by Camas Davis
“Those are corn-finished. But we also have grass-fed. Not as much fat around the edges, but just as pretty, and if you ask me, they taste better,” she said.
I’d heard the term grass-fed tossed around back when I was writing about Portland restaurants. I knew it was more expensive than grain-fed, but I didn’t know why. I knew it meant that the cattle ate grass at some point in their lives, or maybe their entire lives. I knew it was a thing, a term people in Portland, Oregon, had glommed on to, as they had with organic and natural and cage-free. But I didn’t really know why it was a thing, why it might taste better or be better. France had set me on a course to knowing, but I was a long ways from really knowing.
“I need it for a photo shoot, so it just has to look appealing.”
“Huhney, do I look like the kind of person who would put an unappealing rib eye in my case?” She winked at me.
I surprised myself by letting out a flirtatious, demonstrative, engaging laugh. Since my return from France, I’d grown quiet and morose. I barely recognized that laugh as my own. It was as if someone much more at ease than me had taken over.
“What’s the photo shoot for?”
“I’m starting a meat school, sort of.” My designer friend had agreed to produce a promotional postcard for me in exchange for meat, and the plan was to shoot a rib eye on a crinkled piece of butcher paper with some butcher’s twine.
“Get out of here! A meat school?”
“I just went to France to learn butchery, and I want to keep learning. And since there’s nowhere to learn . . . Anyway. It’ll be for anyone who wants to know where meat comes from. Totally hands-on. We’ll use whole animals from local farms.”
“Wait a minute, what’s your name?”
“Camas.”
“Camas what?”
“Camas Davis.”
She sucked air in through her mouth, put her hands up on top of her head, and opened her eyes wide. “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re that food writer who went to France!” She covered her mouth with her hands and looked around the store sheepishly. “Sorry,” she said in a hushed voice. “I have a swearing problem. HOH-LEEE-SHIT. You’re Camas Davis. THE Camas Davis? I’ve been reading your blog. I know all about you!”
A couple of other customers had gathered around the meat case and were listening in on our conversation. She held up a rib eye for me to look at. “What do you think about this one?”
The meat was a beautiful deep red, but there was hardly any fat on it, and the fat, in my estimation, was what made a rib eye look like a rib eye to Americans, even if most people never wanted to actually eat the fat. I did not yet know that, while feeding corn to cattle is what gives rib eyes their signature fat-to-meat ratio, cattle, being ruminants, aren’t so adept at digesting corn. I had some sense that feeding cattle corn made them sick, and that this led to the overuse of antibiotics, and somewhere in all of this we had a methane-production problem on our hands. But I didn’t know that the fat this corn diet resulted in often tasted generic. That we were basically feeding cattle something they weren’t meant to eat in order to raise mild-flavored meat with a marbled look that some marketing concern had taught us to value, when ultimately we didn’t even want to eat the fat because at some point some nutritionist had told us animal fat was bad, which, recently, has been debunked by those same nutritionists.
I also did not yet know that a truly grass-fed rib eye contained a different kind of fat—fat with a much healthier ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids than grain-fed beef—which resulted in a more complex flavor, the complex flavor of, say, clover and ryegrass, foxtail and fescue. All I wanted at the time was a classic picture of a fat-capped, marbled rib eye that everyone, at least in America, would look at and want to eat.
“I think I want to go with corn-fed,” I told her. It was cheaper, after all, and my pockets weren’t exactly spilling over with dollar bills.
“All right. Suit yourself. But grass-fed is where it’s at. Let’s see. This one has a nice fat cap on it. Does that work?”
“Perfect.”
She tore off a sheet of brown butcher paper, and when she’d finished wrapping the meat, she leaned over the counter as far as she could and motioned with her hand for me to get as close as possible. I stood on tiptoe and leaned in.
“You ever tasted jamón ibérico before?” she whispered. I liked how she attempted, and failed in the most charming of ways, to combine her Southern accent with a Spanish one to say “jamón.”
“No,” I whispered back. “But I was just in Spain and I got to taste a lot of other kinds of ham.”
She looked up and scanned the store.
“Hang on a sec.”
To the right of the fresh meat in the case, they’d stacked all manner of charcuterie. I recognized the oblong dried coppas, with beautiful stars of fat running through them, because they looked just like those the Chapolards sold, although the people behind the counter hadn’t made any of this charcuterie. There were also pink-and-white-speckled Italian finocchiona and Calabrese salami, Spanish chorizo chubs, Italian prosciuttos, German landjäger. Even though I’d witnessed the effects of time and air and salt on meat in France, I still had so much to learn. What was the difference between a finocchiona and a Calabrese salami? Did they taste anything like a French saucisson? Why did Spanish jamón have the trotter still on, while Italian prosciutto didn’t?
She pulled out a whole leg of Spanish jamón ibérico. The price tag that sat next to it said $99/LB. She placed it on a shiny metal slicer, flipped a switch, furrowed her brow in concentration as she sliced it, and then handed me a crinkled piece of wax paper with a thin sheet of salty ham on it.
“Shhh. Don’t tell,” she said.
I put the whole slice in my mouth.
“Formidable,” I said and smiled.
“Formidable? What the hell does that mean? It’s fucking amazing is what it is,” she said, again in a higher octave and loud enough for the other customers to hear. “Shit. Sorry for swearing, ma’am,” she said to the customer standing closest to me. “Anyway, I guess these pigs are finished on acorns and half-wild. I’ve been talking to a couple of farmers nearby who are trying to feed their pigs hazelnuts. I wanna learn how to make this someday.”
“Me, too,” I said. We stood in silence for a second while I chewed and swallowed and shook my head up and down and said “Mmm” and “Yes” and “This is delicious.”
She cleared her throat, shifted from one foot to the other, and cracked her knuckles. “Anyway, umm, do you like whiskey? You look like you like whiskey. I wanna take you out for whiskey sometime and hear about this meat school of yours.”
I blushed. Was she asking me out on a date? Was she flirting with me? I hadn’t flirted with a girl since I attended college, at a small, mostly female liberal arts school in Ohio, where, at a party one night, over a six-pack of Labatt, a surly, loud lesbian named Jules informed me that I was known as the “most-wanted straight lesbian on campus.” Plus, even if we were flirting, I was in no position to be flirting back. After what had happened with Tom and then Will, I didn’t want to subject anyone else to my deep and growing ambivalence toward any form of romantic love.
But still, I felt giddy. Giddy to have met another woman who, like me, not only had a penchant for whiskey and a keen interest in jamón ibérico and rib eye fat caps, but a woman who, unlike me, had actually landed a job behind a meat counter.
“I love whiskey,” I said, a little flustered. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s get together. I’m going out of town for a bit, but give me your number.”
She tore off a small piece of butcher paper and wrote her number on it.
“My name’s Joelle. But you can call me Jo,” she said, and winked. “Promise you’ll call me?” she asked.
“I promise.”
“Because gals like us, we gotta stick together. Plus, I wanna help yo
u with your meat school.”
Had I just met my doppelgänger, but with a Southern accent and a propensity to swear even more than I did, who wanted to figure out how to make her own hazelnut-finished ham?
She handed me the wrapped rib eye, and as I made my way to the cash register to pay with the last dregs of that month’s unemployment check, I tracked her movements out of the corner of my eye. When I finally turned toward her again, she was staring back at me.
As I walked toward the front door, she yelled out, “See you soon, Camas Davis.”
TWENTY-SIX
I met the other love of my life three days later. One week before I met Jo, some married friends of mine, Hava and Scott, had called up at the last minute and invited me to join them and their friend Andrew on vacation in Hawaii. My financial situation was still rather shabby. The unemployment office had admitted me into a new self-employment program that allowed me to collect an unemployment check while also making money as a freelancer, so I wasn’t living in total poverty. But my income stream was still tentative at best. Plus, I was spending every extra dollar I had to pay off my credit card or pull together the Portland Meat Collective. Nonetheless, I managed to find one of those suspiciously cheap last-minute airline deals and, against my better judgment, pulled out that magic credit card again. I figured I’d pitch a few Hawaiian food stories in order to justify my trip, and if that didn’t work out and I had to declare bankruptcy and go back to living on friends’ couches, so be it.
I got on the plane, drank the complimentary syrupy mai tai that the flight attendant handed me, and watched Tom Hanks hug a volleyball on the tiny television screen. When we landed, Hava, Scott, and Andrew were waiting for me.
I lugged my suitcase up to the white Jeep they’d rented and hugged Hava and Scott. Andrew and I cordially shook hands, mutually remembering out loud that we had met each other before at various parties Hava and Scott had thrown over the years. The three of them had arrived the day before, and Andrew was already bright red from sunburn.
“Looks like you got some sun,” I said.
“This is actually my natural color,” he said, attempting to look offended, but then Hava chortled and I found myself joining her.
* * *
—
ON THE DRIVE from the airport, Andrew turned up the radio in the Jeep. The Bee Gees were on, and he unabashedly sang all of Barry Gibb’s high notes, with perfect pitch. We drove up and down a few steep hills, past vast fields of black, hardened lava, and up to the house they’d rented, where we sat by a tiny, kidney-shaped pool, drinking gin martinis and catching up. They asked me about France, but not too much. They asked me about Will, but not too much. I needed that kind of distance. I was still fairly incapable of talking about anything that had happened in the past few months, and they instinctively understood this, so instead we made fun of Andrew’s hair, which he’d grown out into a tangled half mullet. Hava and I watched as Scott and Andrew attempted to toss a ball around in the pool. Slowly, I began to see Andrew. The ever shifting green and brown colors in his eyes. His particular way of playing the fool for the delight of those around him. The way he laughed at himself. His hands, which seemed capable and sturdy. Hava and Scott jokingly called him Colgate, not only because his teeth were so straight and white, but because he had an all-American, clean-cut, Midwestern air about him that didn’t quite fit into the counterculture fabric of Eugene, where they’d first met him. Yet he always buttoned his shirts wrong, such that one side was longer than the other, and he didn’t really bother to fix it when someone mentioned it to him. I saw the way he’d stare off into the distance while someone else talked, as if completely uninterested, but would jump in at the perfect moment with the most appropriate, authoritative retort. His smile radiated ease and kindness, as well as a bit of mischief. He possessed an incessantly restless energy. I noticed, too, that he was smart and curious, though he tended to hide these qualities behind a veil of goofy Midwestern charm. I was also, almost immediately, wildly attracted to him.
As it turned out, Andrew, like me, was freshly single. But I was nervous to insert myself into anyone else’s life at that point. Perhaps that was why, even after I began to see him, I avoided talking directly to him without Hava or Scott in the room. Andrew mirrored my behavior. If we were caught alone, one of us would dart over to another part of the room and busy ourselves with the television or a book.
The four of us spent the evenings trying to come up with a tagline for my new business. Andrew, who had an undergraduate degree in math and a master’s in business—foreign languages to a girl with degrees in comparative literature and performance studies—kept asking me: “But how are you going to make a living doing this?” I didn’t know how to answer, and I resented the question. The Portland Meat Collective wasn’t about the money, I told him. It was about cultural defiance, about shifting our social attitudes toward food. Years later, I would come to appreciate it, his insistence that I assign monetary value to my time and ideas, our theoretical arguments about the importance of social versus financial capital.
Andrew seemed at ease in any situation, and his presence had a grounding effect on me. The more he grounded me, the more attractive he appeared to me, despite how different we were from each other.
Three days in, we were flirting underwater and sleeping in each other’s beds.
* * *
—
ON OUR LAST DAY on that black, burned volcanic island, the four of us snorkeled off a beach near the airport, right before our flight. I dreaded going home. Even with my various writing assignments and my plotting and planning the Portland Meat Collective, I still had so much time on my hands, and I was unsure exactly how I should fill it. I also didn’t know whether I would see Andrew again or if we’d just part ways. I tried not to care either way, but I was already imagining what something beyond a tropical tryst might look like with Andrew back home.
I hadn’t snorkeled before, and once in the water I kept lifting my head out to see where I was in relation to the shore. When I finally managed to keep my head underwater for more than thirty seconds, I would swim away from whole schools of vibrantly colored fish in order to go find a better school of fish, only to find nothing.
Andrew swam over.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I just feel like I’m not doing it right.” As I said this it occurred to me that I was maybe the only person in the world for whom snorkeling felt stressful.
“Just let go and float there and see what swims in front of you.”
I put my mask back on and swam a ways out, tracking Andrew’s body in the water. He stopped moving and so did I. We floated there on top of the water together, looking down into the abyss below us, dotted with bright-orange and pink coral. Andrew grabbed my hand and pointed to the right of me. A sea turtle floated below me. I looked back at Andrew, but he was gone.
And so I did what Andrew told me to do. I let the waves move me, and the turtle floated right there with me as each wave gently rocked us farther along. Occasionally it moved one of its flippers to steer, but mostly the turtle seemed not to be going anywhere in particular. After some time, I felt as though my body and the turtle’s were moving in sync, both of us carried along by the lapping of the ocean, and this served to shut my brain off completely.
The only other time I’d felt this way had been several years before, when Jill, who had been fired alongside me, convinced me to go skydiving with her for a story she was writing for the city magazine. As we went up in the plane, sweat poured from every part of my body, my hands shook, my mouth went dry, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I was possessed, in every physical way possible, by fear.
“I don’t think we should do this,” I said to Jill, shaking my head vigorously. “I can’t do this.”
And then, without much warning, a young guy clipped himself to my back, yelled “Here we go!” and pushed us out the door of
the plane. We were falling, and because my brain could do absolutely nothing to stop this rapid free fall toward the ground below, it simply ceased functioning. Either I was going to die or I was going to live. And I felt, maybe for the first time ever, total and utter relief. I was just a body falling through space.
When the guy attached to my back finally pulled open our parachute, I laughed in a way that sounded a tad deranged. I was crying, too.
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
He said, “You’re welcome,” but I wasn’t really talking to him. I was talking to my brain, which had released me momentarily from its incessant tyranny. I was high for a week afterward, with a voracious appetite for chocolate and black licorice and sex. I would lie on my couch, think nothing, and shudder at the monumental sensation of my own body just existing in the world.
Here in this blue water, floating above the turtle, which was letting itself be carried by water toward something I would never know, I felt an exhilarating, wild moving toward something, without having any control over what that something might be. My body, there, alive, real, existing, moving, breathing. The turtle’s body, there, alive, real, existing, moving, breathing. Andrew’s body somewhere nearby, alive, real, existing, moving, breathing.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Back at home, I had a lot to do to make the Portland Meat Collective a reality, like finding farmers to purchase whole and half animals from, and butchers and chefs to teach the classes. Plus, there was Livestock.