Killing It

by Camas Davis

  Though there were still plenty of small meat producers in France, Kate told me the Chapolard model was increasingly rare. Most meat producers raising animals in numbers similar to the Chapolards sold them to small local butcher shops like the one Kate had taken me to in Agen, which then took care of the rest of the processing. Much bigger meat producers, of course, sold their animals at auction or contracted with larger meat distributors and conglomerates, which stocked the meat counters of most grocery stores. France had its share of factory farms just like America. But France also still had farmers like the Chapolards and, to my knowledge, America did not. Most small farmers I’d met didn’t grow their own grain and didn’t butcher their own animals, let alone make pig-head pâté and blood sausage to sell at farmers’ markets.

  Four major conglomerates process roughly two-thirds of the one hundred million hogs raised in America each year. Technically, these conglomerates, like the Chapolards, own all of the animals that become meat, although these companies typically contract with farms—confined animal-feeding operations—to raise them. They also, typically, own the slaughterhouses and processing facilities that turn those animals into food. But these conglomerates differ from the Chapolards in one major way: division of labor is king. By the time a steak from one of these operations gets to your table, it may have passed through dozens of hands and crossed many state lines, and whoever is selling it to you most likely can’t tell you much, if anything, about how it got there—they’re not even legally required to know.

  This division of labor adds up to division of knowledge. I’d found this out when I wrote that story about bavette, back when I still thought all butcher shops employed people who knew how to cut up whole carcasses, who knew which part of the animal each cut came from—back when I thought chefs knew this stuff, too. In fact, very few of the people serving or selling meat in America, let alone the people buying it, knew much about where it came from.

  * * *

  —

  I WANTED TO SHARE my bavette story with Dominique, to tell him what it was like to be a curious person asking questions about meat in the States, but Dominique and Christiane motioned for Kate and me to follow them to another room at the very back of the salle de découpe. When we opened the door, a steamy, unctuous warmth enveloped us, a welcome relief from the chilly atmosphere of the cutting room. My nose immediately filled with the strong scent of meat and bones cooking with bay leaves, leeks, onions, and carrots in a vat of water that was wider than me by several feet and almost as tall. The ingredients, Kate told me, were slowly working their way toward a rich, gelatinous, flavorful symbiosis.

  In the vat, Christiane said, they’d placed the equivalent of six split pig skulls, with the cheeks and other bits of meat, fat, and skin all still left on them, along with several tongues and a few hocks and trotters. This would cook for six hours, and when it was done they’d pick the slow-cooked meat from the bone, gather the very tender tongues, and combine it all with some of that gelatinous liquid and fat in a heavy terrine to make pâté de tête, otherwise known as fromage de tête, or head cheese in English.

  A chef back in Oregon once told me that if I saw “pulled pork” on his menu, and it had quotation marks around it, it was actually head cheese. Why did he have to disguise it in this way? Because his customers, he explained to me, would never buy something called head cheese, and enough people knew French to be able to translate fromage de tête.

  I told Kate this, and she told Christiane and Dominique.

  “Why don’t Americans like head cheese?” Dominique asked, confused.

  “Because they don’t know what it is. They think it’s brains and eyeballs and everything else,” I said.

  “And what is wrong with brains and everything else?” Dominique asked, shaking his head.

  “Because we don’t like to be reminded where meat comes from,” I said. We don’t like brains because brains remind us that the meat we’re eating came from an animal like us. We don’t like eyeballs because they can stare back at us.

  Kate translated, and Dominique stared at me for a long while, looking exasperated and a touch forlorn. “Why would you raise an animal for food and then not eat every part?”

  I did not have a good answer for him.

  I no longer remember what I envisioned when I first heard the term “head cheese,” but I know now that head cheese comprises some of the most flavorful pieces of meat from the entire pig, and not brains or eyeballs. And yet, the chef back in Portland had told me, even though he called it “pulled pork,” it was a hard sell once it arrived on the plate.

  “Too foreign-looking for kids like us,” he’d joked. Kids like us.

  * * *

  —

  BACK OUT IN the cold cutting room, Dominique told me that once Jacques and I returned with the carcasses, they’d begin to work on those, creating piles for each kind of cooked or cured product they’d make that afternoon and into the next day. Tuesdays they continue with this work, stuffing sausages, cutting and trimming chops and roasts, preparing brochettes (skewers), and trimming the belly for ventrèche, which, Kate explained to me, was the Chapolards’ version of American bacon—basically, salted and smoked belly that is liberally flavored with black pepper, but without the sugar that American bacon cure usually includes. All this in preparation for the first two markets of their week, in Casteljaloux on Tuesday and Lavardac on Wednesday. By the end of the week they’d have enough fresh cuts and cooked charcuterie like head cheese and other pâtés, plus sausages, hams, and bellies that have been salted and smoked or hung to dry in previous weeks, to sell at two more markets on Saturday, in Nérac and back at Casteljaloux. The brothers and their wives took turns working the markets, sometimes even bringing their children to help them, such that someone was always available to fulfill the constant production needs in the cutting room and on the farm.

  The Chapolards faced a dizzying amount of work each week, and I was about to ask if they ever felt they didn’t have enough people to get it all done when Jacques entered. He was still grinning, just as he had been when we greeted him upon our arrival at the Chapolards’ farm, right before he’d run home for lunch. Kate explained that he wanted to give us a tour of the farm before he and I drove to the abattoir to pick up the carcasses, so we stepped out of our cutting-room attire and into the sunny outdoors, squinting.

  Out back of the cutting room, we stood in an unkempt courtyard of dirt and scrappy weeds surrounded by barns and other outbuildings. Old equipment and piles of materials—wire netting, rotting boards, rolls of gauzy material—were strewn everywhere. Grass grew in between the springs and gears of some of the old equipment.

  “You know it’s a working farm when it looks like this,” Kate said. “If it looks clean and tidy, the owners probably have a day job.”

  A short grain silo stood at attention next to the open-air barn that housed the Chapolards’ older pigs that were headed for slaughter. Jacques explained that the silo was where they stored the grains that they fed their pigs, grains they grew themselves on the property—corn, wheat, barley, oats, sunflower seeds, and féverole, a type of field bean.

  I asked Kate why they didn’t pasture their pigs, a phrase I’d heard chefs and farmers toss around back home. She explained that “pasturing” in the context of pigs meant something different than with cattle or lamb, both ruminant species, meaning the multichambered structure of their stomach allows them to efficiently digest fiber such that they can subsist and fatten up with a diet of grass alone. Pigs are a monogastric species, she explained, meaning that they are inefficient digesters of fibers like grass such that, although they do love rooting in and eating pasture, they are unable to survive, let alone develop into edible, delicious meat, on pasture alone. They need a balanced ration of grains that have been processed—cracked, rolled, or soaked—so that their stomachs can efficiently digest them. “Pasturing” a pig is really about giving them
exercise, and not so much about their diet. The Chapolards didn’t have a lot of acreage to work with—only about a hundred hectares, the average size of small family farms in the area—and since they’d chosen to grow their own pig feed, their small parcel of land couldn’t accommodate both grain and pigs.

  From a smaller, concrete-and-brick structure, a cacophony of squeals and grunts spilled out toward us. It was a long, low, somewhat narrow building with a tin roof and just a few open portions cut into the walls for airflow. At the front door, Jacques explained that this one held all of their nursing mothers and babies, all of whom were easily spooked. The full walls and minimal number of windows in this nursery ensured that distractions were kept to a minimum and that the new piglets stayed warm.

  Jacques slid open the wood-and-metal door, instructing us to be quiet and move slowly as we walked in. The room smelled like pulsing, breathing, new, hungry, dirty, shitting life, a scent I hadn’t been privy to on a regular basis. Kate explained that all of the manure gets put back out into the fields, where it decomposes and renews the soil with nutrients that make their grain grow.

  Although it was relatively small, the darkness of the interior made the space feel cavernous, as if we were standing inside the womb of a twelve-thousand-pound mama. The sounds of the babies and mothers pinged and echoed off the walls. I watched as eight or so tiny piglets violently shoved their mouths into the teats of their mama pig, who was lying on her side, surrounded by a loose, metal crate or cage, whose “ceiling” and “walls” resembled those metal farm gates you sometimes see at the entrance to a road leading into an animal pasture. Jacques told us that the structure was used to keep the sow from rolling over and killing her babies. Later, I’d find out the name for this practice: farrowing. Many farmers struggle with whether it is humane to sacrifice the mother’s freedom to move around in order to save the piglets from possible death. Some of them believe that, so long as you can make a mother pig feel safe—with walls made of hay bales, for example—as opposed to trapping her in what amounts to a tight metal cage, she won’t roll onto her babies. But on the Chapolards’ farm, Jacques talked about farrowing pens very matter-of-factly. This is how it is done.

  As we walked farther into the barn, the piglets grew louder, so Jacques, looking a little nervous, motioned for us to leave. “He doesn’t want us to stress the mamas and babies out,” Kate explained.

  Jacques took us across the dirt courtyard to another barn, where all of the pigs destined for the dinner table resided once they’d moved beyond nursing to solid food. The barn was open to the elements, with gauzy netting hung from the rafters around the perimeter to keep out dust and bugs. The pigs weren’t cramped in there—they had plenty of room to move around—but they weren’t free to roam the farm, either. Jacques explained that, in total, they had three barns for “grower” pigs, those that would soon be sent to the abattoir, plus one for sows, one that was a nursery for new piglets and mothers, and one for “weaners,” who had stopped nursing and were transitioning to solid foods but were not quite ready to live in the grower barns with older pigs.

  Jacques nodded his head, signaling that our tour was over.

  “Okay,” Kate said. “He’s going to take you with him to pick up the carcasses, and then you’ll come back here and work some more. This is my cue to leave. Have fun.” I’d be working with the Chapolards for the rest of the afternoon, then spending the night at Dominique and Christiane’s house, in a nearby village. I looked at Kate, feeling a bit desperate. I was the new kid, and she was dropping me off for my first day of school.

  She hugged me.

  “What am I going to do without my translator?” I asked.

  “The only way to learn French is to get me out of the picture. You’ll do fine. I’ll come back tomorrow.” And with that, she settled into her car and drove away.

  I turned to Jacques, who was still grinning as he motioned for me to follow him to a tall white van. As we drove down the long dirt driveway, I listened to the rattling sounds of our empty metal driving box and wondered what it would sound like with twenty sides of pig in it.

  Jacques asked me if I liked the Beatles and then started singing “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” urging me to sing along, but I couldn’t remember any of the words.

  TEN

  I’d already been to the abattoir, a small complex of tall white buildings with windows at the top of each wall, in the nearby town of Condom, earlier that morning to witness the slaughter with Marc and Kate, but this time we entered through a different door. We parked our van at a set of sliding metal garage doors—the loading dock, clearly, as there were other men with vans, too.

  We slid open the garage door we’d parked in front of and then entered an echoey, dark concrete corridor with a few inadequate fluorescent lights strung high above us. We took a right, walked down another corridor, then pulled open a heavy insulated metal door, which led us into a cold antechamber. Jacques instructed me to dip the soles of my shoes in a shallow, soapy tray of water on the floor, then we pushed open another, heavier door, which triggered a burst of cold air. I was lost almost immediately—and this, Kate had told me earlier that morning, constituted a small slaughterhouse.

  We ended up in a vast, soaring refrigerated chamber full of hanging half and whole animal carcasses that had been killed that morning. Most were pigs, but a few were lambs, or maybe goats—it was difficult to tell with their skin off. One or two carcasses looked a lot bigger, maybe beef, maybe something else, but they were also skinned, so I could not be sure. All I could see was a series of gargantuan muscles, long white tendons. How different the pig carcasses looked from the other carcasses—with so much more fat, and all their skin still wrapped around them.

  Each of the carcasses hung by one or two of its back legs—depending on whether it had been split in half or left whole—by way of thick metal S-hooks attached to a system of ceiling rails high above me that ran out the doors into other rooms. When I say they were hanging by their legs, I mean that someone had taken a knife and cut a hole between the Achilles tendon and the anklebone. The hook was inserted into that hole, which wouldn’t rip because it sat between that very strong tendon and bone.

  Jacques stopped to talk to a short man in white coveralls, so I began counting the carcasses. About seventy halves of pig, so thirty-five or so whole pigs. Maybe ten lambs, or what I assumed were lambs. And just a few of the larger beeflike animals. Could they be horses? I wondered. Kate had told me that it was normal for people to slaughter horses here when they got too old for other agricultural uses, and turn them into food.

  I stared at a rack of shelves with hooks welded every foot or so along the front of each shelf. A skinned lamb head hung on each of the hooks. The eyes looked out, blank.

  I asked, in stuttering French and English, how much each side of pork weighed, and Jacques told me, by way of hands and fingers, that each half weighed about two hundred pounds.

  Then Jacques demonstrated for me how we would move the Chapolards’ twenty sides of pork into the van. He walked over to one of the hanging sides and stood in front of it. What does a side of pig look like? Imagine a pig cut in half along the spine. Each side has one half of its rib cage, one half of the belly, one half of the spine, one back leg, and one front leg. With both of his thick, meaty hands, he pushed a side forward along the system of rails above us, his upper body pressing forward toward the door, while his legs pressed back toward the concrete floor. He appeared to do this with little effort. I grabbed on to another side just as he had shown me, but the strength of my hands felt inadequate for pushing this much weight. In an attempt to conjure more force, I awkwardly bear-hugged the carcass, with my neck and face cranked around the side of the pig so I wasn’t staring into its inner cavity and I could see where I was going, and walked the carcass along this way, although at times it seemed as though the carcass was walking me. The carcass was, as Dominique had cautioned, still slightly wa
rm. Hugging this animal body, my own temperature rose slightly. It was difficult not to feel a visceral overlap at the liminal place where my skin touched the pig’s skin. Jacques turned around to check on me and laughed. It was a friendly laugh, but he clearly thought my technique wasn’t the best way to get the job done.

  We moved all twenty of the sides this way, lining them up on the ceiling rail next to the door where we’d parked our van.

  “Très bon!” Jacques declared every time I arrived with a carcass. Sometimes he even clapped. He never stopped grinning. Jacques’s coveralls were spotless. I looked down to discover my black turtleneck smeared with white fat and stray bits of meat.

  When we were ready to load the carcasses into the van, Jacques grabbed each one with a mechanical hand that hooked onto their feet and guided them gently into the truck, where he hung them again by their back legs on hooks dangling from the ceiling.

  Jacques motioned for me to stay put and then disappeared into the labyrinthine halls of the abattoir. A few other men were in the process of loading carcasses into their own vans. They all looked at me with faces I could not read. When I caught one of the men’s eyes, he nodded at me, then looked away. I was a new face and, I assumed, not an expected one. I got the sense that the Chapolard wives never picked up the carcasses.