by Camas Davis
PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2018 by Camas Davis
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Portions of this book, some in different form, appeared as part of “Girl with Knife” in Double Bind: Women on Ambition, edited by Robin Romm (Liveright, 2017), “Human Principles” in Ecotone, and “Know Where Your Food Is From” in MIX Magazine. “Run Rabbit. No, Really, Run!” a feature in an episode of This American Life was adapted from “The Messy Middle,” which appeared in Oregon Humanities.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Davis, Camas, author.
Title: Killing it : an education / Camas Davis.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018006205 (print) | LCCN 2018017105 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101980088 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101980071 (hardcover) |
Subjects: LCSH: Davis, Camas—Travel. | Butchers (Persons)—United States—Biography. | Food writers—United States—Biography. | Slaughtering and slaughter-houses—France. | Slaughtering and slaughter-houses—Oregon—Portland.
Classification: LCC TS1959.5.D38 (ebook) | LCC TS1959.5.D38 A3 2018 (print) | DDC 664/.9029—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006205
Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
Version_1
FOR DJUNA,
AT THE VERY BEGINNING
OF ALL THIS
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part IOne
Two
Three
Four
Five
Part IISix
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Part IIITwenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
A Note for All the Searching People Who Helped to Make This Book Happen
A Note for Other Searching People
About the Author
You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.
—WALT WHITMAN, “Song of the Open Road”
Despite our machinations, we are ultimately unsuccessful at avoiding pain, loss and death. For animals, plants, and humans alike, there is more to life than not dying.
—CHARLES EISENSTEIN, “The Ethics of Eating Meat”
“Life,” as the Russian proverb says, “is not a walk across an open field.” Experience is indivisible and continuous, at least within a single lifetime and perhaps over many lifetimes. I never have the impression that my experience is entirely my own, and it often seems to me that it preceded me. In any case experience folds upon itself, refers backwards and forwards to itself through the referents of hope and fear; and, by the use of metaphor, which is at the origin of language, it is continually comparing like with unlike, what is small with what is large, what is near with what is distant. And so the act of approaching a given moment of experience involves both scrutiny (closeness) and the capacity to connect (distance).
—JOHN BERGER, Pig Earth
PART I
ONE
She was big. I didn’t even know pigs could get that big. And although I could see for myself the astounding girth of her, I had no way of wrapping my head around the sheer physical reality of such a weight, until the mechanical hand that had lifted the dead old sow up out of the concrete bath of scalding water accidentally dropped her, from five feet high, onto the hard, cold concrete floor. It wasn’t a thud, exactly. It was more of a ripple. A reverberating ripple of fat and skin and bone. Her heart was still in there, too, though no longer beating. So were her kidneys, her spleen, her lungs, her gallbladder, her small and large intestines, and everything else that had once made her alive but now made her a very heavy carcass on the floor. Without flinching, several men in dark-blue coveralls scrambled over to her body and attempted to push her back into the mechanical hand. As if this were actually possible. It most certainly was not.
“She’s three hundred kilos. Too big,” Marc Chapolard, who, along with his three brothers, had agreed to mentor me in the French ways of knife and bone, told Kate, my American translator and host, who told me. I did the math. Almost seven hundred pounds.
Just minutes before this pig carcass had accidentally fallen to the floor, a tall, thin, older gentleman, also in coveralls, had escorted the live sow through a wooden chute. As I watched her slowly make her way—she had so much body to move—Marc explained that she was done having babies and was going to be turned into sausage.
Another man then secured what looked like a set of headphones onto the sow’s head.
“Are they going to play her music?” I asked, in all seriousness. No one answered me.
Then, with the meaty part of his palm, the man pressed a big red button on the wall, which sent a quick electrical current coursing through the headphones and into the skin and the subcutaneous fat and the bone and then the brain of the seven-hundred-pound mama, who dropped to the floor and began convulsing.
This felt to me like a private moment that I shouldn’t be allowed to witness, these last shudders of life, this battle waged by her body’s nervous system, but I did not turn away. I was here to learn, after all. I was here to do something hard and real. I wasn’t interested in wasting any more time pretending that what was unfolding in front of me wasn’t really happening. I’d spent the past ten years of my life doing that, and I was determined never to go down that road again. But words like hard and easy didn’t seem to apply here. To the people working in this abattoir, to my French mentors raising pigs and butchering them back at the farm, this scene—would they even call it a scene?—was, quite simply, work. Life, death, work. So I kept watching.
“That makes her senseless to pain,” Marc told Kate, who told me. This was the most humane
way to kill a pig, he said. Sever all communication between the brain and the nervous system as quickly and painlessly as possible.
“She’s not dead yet?” I asked.
“No,” Marc told Kate, who told me. “She’s unconscious. She won’t be dead until they bleed her.”
When I looked back, another man had hoisted the pig up by way of a chain wrapped around her back leg. He stuck a long knife into the space between the sow’s throat and where I imagined her heart to be.
“She can’t feel this,” Marc said in French, Kate translating. “If we didn’t stun her first, she would feel it.”
A woman held a plastic container underneath the sow to collect the blood. We all watched in silence as she rhythmically stirred the blood to keep it from coagulating. Time slowed to that rhythm. My brain slowed to that rhythm. My breath slowed to that rhythm. It was nowhere near a lullaby, but something in this woman’s focus, in her unwavering attention to this one small detail, something in the stillness of her face, almost soothed me. Almost.
But as I looked from the woman’s face to the sow’s now lifeless visage, I flashed upon an utterly inappropriate metaphor, one that linked the dead seven-hundred-pound sow to the very much alive one-hundred-thirty-pound me. This sow, I thought, had spent her entire adult life doing her job well. Her job was to make babies. Lots of them. Babies that could then be turned into food for our tables. And then, one day, someone had deemed her no longer useful. And just like that, her job had ended. Hence the headphones and the electric shock and the blood. At least she could still be used for sausage.
I’d spent my entire adult life doing my job well, too—although it didn’t have anything to do with making babies for the dinner table. And then, one day, just a few short months ago, someone had deemed me no longer useful and my job had also ended. It had all happened so fast. Given the way things had gone in my life recently, I felt like I was the one who had just been dropped from a five-foot height onto a hard, cold concrete floor. But of course, I hadn’t. Of course, I still had blood pulsing through me, and this sow didn’t have any. She couldn’t feel anything anymore. But I could. And I knew that, in my attempt to relate my narrative to hers, I was only distancing myself from what was actually happening in front of me: the transformation of life into death into food.
Marc nudged me over to the bucket of blood.
“This week,” Marc said, “you’ll help us make boudin noir.”
Blood sausage. I had eaten it several times as a food editor and restaurant reviewer back in the States, but I’d never actually seen anyone prepare it, let alone made it myself.
After less than a minute, the sow’s bloodletting ceased. She was dead. There are so many other ways to say it or think it, all loaded: She had no more life to give. She had passed. She gave her life. Someone took her life from her. They killed her. They slaughtered her. They harvested her. They murdered her. Her body had the potential to become heavy with the weight of too much meaning. Her body had the potential to become heavy with the weight of the absence of meaning. But here, in this moment, she was, quite simply, dead.
The men pushed her heavy carcass into a deep concrete pool of steaming hot water, to loosen her hair follicles, Kate explained. Two men, with the help of long paddles, rolled her carcass gently through the bath, shepherding her toward her next fate, that mechanical hand. As the mechanical hand scooped her body into the air, Marc explained, it would twirl her body around, as if on a rotating spit, while hot flames shot out and the rubber fingers of the mechanical hand massaged the hair right out of her skin. But before any of that could happen, there was that drop. The seven-hundred-pound ripple. The men scurrying to try and push her body back in.
“Why don’t they just skin her?” I asked, thinking of the deer I’d watched my dad skin as a child.
“Because the skin is food,” Kate answered. “We don’t waste food here.” Earlier in the week, I’d discovered little rolls of pigskin tied with red-and-white butcher’s twine in Kate’s piggery, or pantry. She stored them in tall, sealed jars filled with rendered pig fat to keep oxygen from spoiling the skin. “For cassoulet,” she’d told me. In Gascony, an oft overlooked corner of southwest France and the place I would call home for the summer, cooks line their cassoles—the upside-down-bell-shaped ceramic pots that cassoulet is traditionally cooked in—with pigskin before they place Tarbais beans, duck confit, and pork sausage into the pot. The pot is then placed in the oven for hours, until everything becomes tender, oozing with the flavors of meat and fat and beans. The skin not only keeps everything from burning or sticking to the pot; it provides the collagen and fat that’s responsible for the rich flavors of the dish.
One of the men in the abattoir pulled out a small blowtorch and a couple of knives so that they could scrape and burn her hair off by hand. And in this next moment, a moment wedged between the finality of her death and what was to come next, the further transformation of her body into food, the real, visceral scent of scalded pigskin mingled with the imagined scent of cassoulet in my brain. The gap between the two closed just a little, but not completely. Even in this abattoir, facing the stark exchange of death for dinner, that gap refused to go away. There remained, somewhere between the genuine article of this sow’s life and death—somewhere between her death and dinner—a black hole, an undoing.
Marc ushered me to a neighboring room and pointed to buckets of hearts. Buckets of spleens. Buckets of lungs. Everything could be used for food, he told me. In another room, lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, a lone, stout man, with tufts of gray hair spilling out of the collar of his white butcher’s coat, cleaned pig intestines over a porcelain sink. The smell of bleach and vinegar wasn’t quite enough to cover up the organ funk that permeated the room.
“These will be used for stuffing sausages,” Kate told me.
This was for the most part being done the old-fashioned way, on an incredibly small scale, with just a little help from mechanical ingenuity. Before coming to France, I’d seen a statistic that 99 percent of all the animals raised and slaughtered in the United States were factory-farmed. I assumed that statistics for the rest of the industrialized world, including France, weren’t too far behind. The animals in this tiny, cooperatively owned abattoir, however, represented the other 1 percent. The floors were concrete. The walls were limestone. The doors were open. The people who owned the slaughterhouse were also the farmers who raised the animals and, in some cases, the butchers who turned the carcasses into roasts and hams and sausage and bacon, or ventrèche, as the Chapolards called it. There was little division of labor here. Farmers like the Chapolards shepherded their animals all the way from seed to sausage. This lone man standing underneath the lightbulb opened the ends of the intestines with his two sausage-size thumbs and held the openings under the faucet to clean them. Then he massaged them with salt and vinegar until they were ready to be stuffed with ground meat and fat. That’s how they did it in Gascony. It didn’t seem to matter that it was a lot of work. An animal’s life had been taken, and the animal deserved this kind of attention to detail.
I could feel Marc and Kate looking at me, trying to gauge my reaction. Somewhere just beyond my conscious thought—So this is how it’s done—that black hole swirled. And it was into that black hole that my limited understanding of life and death and all the emotions and thoughts one is told to have or not have about such things disappeared.
“What does she think?” Marc asked Kate, who asked me.
I furrowed my brow. “Je ne sais pas,” I said. I closed my mouth, then opened it again as though I had something more to say, but I didn’t. The distinct flavor of wet barnyard and blood hit my tongue. Je ne sais pas. I don’t know. It was one of the few things I did know how to say in French, and it was true. I didn’t know. I’d just spent the past ten years of my life making sure I knew everything about everything. I was paid to know. If I didn’t know, I was paid to find
out. And then I was paid to write what I knew and come up with a clever headline so that everyone else would know, too.
But today, I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t sure what I felt. It was as if, because no one was paying me to write it all down, I had no words to describe it even to myself. And without words, swimming around in that black hole between death and dinner felt deep and vast and lonely.
TWO
One week before I stepped into my first abattoir in France—before I stepped into my first abattoir anywhere—I left my home in Portland, Oregon, took a long plane ride across the country to New York City, and then boarded another plane to Toulouse, in southwest France. On the plane to Toulouse, my seatmate, an attractive Frenchman with smooth olive skin, well-coiffed hair, and a neatly folded silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, asked me, in perfect English, what I would be doing in France.
“I was a magazine editor for ten years,” I told him. “But I lost my job. And now I’m going to study butchery in Gascony.”
My seatmate’s eyes widened. I sensed that my answer had interrupted his perfect sense of order in the world. His silk handkerchief nearly wilted in disappointment.
Since this already seemed like a big enough pill for the man to swallow, I refrained from mentioning that, in addition to recently having abandoned my ten-year career as a magazine editor, I’d also ended a ten-year relationship with the man I thought I would marry, that I’d promptly moved in with another man with whom I thought I was in love, and that, aside from my weekly unemployment checks, I was completely broke, save for an unused credit card I’d found in the back of my filing cabinet, which, against the better judgment I once possessed, had paid for my seat next to him on this plane.
I was a magazine editor. I lost my job. I ran away to France to become a butcher.
I liked the sound of it. But the man with the silk handkerchief did not.