San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

There is a house in La Jolla that is almost entirely food. It overlooks Black’s Beach. It is a very, very nice house. Walk its grounds, and you come across blueberries and strawberries and cabbage and habañeros and herbs and goats and bees and chickens and greenhouses. What was once a tennis court on the grounds has been filled in with more food growing. It is a house-farm, an Eden on the sea cliff, and it’s become an epicenter of San Diego’s food scene. It’s owned by Michelle Lerach and her husband, Bill. Michelle took a sabbatical during law school to live and work on a goat farm in Northern California. There, she saw how connected farmers and ranchers and makers were to restaurants, grocers, distributors, lawmakers (who endorse public spending on agriculture), media, etc. She wanted to bring that to San Diego. She wanted to bring them all to the same plot of land (or house, in this case) to start fostering good, local foodways. So she opened her home—affectionately called the Castle of Chaos—to all of them