfather and great uncle.  There is a photo somewhere of a 3 year old Squidly smiling happily over a pile of colorfully plumed pheasants.  Every winter,  I knew one day I would come home from school to find a dead deer hanging upside down bleeding out in the garage.  Once, the entire house shook as we were getting ready for school which, we discovered as we all ran out of our rooms, was caused by my Dad standing in the kitchen door in his underwear shooting a turkey that had been walking a few feet from our pool.  But, all the dying came with a code of honor.  You never shot anything you weren't going to eat and as the meat was being cleaned and then cooked and then eaten, it was done with thankfulness and ritual.  I spent plenty of time on the farms of my friends and I know these can be brutal places for both man and animal, but this book turned my stomach more than once.

Beyond the issues I have with him and his approach to "farming",  it's not a well written book.  I'm not sure if he needed to flesh out what really should have remained an interesting and well written article, but there are tangents that we are forced to explore that are utterly, utterly either straight up boring or require great strain to see the connection.... 

Probably the worst of the worst of all the death, destruction and marital ugliness (TMI), is that at the end of this wretched experiment he has no opinion.  He hasn't decided that there is any purpose or lack thereof to the locavore movement, the organic movement, or any other of the issues associated with what he just did beyond that he likes that he no longer has to buy eggs, and oh, yeah, they sort of taste better.  I mean COME ON, you built a farm, ran a farm, ate from the farm, put your marriage in second place to the farm, almost lost a finger to the farm and you don't come down on any side of the issues???!!!!   

I love Brooklyn, I love the idea of growing ones own food no matter where you live, and I love the lyrics to the Nine Inch Nails song, but I really did NOT like this book....  Save yourself the money, time and feeling sick to your stomach and just read the New York Magazine article by clicking here.