by Camas Davis
Soon after I returned from France, a local public relations woman I knew from my city magazine days had reached out to me.
“Are you back? I heard about your time in France. I’ve got this idea for an event series. Meat authors discuss the hard stuff at restaurants. I’m calling it Livestock. Let’s get together.”
Lisa and I met for lunch a few days later, and I told her about my idea for the Portland Meat Collective—in fact, she helped me crystallize the name and the mission. She shared her idea for the author series. That all sounded good and fine, I said, but why not add a demonstration of whole-animal butchery to the mix? And invite farmers, too?
The plan we came to was this: In front of a live audience, three different authors, whom I would choose, would read aloud essays they’d written about the moral dilemma of eating meat. After the readings, one of Lisa’s clients—a chef who knew how to butcher—would break down a side of beef or pig in front of the audience, and the farmer who raised the animal would share his or her farming practices. For the finale, we’d offer a parallel tasting of, say, grass-fed and grain-fed beef, or pastured and barn-raised pork. We’d pour wine, too, which, we hoped, would ensure heated discussion.
If you live in a city like Portland or Berkeley or New York, and you count yourself even remotely part of the food scene in that city, this sort of event is, today, probably not that novel. (Of course, anyone in a rural community who’s reading this may be rolling their eyes.) But in 2009, Livestock was an anomaly in Portland. Tickets sold out within twenty-four hours.
“Livestock,” we wrote in our press release, “is an urban conversation designed to explore the literary and literal aspects of killing dinner.” John Berger would have loved it.
* * *
—
FOR THE FIRST NIGHT of the series, in mid-November, just a week or so after I returned from Hawaii, I decided to wear tight gray jeans and Sigerson Morrison heels from my days in New York. This was a conscious decision. I was going to be co-host of the event, and I wanted to strategically convey a contradictory impression.
Since I returned from France, I’d become increasingly aware of the way in which people spoke of me in relation to butchery, as if I were a monkey on display in a cage performing tricks no human had ever seen a monkey do: “This is my friend Camas. She just went to France to become a butcher. Can you believe it?” Or “You are one sexy butcher,” even though I wasn’t even really a butcher. “I’ll make sure to never get into bed with you and a sharp knife,” said a man I had only just met at a party.
I was pretty sure no man who’d gone to France to study butchery would be talked to this way. Underneath such comments I sensed a deep-set doubt that a woman who looked like me—whatever that meant—could ever be a butcher. Of course, I wasn’t a butcher, not yet. But I had ambitions to be one, and I felt that, within all the joking about sexy butchers and sharp knives in bed, my very ambition was in question.
I figured I’d use this to my advantage. Those tight jeans and black heels would ensure that everyone made a certain judgment about me when they saw me. I wasn’t sure what the judgment would be, but I knew it would not be She looks like a butcher, or even She looks like someone who knows a lot about killing animals for food. Then, when I spoke, I would obliterate their assumptions. I have always been a confident public speaker. I didn’t know everything there was to know about meat, by a long shot, but I was pretty sure I already knew a lot more than most people in the audience, and I knew how to tell a good story. No one would see me wield a knife that evening—thank goodness—but they’d hear me talk about what it had been like for me to do so in France. I’d tell the story of my time in Gascony, and they’d think: She went and did that? They’d hear me unveil this idea for the Portland Meat Collective, and then they would ask me how to sign up.
Perhaps most important, I would put a face (and a body?) on butchery that was new. A so-called feminine face—attached to a quick-thinking, articulate brain. And this, I hoped, would get people to shift their perspective so that they’d become curious about something that, until then, had been the territory of intimidating, burly dudes in chain mail and XXL white butcher’s coats, with blood and tattoos on their forearms, who didn’t much like to speak to outsiders and held the nature of their work close to their chests.
* * *
—
JO SHOWED UP the first night. I hadn’t called her yet. When she walked into the room, her presence immediately unnerved me and so I turned away before our eyes met. She sat just to the right of where I was to stand the entire night while I emceed the event.
We’d crammed an audience of fifty into a kitchen at a local culinary school. No one seemed to mind the tight quarters. I welcomed everyone to the event and then announced our first writer, who read an essay about the pleasure she felt eating meat, even though she felt guilty eating it.
“I am a lapsed vegetarian, the way my father is a lapsed Catholic. But while my father lost his faith in rosaries and Hail Marys, I’ve simply been ignoring my belief in the essential rightness of vegetarianism. My dad will never stand in a Communion line again, but one of these days I’m going to return to a plant-based diet. I’ve just been putting it off.”
The next writer read a story about going deer hunting with her father after he’d been diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of brain cancer.
“That day in the woods, after the deer was field-dressed, my dad turned to me and he said, ‘Well, that was maybe my last deer.’ I bent a little farther over the knives as I cleaned them, trying not to let him see how close I was to crying, and he picked up his camera and snapped my photo. But he didn’t need to. There was a deer. I was with my father. It’s a story. For as long as I can, I’ll remember.”
Another told the audience about his experience watching a butcher kill live eels in front of a massive Buddhist temple in Japan.
“Wriggling and wet, the eels received a spike through the eye, and were appended onto a bloody block of wood by the ocular point.”
Then our butcher for the evening, Adam Sappington, set to work on a massive forequarter of beef. Adam was a longtime Portland chef who’d started butchering whole animals in restaurants nearly a decade before The New York Times dubbed butchers the new rock stars. He was a good ol’ boy from Missouri who, with his wife, Jackie, had just opened his own restaurant, the Country Cat, which offered Southern dishes like fried chicken but also Pacific Northwest fare that James Beard would have approved of, like pan-seared salmon and fried oysters. Each week he ordered a whole lamb, an entire side of beef, a side or two of pork, and dozens of whole chickens and broke them down himself in his diminutive kitchen. All the animals came from local, small- to medium-size farms, and he’d somehow figured out how to use every part of each animal on his menu and make money. Few chefs were doing this in Portland at the time, and if they were, it was usually as a novelty, for an occasional special dinner or menu. Adam had figured out his own narrow path across an indeterminate expanse of known and unknown risks. He didn’t own his own farm, but he’d inserted himself into America’s food system and figured out his own defiant workaround.
I became completely disoriented watching him butcher that side of beef. His particular reading of the road map, his technique, bore little resemblance to what I’d seen the Chapolards do. Sure, it was beef, but weren’t the parts of the animals mostly the same? I momentarily wondered if everything I’d learned in France had been totally wrong.
But then Adam told the audience that he’d taught himself how to do this, that he’d figured it out based on the cuts he needed to please the customers who paid his bills. And the parts his customers believed they didn’t want to eat? He’d disguise them in the form of stocks and broths, savory pies, or “bacon bits” sprinkled over salads. Of course he cut the animal differently. Plus, it was beef. What did I know about beef? Nothing, really.
Afterward, we served each of our guests comp
osed plates of slow-cooked grass-fed and grain-fed beef chuck and slices of lightly seasoned and roasted beef loin. The audience tasted each and told us what they thought.
“Too meaty,” many people said of the grass-fed beef.
“Too fatty,” others said of the grain-fed beef.
“I can’t even tell the difference,” one guy admitted.
The farmers who’d provided the meat entered into a friendly debate about grass-fed versus grain-fed beef. The grain-fed-beef farmer said she’d consider grass-fed if she had enough land to pasture her animals on and if consumers actually liked the taste. The grass-fed-beef farmer insisted it was the only way to raise beef, that it was better for the environment and the animals, not to mention better for our health, that educating consumers about the unique flavor was part of her job, that consumers would have to open their minds if they wanted our system of meat production to change.
I asked a lot of questions that made the farmers straighten up a little bit in their chairs. At what age do you slaughter your animals? Have you ever considered slaughtering them at an older age? Why not? What breed do you raise? Why? How much do your animals move around in a day? I couldn’t tell whether my line of questioning made the farmers happy or nervous, but I was pretty sure they weren’t used to being asked so many questions.
* * *
—
AS PEOPLE FILTERED OUT, Jo grabbed me by the elbow.
“Hey, lady. I been hoping you’d call me. I wanna buy you some whiskey and pick your brain and help you start this meat school.”
I had her write down her number again, just in case I’d lost it, although I knew exactly where I’d tucked it into my wallet.
She looked me up and down before she left. “Nice shoes, by the way. Good choice.”
After cleanup, I asked Adam if he’d teach my first Portland Meat Collective pig butchery class.
“Sounds good to me, doll. Come over to my restaurant and we can talk over a glass of whiskey and a plate of beef jerky.”
How was it that these people kept landing right in front of me exactly when I needed them? Two Southern butchers who called me “lady” and “doll,” who wanted to help however they could and talk meat over whiskey and beef jerky, who, just like Kate, didn’t even flinch when I told them my plans?
Tout seul, tu meurs, Dominique had said.
My idea began to feel a lot less improbable.
TWENTY-EIGHT
In the middle of the Livestock series, Andrew called and asked me to dinner. He took me to an overpriced surf-and-turf restaurant on a hill overlooking the city. I was grateful for the meal, of course, but when he asked me what I thought of the food, I couldn’t help but point out that the lobster had freezer burn and the steak probably came from a feedlot in Iowa. He laughed, not in any way offended by my directness.
“Why don’t you make all the food decisions from now on,” he said.
“Great,” I said. “Have you ever tasted raw sea urchin before?” He hadn’t, but he was game to try.
We were, in so many ways, nothing alike. Andrew had grown up in the flat expanse of Illinois cornfields, amid waving grain, Chicago skyscrapers, Republicans, football, fraternities. I was named after a wildflower and a ditch and dropped acid for the first time at the age of fifteen, the same age I decided tempeh and tofu were more righteous than my dad’s venison and trout. By the age of sixteen I’d formed a feminist club at school and volunteered on the weekends to unionize migrant farmworkers in Woodburn, Oregon. I came from a family of liberals, maybe even radical liberals, at least in the eyes of the people Andrew grew up with—but with a certain rural flair, a rural flair that Andrew actually did share with me, having grown up on a Christmas-tree farm with horses. Both of us had a little country in us, but my kind of country now included the word charcuterie, which Andrew wasn’t yet sure how to pronounce. Our backgrounds were so unknowable to each other that we began with a remarkable lack of assumptions about each other.
* * *
—
A FEW WEEKS into my new romance with Andrew, I left a voice mail for Jo. “Hi, Jo. We met at your butcher shop? I’m the one starting the meat school? It’d be great to meet up and chat. Seems like we have mutual interests.”
“Mutual interests” was an understatement. What I really wanted to say was: I feel so lucky to have found you. It feels lonely to be me right now, a woman out here in meat land, asking questions I’m not supposed to ask.
We met up at a new Spanish restaurant in town and shared a plate of foie-gras-stuffed dates and a burger, not to mention several tiny glasses of whiskey and beer—tiny glasses that we emptied quickly and that were refilled even quicker.
I told her more about the Portland Meat Collective and she immediately offered to help. I confessed that, even with her help, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. Things seemed to fall apart in my life, I told her, and I had little money to my name. I told her about Tom and Will, about losing my job, and she responded by telling me that she’d recently lost her high-paying corporate job before deciding to work her way into the world of butchery. She asked me about France, and I told her how it had changed everything for me.
“That doesn’t sound like falling apart,” she said.
“I just want to keep learning,” I said. “And there’s nowhere to learn.”
“Me, too,” Jo said.
“But you can learn at the butcher shop,” I said.
“Not really. I mean, Matt and Stu teach me things every once in a while, but they’re burned out. They’ve worked there for over ten years. Besides, we don’t even do that much whole-animal butchery. I mostly just make a lot of sausage. Let’s make a place where we can learn,” she said.
It might have been all the whiskey, but talking to Jo over those little glasses of liquor, I began to wonder whether the universe was more magical and all knowing than I had ever believed, having sent this remarkable woman to me, a woman who, save for her Southern accent and my hunch that she slept exclusively with women, appeared to have been living a near-mirror image of my life as of late. Jo offered to pay our entire bill, and then we made our way upstairs to a tiny bar and ordered more whiskeys.
Five whiskeys in, we were making out at the bar like teenagers. What in the hell was I doing? Was I even attracted to Jo? Was this even me? And what about Andrew? I liked Andrew. A lot. I liked the way he came into my life sideways, from unfamiliar, unknowable places. I liked the mystery in that. Jo, on the other hand, felt so familiar in the most uncanny of ways. How could she possibly exist? The writer in me felt suspicious. Seriously? I’m the only woman I know who’s left her career to learn butchery, and Jo goes and does the same thing and then we meet over a stack of rib eyes? Was I about to have an affair with a lady butcher? If I ever write this story, no one will ever believe me. That’s what I thought while making out at the bar with Jo.
“I’m seeing someone,” I told her. But we headed to her house anyway.
I left early the next morning, feeling guilty and hungover, unsure of who I’d woken up as, or who I’d woken up with, but I didn’t have long to process any of it. A few days later, Jo showed up at my place with butcher paper and knives. I stood at the door, and didn’t invite her in.
“You gonna let me in?” she said. “Let’s start this thing. I brought paper and pencils so we can sketch out a business plan. You ever written one before? I’m pretty good at it.” She pushed past me into my tiny apartment and flopped onto the couch. I stayed by the door, as if by sticking close to that particular threshold I might, at any second, be able to pass through it and go back in time.
“About the other night,” I said. “I don’t think we can do it again.” I couldn’t say exactly why. There was Andrew, of course, but we’d made no specific commitment to each other yet. Maybe it was the fact that I’d failed miserably at dating women in college. Or maybe I felt we were meant to achieve more i
mportant things together. Maybe I was just scared. Maybe I knew I couldn’t ever be for her what she needed me to be. We were so very much alike, and yet our meeting seemed so improbable—too good to be true, really. Better to cut this off now than to risk more heartache.
“If you just want to be friends, you can tell me. It’ll be fine,” she said.
“It’s probably best,” I said.
* * *
—
BUT THAT DIDN’T WORK. These were two incomparable loves. I loved a woman who could nearly read my mind. I loved a man whose mind I could not immediately know. For a while I convinced myself it would be perfectly acceptable to cultivate both at the same time.
This was something other people—worse people than me—did. Driving across town late at night, stealing from one person’s bed to the other. This was the territory of liars and cheats, the subject of racy novels and lurid soap operas. This wasn’t my wheelhouse. It never had been.
Jill called it “unleashing my awesome power.”
“Just embrace it,” she said. “It’s complicated, but so what? What in life isn’t?”
I’d returned from France ready to trade in my life of buts for ands. I hadn’t planned on applying that to my love life as well, and yet I wanted to live in a world where I was allowed to love both Andrew and Jo in whatever way I wanted to, without consequences.
This is the most humane way to kill a pig, Marc Chapolard had told me. You commit to the act. You do it fast. You render her senseless to pain. And then you bleed her. Any other way is just cruel, he’d said. Don’t draw it out.
There’s another side to that equation, one the Chapolards never felt the need to tell me, perhaps because it seemed so very obvious to them. Even when you commit to the act, and the resulting sacrifice, even when you do it fast and do it well, you yourself do not become exempt from feelings of discomfort and pain. There’s still sacrifice and sadness and discomfort to contend with.