Killing It

by Camas Davis

  “I go to Haiti every year to do volunteer medical work,” Levi said. “They just hack the carcass into rough pieces and stew it all. There’s no time for anything else. So many people don’t have refrigeration, and everything needs to be cooked immediately.”

  Next, John cut the front and back legs away from the middle portion. He did not use a cleaver or a saw, only that small knife inserted into the spaces between joints.

  “No one trained me,” John told us. “I just figured it out myself.” Levi had mostly taught himself, too, learning from others when he could, and from books, but mostly it had been—and to some extent it still was—a process of trial and error, with a few mentors like John and Robert and Chief Dave to guide him in between.

  While they cut, Levi asked the students what all of this had meant to them. Porter put it best. “I was in architecture as an undergrad, and I understood, by looking at pictures and plans, what a building looked like. But there’s an experience of going into the building that’s completely different. That’s how I feel about this pig.”

  “What about you, Ms. Reporter Lady?” he asked me.

  I paused for a minute but did not answer. I had so much to share about what I had learned in France, but I was here to report a story, not to tell my own. I picked up a spare knife, and set about seaming out the ham.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE END of the day, we’d cut and vacuum-packed everything but the belly and the meat that Levi would turn into sausage. Levi would take care of these parts later, because there were still rabbits back home that he needed to process, and bees to check on, and he still needed to kill that rooster he’d bought from Linda, plus some other roosters he accidentally had in his backyard—some chicks he’d bought turned out to be male—but wasn’t supposed to, since roosters were illegal in Portland due to their prodigious vocal talents. I followed Levi to his house to help him.

  Levi’s North Portland backyard was muddy and full of sweet-smelling rabbit manure and firewood and food: eggs, chickens, lettuce, squash, carrots, chard, rabbits. Levi boiled some water in a large pot on a propane burner and then grabbed a rooster and instructed me to hold it upside down by its feet to calm it. He said this curtly, as if he were working on a patient at the hospital and didn’t have time to joke around. I sensed he was done talking to Ms. Reporter Lady for the day, so I put my notebook and pen away, grabbed the rooster’s feet with one hand, and wrapped my other hand around its wings, as Levi instructed me. Levi pulled a small knife from his back pocket and stuck it into the top of the rooster’s mouth, just as they had at Jehanne’s farm.

  “That was to scramble his brain so he can’t feel what comes next,” Levi said.

  He then stuck the knife into the rooster’s neck.

  “That was the carotid artery I severed,” he said. “Now we wait for his nervous system to completely shut down.” As the rooster bled out, it shuddered a few times in my hands, its claws drawing circles in the air as if it were running in slow motion, much in the way our old hunting dog, Gabe, used to move his feet while sleeping, dreaming of flocks of geese, most likely. Levi touched one of the rooster’s eyeballs with his finger.

  “If the rooster flinches when I do that, it means he can still feel pain and I did it wrong. But he didn’t flinch. That blinking is just part of his nervous system making its last stand.”

  My heart pumped a little faster as I watched the rooster’s eyes close for the last time.

  Four days earlier at Linda’s farm, I’d noticed a rooster in the barn, standing on one leg, one eye closed, one eye open.

  “Wild ducks will line up in a pond on a log,” Levi had told me. “All the ducks in the middle will be asleep, and the two ducks on the end have their outside eyes open, their inside eyes closed. They’re keeping watch. Their brains are half-asleep, half-awake.

  “Chickens sometimes do something similar when they sleep,” Levi said. “They stand on one leg and keep the opposite eye open.”

  I imagined all the meat eaters in America lined up like ducks in a pond on a log. We’re all huddled in the middle, sleeping. Maybe Linda or Chief Dave takes up one end. Maybe Levi takes up the other. And as we sleep, they keep watch. They see. They know. They carry the weight of a certain reality for us so that we don’t have to.

  Levi killed a few more roosters and then sprayed their carcasses with a hose. We dipped them in hot water. We plucked their feathers, removed their heads and feet and guts. The next day, after they’d gone through rigor mortis, Levi would tuck one into a pot of simmering wine with onions and carrots, garlic and peppercorns.

  “Here’s to dinner.” Levi held up a glass of beer.

  I took a long swig of mine and sat down on one of the wooden steps of his back porch.

  Levi sat next to me. “So what do you think about all this?” he asked.

  I was still on unemployment. I maybe couldn’t make next month’s rent. I was now doubly heartbroken, living alone, and unsure of what the future held for me. I was back to writing again, but I didn’t want to be. France seemed like a faraway dream. Christiane’s words still haunted me: “If you don’t do anything with this, we will be very sad. It will all be for nothing.”

  I thought about what Robert’s student Porter had said, how the experience, as an architecture student, of going into a building was totally different from looking at pictures and plans of a building. Porter had said he wasn’t quite sure yet how watching Levi kill a pig had changed him. He just knew it had.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “Maybe you can help me.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Surely, I explained to Levi, we weren’t the only people in Portland searching for this sort of transparent experience, who wanted to take part in the process of getting meat to our tables the right way, the old way, the respectful way—whatever you wanted to call it. The real way, if such a reality was even possible anymore. Surely we weren’t the only people unconvinced that the answer to the entire meat conundrum was as simple as forsaking meat altogether. Surely we weren’t the only people who would rather eat meat from farmers like the Chapolards or Linda than from anonymous factory farms four states over, or four countries over, for that matter.

  All around me in Portland, I saw people hungry for connection with their food. I saw words and phrases like sustainable, local, organic, farm to table, and humane tossed around at farmers’ markets and grocery stores, on restaurant menus. I myself had used these terms in my food writing on occasion. But what did those labels mean, and did they really connect us to the thing itself—the act of killing and butchering an animal for dinner? If more of us were connected to the thing itself, how might each of us become a very different kind of meat eater?

  Even outside of the politics of food, the economics of the plate, the lure of sustainability’s lingo, I knew there was something deeper that would resonate with people in Portland, just as it had for me in France. It was learning how to do something tangible, meaningful, and direct with my own two hands. If anyone asked me where the ham on my plate came from, I wanted to be able to tell them, from beginning to end, how it had gotten there. That was a kind of ownership—maybe not the kind of total ownership the Chapolards had achieved, but certainly a reclamation of knowledge and skill that had been taken away from us once industrialization took over our food system.

  I didn’t want to disappoint the Chapolards, but I was far from ready to open a butcher shop or start a farm, if not solely because I had no money to do so. Plus, I wasn’t even convinced that the Chapolards’ model would work back home. I needed to keep learning. I wanted to make a living, somehow, outside of writing. I wanted to re-create my French education in Oregon, not only for myself but for my community.

  What if, I thought, by bringing people closer to the basic, old-fashioned processes by which meat got to our tables—by drawing the comparison for them between that 99 percent of animals raised on f
actory farms and that other 1 percent—I not only inspired them to change their buying and eating habits, but also to change the way they saw the entire world, their community, and everything else that stood between life, death, and dinner? What if it made people grapple in ways we modern, urban beings were rarely, if ever, forced to grapple? Maybe simply being told how awful industrialized farming could be wasn’t enough to make people change how they ate. Sure, the industrialization of our food system had, in many ways, severed our brains from our bodies, allowed us not to think about what we ate, but what if some people wanted things to be a little more difficult—what if more people wanted to think and register and feel and see what happened?

  In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes, “There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists.”

  I’d been on both sides of this equation. But now I found myself in the middle of the gap between death and dinner. I was on the search for and people, not but people. Levi was one of those people. So were Linda the farmer and John Taboada. I needed to find the Chapolards of America. I wanted more teachers. More mentors. More allies. More people hungry, like me, to learn and open our eyes and see.

  It was a rather lofty ideal, of course, but, sitting there on Levi’s back steps, I began to pull together a business idea: a fully transparent, hands-on meat-education-and-buying model I eventually dubbed the Portland Meat Collective. I’d source animals from local farmers like Linda. I’d use those animals in classes that encouraged people to pick up knives and learn how to slaughter, butcher, cure, and cook every part of those animals for food. I’d hire people like John and Levi and Chief Dave to teach the classes. And although I wasn’t quite ready to teach myself yet, I’d at least be able to help those teachers interpret for our students what they were doing with their knives, and why. Maybe the classes would even prepare me to someday be able to teach others myself. Maybe, eventually, the Chapolards and Kate could come and teach. We’d show students how to use every part and make it last. We’d make pâté de tête together and maybe no one would cringe. And then the students would go home with all that meat to fill their freezers and make their own jambon. Just as Levi had said, people used to do this all the time with their elders, their neighbors, their families. I was simply going to re-create this scene for modern, urban times, give it a name, register as a business with the state, maybe even pay myself for the work it took to bring this sort of experience to others.

  I told Levi about my idea and asked him if he might consider teaching a class.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  OF COURSE, I had absolutely no money to start a business, so I set about scrapping. I convinced a designer friend from my magazine days to create a brand identity for me in trade for meat and classes down the road. My brother, who ran a successful Web design company, generously helped me throw together a Web site for free. A friend recently out of law school acted as my pro bono lawyer. People liked the idea and were happy to help.

  I called up the United States Department of Agriculture and the Oregon Department of Agriculture and every other relevant Department of Fill-in-the-Blank that I could find and asked whoever was willing to listen whether what I wanted to do was legal.

  Sort of, they said. Maybe? It’s a gray area. No one’s ever asked us this before. There is simply no precedent.

  No precedent for a farmer, a butcher, and a bunch of regular old people gathering together around a table to turn an animal into dinner. At least no precedent that anyone could remember.

  Was there some license they could give me to make what I was going to do legitimate?

  We don’t have a license for what you’re about to do, they said. Hearing this thrilled me. What I was about to do felt defiant in all the right ways.

  So could I do it?

  So long as you walk very carefully between about one hundred regulatory lines, they said.

  I could do that. But first I asked them to tell me everything they could about the nature of these lines they were talking about. And then I put my old magazine fact-checking hat on and set about diving deep into the gray area, feeling out its boundaries, asking a whole lot of questions.

  In just over a month, word traveled quickly. Whether it was because I knew the right people, or more people had been watching me from afar than I cared to know about, before I’d even registered my business name with the state of Oregon, before I even knew how I was going to pull off the first class, the local media started calling. They asked me questions like “What does it mean to be an ‘ethical’ butcher?” and “How transparent will your meat classes actually be?” I stumbled over the answers—my new lexicon was still in progress. I didn’t even consider myself a butcher yet. I wasn’t even sure how to go about making my idea a reality.

  But I kept meeting the Chapolards and Kate Hills of America. They kept offering me help.

  And then I fell in love with one.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It was the end of the day, already dark outside, and when I opened the door to Pastaworks, a European-style market on Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, a gust of cool October air ushered me in.

  As a teenager, I occasionally drove up to Portland from Eugene for the day with friends who had their own cars. We’d strut up and down Hawthorne in our vintage velvet dresses and batiked leggings, poking our heads into tie-dye and incense stores with brightly colored Indian tapestries in their windows. Today Hawthorne is home to an American Apparel and a Ben & Jerry’s, but the scent of Nag Champa still wafts from a few of those same stores, their window mandalas long ago faded by the sun. Every time we walked by Pastaworks, I’d press my face up to one of its windows and peer in at all those exotic-looking ingredients. It seemed like a place meant for adults, adults with money, adults with an understanding of the world I had no ability to comprehend.

  After arriving home from France, however, I’d discovered that, aside from Portland’s farmers’ markets, Pastaworks was as close as I could possibly get to the markets I’d fallen for in Gascony. Not quite the same—it was, in truth, more Italian than French in terms of its ingredients, it was more American than Italian in terms of its prices, and no one wagged their finger at me when I picked up a melon and smelled it—but it would have to do.

  Upon entering Pastaworks, you were immediately hit with the funk of olive brine and aged cheese. On the left side of the store, a wide, deep refrigerated trough spilled over with aged pecorinos and nutty blues, tart and crumbly chèvres, sharp cheddars, luscious rounds of raw cow’s-milk cheese wrapped in thin strips of spruce bark, and thick, oozing triple creams that, back when I could afford them, I ate with a spoon for breakfast. Off to the side, vats of salty olives seasoned with rosemary, jars of tiny pickled anchovies, called boquerones, with glistening silver skin and creamy flesh, bowls of bright roasted red piquillo peppers preserved in olive oil. In the middle of the store, you’d find a copious bounty of bright-green broccolini, striated purple-and-white radicchio, or, depending on the season, velvety mâche, all grown by farmers only an hour or two away. On the other side of the produce mountain you might discover wild fiddlehead ferns waiting to be sautéed in sweet butter and green garlic or, in the right season, a pile of plump matsutakes plucked straight from the wet, pungent soil of Oregon’s Willamette Valley by a crazy-eyed mushroom forager named Lars. At the back, owner Peter de Garmo, a white-haired, bespectacled, quiet man who opened Pastaworks in 1983 and probably still knows more about food and wine than all the denizens of Portland combined, sat at a tall desk, surrounded by shelves of Italian Barolos and Barbarescos, bottles of French Chinon and Bordeaux, obscure Oregon pinot noir and pinot gris. And on the right-hand side of the store, a vast glass butcher’s case stacked with thick T-bones and loin chops, beautifully tied pot roasts, breaded scaloppini, and plenty of tenderloins. />
  I was surprised to see a woman standing behind the meat counter, leaning against it with her right elbow, her chin resting in her hand, talking to her male co-worker, a rockabilly type with meticulously groomed sideburns. She spoke with a honeyed twang. She wore a baseball cap pulled low over her dark-brown eyes.

  Before I went to France, this had been one of the meat counters that rejected me when I asked if they’d take me under their wing. Only men had been working behind the counter then. The woman stopped talking as I made my way toward them. They wore white, button-up butcher’s smocks, and hers was two sizes too big on her petite frame. She punched him on the shoulder and, under her breath, said to him, “I got this one.”

  The meat counter was situated a step or two up from the floor I was standing on, such that the meat in the case could be viewed at eye level, and anyone who worked behind the counter towered at least a foot above my head. Because of this, even though she was clearly slight in body, she cut an imposing figure.

  She looked my age, maybe a little bit older, judging by the crow’s-feet around her eyes. Her jaw was square, her face long. I caught her eyes briefly, and in response she tipped her chin up and out, pursed her lips, and stared at me from under her baseball cap, almost as if she were challenging me to a fight. I lowered my gaze back to the rib eyes and tenderloin roasts between us. There were no pig ears or trotters here. No blood sausage.

  “Huhney. What can I do you for?” Unlike her somewhat menacing presence and expression, her soft low voice and her Southern accent soothed in the kindest of ways.

  “I’m looking for a pretty rib eye.”

  “Whaddya mean by pretty? Which one do you like?”

  “Maybe one with a lot of nice fat. Maybe that one.” I pointed to a bright-red rib eye with a beautiful white cap of fat around the edge and what I deemed to be proper marbling, though, in truth, at that point, I really didn’t know much at all about beef or marbling. It was what I would call a classic rib eye. The kind you see on American grocery store billboards that say something like WE’VE GOT USDA PRIME!