by Camas Davis
I had become so good at pretending I was exempt from such complexities. And so, to stave off the inevitable pain, I did my best to close the door on Jo in my mind when I was with Andrew, and to close the door on Andrew in my mind when I was with Jo.
I have never been fully able to reconcile all that was gained and all that was lost when I finally made my choice. The right thing to do never quite felt like the right thing to do.
I’m talking about love and heartbreak and slaughter and dinner all in the same breath. I don’t think I am supposed to, but I’ll keep doing it anyway.
TWENTY-NINE
Two months or so into my messy entanglements with Andrew and Jo, while Jo and I also worked together to make the Portland Meat Collective a reality, an article came out in the state newspaper detailing my trajectory from magazine editor to aspiring “ethical butcher,” as they called me. In the article, I announced that our first classes would take place in February, even though I still had so much to figure out. The day the article came out, several hundred people signed up for the Portland Meat Collective mailing list. I was in business, sort of, except I didn’t actually have the money I needed to start the thing. So, I conceived a risky plan to require all students to prepay for each of my classes, then I could buy the tools and supplies I needed to pull it all off. Since the article made me sound more official than I actually was, I hoped that this rather rickety business plan, along with the kindness and generosity of people like Jo and Adam, would work. The article also transformed me, overnight, into a sought-after public speaker on the matter of the ethics of eating meat, a topic I was only just beginning to articulate for myself.
A few days after the article appeared, a professor at Portland State University called to invite me to take part in a roundtable talk. Jonathan Safran Foer had just come out with his book Eating Animals, and the talk would have the same name. The professor had attended the Livestock event, and he thought it all brought up a lot of sticky issues worth delving deeper into. For the talk, I would be charged with addressing “ethical meat eating,” although this was not a term I had yet used to describe my own still-forming philosophy. A philosophy professor would give a ten-minute history lesson on the trajectory of moral and ethical thought about eating animals, from Pythagoras to Peter Singer. And a law professor would discuss the legal rights of animals. After we each spoke, we’d field audience questions.
Our moderator posed the challenge of the evening’s theme to us this way: “If we all agree that we must eat, and eat well, then the really interesting questions begin when we ask: How do we eat well? And within this apparently simple, but actually massive, question, the issue I hope we can flesh out is: How can we eat animals well, if at all?”
I liked the question precisely because of its complexity, because of the way it inherently challenged the dogmatic thinking that so often accompanies discussions about eating meat. It was a question I wanted to answer, though I wasn’t sure whether I was up for the task or not.
* * *
—
THE NIGHT OF THE TALK, my heart beat with a limp. My hands shook when I picked up a glass of water. I hadn’t been able to decide what to wear, but since my armpits refused to quit pouring sweat, I finally settled on black jeans and the black turtleneck I’d so often worn in the Chapolards’ cutting room. I’d just recovered from a severe case of pneumonia and possessed the darkest of circles under my eyes and the palest of skin.
“You look a little bit like death,” Andrew joked. “It’s very appropriate to the subject matter.”
“I’m so nervous,” I admitted to him before leaving his house to drive to the event early, alone. “I’m never nervous about these things.”
“You’ll kill it. You always do,” he said.
It didn’t help that five minutes before the talk began, Andrew walked in, followed by Tom and his new girlfriend.
From the front of the room I watched Tom and Andrew—who knew each other through our mutual friends Hava and Scott—shake hands and exchange a few words, their gestures appearing to me overly formal and forced. As they headed toward their seats, I watched Tom’s new girlfriend crawl over a couple of people she appeared to know. She wore her long hair in two braids down to her butt. The thick green-and-black wool Pendleton shirt she was wearing expressed an outdoor West Coast ruggedness, the sort of look I’d cultivated back when Tom and I met in Eugene. It had been almost two years since he and I had ended things. While we’d mostly managed to remain friends, the pain was still raw so seeing Tom with this younger, more outdoorsy version of what he had probably always wanted me to be turned my skin hot and itchy with unwelcome jealousy.
Jo snuck in at the last minute, wearing a fedora low over her eyes. She stood in the back, behind a tall brick wall of a man, so that I could barely see her. I wondered if she didn’t want me to know she was there. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Tom and Pendleton Girl and Andrew were enough to contend with.
I was about to stand in front of a roomful of people to talk about the importance of transparency. I was about to try to encapsulate, in ten minutes, the nuanced, controversial nature of multiple competing truths: death, life, dinner. Meanwhile, my own personal competing truths were floating out there in the audience, their eyes on me. What knowledge did I possibly have to offer any of these people?
Pythagoras was a vegetarian, the philosophy professor began, and Aristotle thought hard about the moral status of animals, too, she said. She conjured Aquinas, Descartes, Voltaire, Tolstoy, Bentham, John Stuart Mill. She talked about the “negative rights” of all animals—that animals, like humans, had the right to bodily integrity, a notion I agreed with, although I was perfectly aware that many people believed that killing an animal for food, no matter how humanely, violated an animal’s right to bodily integrity. She moved on to Peter Singer, the godfather of the modern animal rights movement, telling us that Singer believed we should seek to minimize suffering and maximize well-being and happiness. I also agreed with Singer. Then she turned to Kant, who generally believed it was acceptable to raise animals for meat, but unacceptable to be cruel toward animals. Certain Kantians, she suggested, believe we have a direct duty to humanity and an indirect duty to animals to not treat animals badly, because when we treat animals badly, we are, in turn, adversely affecting ourselves. I got a little lost in her particular rendering of this argument, but felt I could agree with its basic tenets, too. The philosophy professor didn’t say whether she ate meat or not, but I sensed she was very much against it.
Next, the animal-law professor introduced herself, acknowledging that she was a twenty-year vegan. “Philosophers might believe that animals should have rights, but when it comes to legal rights in this country, animals don’t have any,” she told us over the top of her round Gandhi glasses. “I come to this issue from a social justice point of view,” she revealed.
“Here’s how my lawyer logic works,” she said. “How many people agree with the following statements . . .
“We are members of the animal kingdom. Raise your hand if you agree.” All hands raised.
“We have a right to survive.” All hands raised.
“Eating is part of that right.” All hands raised.
“We shouldn’t cause unnecessary suffering.” All hands raised.
“Animals can suffer.” All hands raised.
“How many of you believe that animals suffer in the process of being raised and killed for food?” Most hands raised. I agreed that most animals did, but I didn’t agree that all animals had to.
“How many of you believe that we don’t need to eat animals in order to live healthful lives?” Hands all the way up. Hands all the way down. Hands wavering. One guy groaned and then got up and left. I wasn’t sure yet what my own answer to this part of the equation was, but I had begun to look into what happens to the body and the brain when animal fats and protein are cut out completely, and I had encountere
d an equal number of convenient nutritional narratives supporting the total abolition of meat from our diet as I did narratives that supported some meat, in moderation, as beneficial. No scientist or nutritionist I could find could prove that the way Americans currently eat meat was essential to our well-being. At any rate, this didn’t matter, because there was clearly no room for nuance in this lawyer’s argument.
“My conclusion, then,” she said, “is that killing animals for food that we don’t require for survival is unnecessary suffering and is therefore without moral or logical authority.” Logical indeed. Her equation seemed so very simple. I wasn’t convinced.
When my turn came to speak, I wanted to know whom I was speaking to.
“How many of you are vegetarian or vegan?” Three-quarters of the room raised their hands.
My talk, punctuated by a good many umms, went along different lines than the first two speakers. I wasn’t going to talk about whether or not we should eat animals, I told the audience. I was more curious whether, for those who choose to eat animals, a middle ground exists between choosing not to eat them at all and choosing to eat animals at the cost of their suffering. What were the options for folks who felt they wanted or needed to eat some meat in order to live a “healthful life” but raised their hands for the rest of the lawyer’s questions? What were the options for people who understood that, more often than not, raising animals for food did cause suffering but did not always have to? What if you could raise an animal for food and kill it without any excess pain or suffering outside of the normal pain and suffering that all animals, and humans, can expect to encounter as sentient beings living in a volatile and unpredictable world? The only sticky question we’d be left with then would be whether killing an animal—absent any pain—was moral or not, and that seemed to me a largely personal choice that necessarily had to be informed by your relationship to the ands and buts of the world.
The audience blinked back at me. I coughed. The umms gave me time to breathe and think between ideas. The umms probably also made me a shifty suspect.
And then our even-tempered, fair moderator let the audience out of its cage. He could not contain them.
“Please raise your hand if you have a question for any of our speakers.”
The people in the audience who raised their hands—and there were so many—mostly delivered speeches of their own. Indeed, some seemed to have practiced in front of the mirror beforehand. What questions they did ask were mostly aimed at me.
“Do you consider yourself a feminist?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Then how can you eat meat?” The audience member proceeded to pull out a copy of Carol Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat and wave it at me.
“I’ve read the book,” I told her. I’d actually read it three times in college and still had my dog-eared, highlighted copy at home. Nevertheless, she began reading from the book.
“An integral part of autonomous female identity may be vegetarianism; it is a rebellion against dominant culture whether or not it is stated as a rebellion against male structures. It resists the structure of the absent referent, which renders both women and animals as objects.”
“Ma’am,” our moderator said politely, “we’d like for this to be a time for questions. Moving on. You, sir . . .”
A gray-haired man in tie-dye stood up and looked at me. “Do you consider yourself a Nazi?” He pointed his finger at me when he said it.
“No,” I said.
“Well, since you believe in imprisoning animals, you’re a Nazi to me.”
“And a slave owner!” someone in the audience added.
“As a lesbian and a vegan, your speech actions violate me,” one woman said, her eyes locked on mine. I’d watched her during my talk as she shook her head often, pursed her lips, and struggled to stay seated.
I glanced over to where Jo had been standing, but she’d already left.
The very last person in the audience to voice his opinion told us he’d grown up in Turkey. He grew up eating meat, he explained, although not very often, because it was a special privilege and hard to come by. But he reminded us that, for poorer nations like his, eating meat was and still is a matter of survival.
“This is a very American discussion,” he said. “For people elsewhere, we don’t have the luxury of such debates.”
“And on that note,” our moderator said, sounding a little exasperated, “thank you all for coming. We have animal crackers for you to enjoy before you leave.”
* * *
—
I SAID HELLO TO TOM, shook his new girlfriend’s hand. She told me she didn’t eat meat but she had liked how I framed the debate. She also asked me if I ever taught rabbit classes and said that if I did, she’d take all the pelts—for an art project, she said.
The woman with the Sexual Politics of Meat book pushed past me to the door in a huff.
An anthropology professor from Lewis & Clark College asked me if I would speak at one of her classes.
A farmer asked me if I’d buy her pigs.
One woman handed me a PETA flyer that said MEAT IS MURDER.
Andrew and I drove in separate cars back to his house.
On the way, Jo texted me.
“You killed it!” she said.
I wasn’t so sure I had killed it. I hadn’t been prepared for all the pushback.
* * *
—
AT ANDREW’S HOUSE, I crawled into bed with him, nestled my head into his chest, and shut my eyes.
“I have to tell you something,” I said.
Seeing Andrew and Jo in the same room had forced both doors in my brain to open to each other. I had known, for some time, that it would be impossible to keep the two separated both in the real world and in my head, and that once any semblance of a collision occurred, I would be forced to contend with what felt like an inevitable decision. Jo already knew about Andrew. It was time for Andrew to find out about Jo.
Andrew got out of bed, pulled on a shirt and pants, and began pacing back and forth. “We never made any commitment to each other,” he said, grabbing a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and walking out of the room. “You have the right to see someone else, but still,” he said, shutting the door loudly behind him.
But. Still.
Our chances for survival were so very slim, really, but somehow chance won out. That would be the easy, romantic story to tell, anyway. The truth is, those first months together with Andrew were wild and rough and untethered and wholly uncertain, and I was almost solely at fault. I fell in love in two very different ways with two very different people at once. For such a long time, I was unwilling to lose one to keep the other. The real, practical world needed me to make a choice. I wanted to believe I didn’t have to. That was where the fault lay.
When he came back inside, I told him I’d call it off with Jo. And the next day I did, again, sort of, except not really, because neither of us knew how to live within the absence. And so, over the next several months, Jo and I chose to separate ourselves from each other in the slowest way possible, constantly second-guessing whether it was the right decision, struggling to redefine who we would be toward each other, searching, always, for the right vocabulary to capture the loss we both felt. I could not explain this to Andrew, so I didn’t, not for years, not even after Jo and I almost completely stopped speaking to each other. When I finally did, I still couldn’t find the right words.
THIRTY
One of the reasons I drew things out with Jo for so long was that I couldn’t have started the Portland Meat Collective without her. Even in the middle of our knotted affair, Jo relentlessly pushed me forward. She introduced me to farmers, took me to slaughterhouses, brought me knife shopping. Our shared enthusiasm was sincere and contagious. We felt we could do great things together. We knew all the right people. We had exactly the right combination
of skills. Together we were charming and funny and singular in our way, and people were drawn to us—these two women who didn’t belong, who’d chosen to do something utterly unexpected. And then we were ready for our first class.
For the class, at the recommendation of Adam and Jo, I’d ordered two pigs from Mile End Farm, which sold whole and half pigs and smaller cuts like pork shoulder and belly to several restaurants in town, including Adam’s, as well as to meat counters like Jo’s. The farmer, Tricia, was older and had a dry, ashy voice. She held back her frizzy hair, dyed a burnt golden red, with a big 1980s-style butterfly clip. And she carried around a notebook with pictures of all of her pigs, whom she referred to by name. She told me that in winter she let some of them sleep indoors with her. I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not.
“I love my piggies,” she’d coo, hugging her notebook to her chest.
She didn’t pasture her pigs, she told me, but they lived in an open-air barn that sounded kind of like the Chapolards’, with plenty of room to move around.
I hadn’t yet found a farmer who pastured and raised enough to be able to sell to me at the last minute (and my first pig order was very last-minute), so she would have to do, even if I hadn’t yet been able to visit her farm myself. Plus, it hadn’t occurred to me not to take the farmer at her word.
“No problem. I can get them for you on Friday,” she said to me the Monday before. This probably should have aroused suspicion, but I did not yet know which red flags to look for.
Adam asked the slaughterhouse to keep the two carcasses I had ordered whole—“luau style”—which is how he’d taught himself to butcher animals. This request tacked on an extra hundred dollars per animal for some reason, but the animals themselves were remarkably inexpensive, at $1.67 per pound, and the pigs were small, with hanging weights (meaning their weight after they are slaughtered, bled, and eviscerated) of about 150 pounds, less than half the size of the Chapolards’ pigs. At the time, this very low price did not seem odd, either, not yet.