Killing It

by Camas Davis

  “The barns and cold frames keep them warm and sheltered, and they keep my farm from becoming an unplantable mud pit. I have to give the soil a break after they root around in it and fertilize it anyway. I can’t just plant vegetables right away.”

  From May through September, the pigs were free to roam a larger fenced-off area of pasture, hunting for worms, grubs, and other bugs, as well as edible leaves, roots, and grasses—although Chris also fed the pigs grain. In the process, the pigs got plenty of exercise, and in return, their hooves worked their manure into the soil, infusing it with nutrients that would feed his vegetable crops at a later time. In many ways, this seemed like a more appealing model to me than that of the Chapolards, who kept their pigs in barns year-round.

  Chris told us he typically slaughtered his pigs at a hanging weight of around 240 to 290 pounds and that it took the animals about eight months to get there. Most pigs I’d worked with so far in Oregon were slaughtered at around 150 to 200 pounds and six months of age, but these were often kept in barns year-round.

  I told him that the Chapolards grew their pigs out to about 400 pounds, slaughtering them at around twelve months.

  “How can they afford that?” Chris asked, a response common to many farmers I told this to.

  “They price it accordingly,” Kate said.

  “Is anyone willing to pay that price?” Chris asked.

  “They sell out every week,” I said.

  Chris shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t know if anyone would pay that kind of price here.”

  Dominique asked Chris whether he did all of the farming himself.

  “For the most part, it’s just me and my wife,” Chris said.

  Dominique shook his head and said something to Kate.

  “He’s asking if you had to buy all your land and equipment by yourself, too.”

  Chris nodded his head yes. “It’s very expensive to start a farm,” he said.

  “Dominique likes to say that if you work alone, you die,” Kate said to Chris. “Not only does Dominique work with his brothers and their wives to make their farm run; they are part of a cooperative of farmers who share equipment and a slaughterhouse.” Kate briefly explained the GAEC and CUMA models to Chris. “Dominique wants to know why you don’t do that here.”

  “Because in America, small farmers are competitive. We don’t want to share our secrets. We don’t trust other people. It’s every man for himself out here,” Chris said, laughing but meaning everything he said.

  It was true. Every farmer I met who was raising that 1 percent of animals the non-factory-farmed way was going it alone, buying the same tractor that the farmer next door bought, paying for the same services of a slaughterhouse or butcher like every other farmer, but having little say in how well those services were performed. In America, I was learning, small farmers like Chris worked alone, and they had little control over the process of production once their pigs reached slaughter age.

  Dominique shook his head as if to say, What a pity.

  Kate told Chris she’d send him Dominique’s ham recipe and some information about how the GAECs and CUMAs worked in France, but both Chris and I said we thought such models would never fly in America.

  “But maybe you’re right,” Chris said. “Maybe I need to start talking more to my neighbors.”

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE WORKSHOP the next day, Dominique butchered one side of pig for the audience, and then Adam demonstrated his very different approach on another side. Michael Ruhlman, Kate, and I provided commentary, comparing and contrasting the two styles. A new charcuterie business in town, Olympia Provisions, the very first USDA-inspected salumeria in Oregon, passed slices of their charcuterie out to the audience of about forty people while they watched Dominique and Adam work. As soon as Dominique and Adam finished, the audience began peppering them with questions.

  “Why can’t I find coppa in my grocery store?”

  “What do I do with trotters?”

  “Nitrates. Are you for or against them?” Michael and Adam were for them. “Food safety is paramount,” Michael said.

  Dominique was against them.

  Jo and I snuck a few pieces of Dominique’s saucisson onto the charcuterie plates we were passing out to the audience and asked them to compare. Elias Cairo, one of the owners of Olympia Provisions, and Dominique engaged in friendly banter about the differences for the audience, contrasting age, feed, and breed.

  Michael wrote about his experience later and managed to capture what I think it’s safe to say all of us in the room felt.

  “Three hours of intense interaction with people who truly care about this world, the earth and the animals, who care about cooking, about serving people, who do it the hard way, the long way, these grounded wonderful, big big souls. When I walked out of there, I felt as if I’d come out of a world that was impossibly good, could-never-happen good. . . . Swear to god, I wanted to collapse right there at NW 8th and Burnside and weep.”

  Despite the challenges of the past year, I’d created an experience of impossible goodness with the help of my growing family of mentors—wonderful, big souls who not only wanted to do it the hard way but saw this as the only way. It didn’t occur to any of us to try and find any other way around it.

  THIRTY-THREE

  In the early months of getting to know Jo, she’d often talked with great reverence about a man named Bob Dickson. Bob, she told me, had headed up the meat science program down at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, for twenty-five years, then consulted with meat companies all around the world before moving on to head up a local USDA-inspected, Animal Welfare Approved slaughterhouse and meat-processing facility outside of Portland.

  A lot of the meat that Jo received at the Pastaworks meat counter went through Bob’s facility, so she’d somehow charmed her way in and met Bob, who’d happily shown her around. At my request, Jo arranged for me to meet him and take a tour of the facility. And so, with a few Portland Meat Collective classes under my belt, and Kate and Dominique having come and gone, I finally entered my first American slaughterhouse.

  A pastoral white wooden fence bordered the perimeter of the complex of buildings that housed the facility. Beyond the fence lay fields of grass, the sort of fields that looked as though they should have animals grazing on them, though they did not. From the outside, it resembled the abattoir in Gascony, albeit about five times larger. Jo told me before we’d arrived that this slaughterhouse was considered one of the larger of the seven or so USDA-inspected slaughterhouses we had in the state at the time, even if, compared with slaughterhouses owned by any of the major meat conglomerates around the country, it was actually quite small.

  From the parking lot we followed the signs that said OFFICE and walked up a set of narrow stairs lit by a lone fluorescent bulb.

  An older woman with bleach-blond straight hair sat at a desk stacked with baskets of invoices, a very ancient-looking computer, a phone with dozens of blinking lights, and a sign that read TALK TO THE HAND.

  “Hi, Debbie. How you been doin’?” Jo said in her disarming, golly-gee Southern accent, as if she and Debbie had been friends for ages. “We’re here to see Bob. This is my friend Camas.”

  I extended my hand and smiled at her. The woman stared at me suspiciously.

  “So nice to meet you,” I said. She gave me a very light handshake without saying anything, got up from her chair, and disappeared down a dark hallway, her footsteps echoing on the linoleum floor.

  A couple of Latino guys sat eating their lunches in a makeshift break area off to the side of Debbie’s desk.

  Jo waved at them. “Hola,” she said. I smiled at them.

  They nodded at us in unison, then commenced to staring at the empty spaces in front of them, eating in silence, chewing quickly.

  Debbie came back, followed by a tall man in his ea
rly sixties, with wide shoulders and smile lines creasing his weathered face. He said a friendly hello to the guys eating their lunch, addressing each by his first name, then walked over to us, grinning.

  “I’ve been waiting to meet you,” he said to me. “Jo’s told me so much about you.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” I said.

  We followed him down the dark hallway and into his small private office, which had white walls and the sort of drop ceiling I remember from the classrooms in my high school—which, rumor had it, was originally designed as a prison. We all sat in chairs two feet away from one another, as if huddling over a nonexistent fire to keep warm.

  “So,” Bob said, “tell me about this Portland Meat Collective.”

  I told him about the Chapolards, about my belief in transparency as a means of changing how and why we bought, cooked, and ate meat. About my philosophy of whole-animal butchery, which made him chuckle and say, “The whole animal is always butchered, and, trust me, those big meat companies manage to use every part.”

  “But it’s not all used for food,” I countered. “Plus, most consumers don’t even think of the whole animal as edible, so we sure have to produce a lot of pork chops and tenderloins just to make them happy, and so far as I know, no one has invented a pig made up entirely of loin and tenderloin.”

  Still, he pointed out, it wasn’t as if we just threw away the rest. Between pet food, glue, bullets, and even cigarette filters, every part of the animal went to good use, he said. “The industrial model of meat production is actually incredibly efficient,” he said. But he agreed with me that consumers could be better educated about how to eat the whole animal, and that butchers and small farmers working outside of the industrial model might be able to make an actual living if consumers supported them in that way.

  I told him about the format for our classes.

  “You’re doing what I wanted to do twenty years ago but never could,” he said. “People just weren’t as interested as they are now. I also believe if every slaughterhouse and farm and butcher shop were made of glass, we’d have a very different system of meat production.”

  I asked him how his processing facility differed from others.

  “Well, for one, we’re letting you and Jo watch the slaughter. Not every slaughterhouse allows that. We’re also trying to work with a diversity of farms, from small to medium to large. And we’re trying to satisfy a lot of different needs, from grocery chains to individual consumers. And we are certified as a humane operation.

  “Back in the day, slaughterhouses were not nice places to be,” Bob said, adding that maybe “nice” is never the right word to use to describe slaughterhouses. “Standards for ‘humane treatment’ didn’t even exist. That phrase didn’t even exist. Now, thanks to people like Temple Grandin, slaughterhouses, believe it or not, are greatly improved. They are much better.”

  I wondered what exactly Bob meant. I’d read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair long ago and knew that the federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which was passed, in part, because of that book, had set basic sanitary, labeling, and safety standards that hadn’t previously existed. But did Bob mean things had gotten better since The Jungle? Or did he mean that things had gotten better than the horrific—and totally contemporary—slaughterhouse scenes I had seen in undercover YouTube videos floating around online?

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘better’?” I asked Bob.

  “Why don’t we take a tour,” he said, “so you can see for yourself.”

  * * *

  —

  WE FOLLOWED BOB outside.

  “First I’ll show you what it’s like from the animal’s perspective.”

  He walked us over to the holding pens, where the animals settled in the night before slaughter—basically a barn. Since it was already lunchtime, Bob explained, there weren’t many animals left—just a few head of cattle, as far as I could see.

  A man stood at the entrance to the barn.

  “Now watch closely. He’s going to open that door and calmly lead one of the steers into this chute.” Bob pointed to a long, meandering pathway that led from the barn to the kill room, a few hundred feet away. The pathway was bordered on both sides by tall, gently curving walls made of concrete.

  “We used concrete because it doesn’t reflect light, which can scare the animals,” Bob said. “And we curved the chute in such a way that the animals wouldn’t become alarmed by sharp corners, and could not see too far ahead or behind them. The whole goal here is to keep the animal as calm as possible.”

  I stood up on tiptoe to peer over the curved wall and saw the steer slowly make its way, but Bob motioned for me to crouch down.

  “Any surprise in the animal’s line of sight might scare him. We want to stay out of sight.”

  Bob motioned for us to step away from the chute, and we quietly followed him around to the other side of the building, where we could stand without being seen by the animal and watch the kill.

  A man on a raised platform stood at the end of the chute, which very gradually ramped up into an open doorway leading to the indoor kill floor. The gradual rise, Bob explained in a whisper, was also meant to prevent undue stress.

  From where I stood, I could no longer see the steer. All I could see was the man on the platform. In his hands he held an oblong black metal instrument that looked almost like a short telescope.

  “That’s the captive bolt gun he’ll use to stun the steer before bleeding him,” Bob explained.

  My heart began to race, and my palms were sweaty. I looked at Jo briefly, but she stared at the man with the bolt gun and did not look back at me.

  Bob explained that the steer now stood in a very tight space, with walls right up against his body on all sides, another way to keep the animal calm—Kind of like a hug, I thought, aware that I was anthropomorphizing. It was not really at all like a hug.

  Considering what was about to happen, everything seemed so very calm and quiet. Out of the corner of my eye, I could sense a lot of activity just inside, but from the outside I couldn’t hear any of it. The man calmly raised the bolt gun up toward the steer’s head, in a slow, considered manner. I watched the man’s eyes watch the steer’s eyes. I heard a brief, forceful pneumatic puff of air from the gun, and the steer’s head vanished.

  Bob told us to look through the slats in the gate in front of us. I could see onto the kill floor. The animal had fallen to the ground, and a man had already stuck a knife into the steer to begin the bleeding process.

  At least this is how I remember it. The thing about watching something like this without taking notes—I wasn’t there as a journalist after all, but just as a curious consumer—is that all you have to go on afterward is a loosely knotted string of disparate, exaggerated sights, sounds, and smells that dig a zigzagging rut in your memory and lodge themselves under an ever collecting array of detritus. I remember how, after that puff of air from the bolt gun, the man stared down toward the steer from his platform, presumably to make sure he’d done his job correctly, and then, how he turned slowly away and looked out into the empty space in front of him, and how his chest rose and fell with the next breath he took.

  I remember thinking I would never be able to find words for any of this. Not because it was bad or good, or better or worse, but because that’s what witnessing this particular kind of death does: it brings to light our lack of vocabulary for it. Dario Cecchini, the famous Italian butcher whom Bill Buford wrote about in his book Heat, referred to humane slaughter as “a good death,” one of four things he felt an animal that is killed for dinner is owed—a good life, a good death, a good butcher, and a good cook. “A good death” seemed appropriate enough, but even this did not quite capture the black hole one fell into after witnessing such an event.

  I remember the USDA inspector standing at a table, slicing into a liver with a knife to inspect it for signs
of illness. I remember watching a short man strip the hide from a steer hung from the ceiling in a matter of seconds. I remember the cleanness of the space. The steer’s massive carcass. The silence of the workers’ movements. Their serious faces. I remember understanding then what Bob had meant by “better.” This place appeared organized, calm, efficient, and—in every way that it could be—humane. The curved walls. The dull, unreflective concrete. The slow, considered movement of the man with the gun.

  * * *

  —

  I HAVE SAID that slaughter is hard to watch. Hard always seems like the wrong word, but I never want to give the impression that it is easy. Without fail, someone always asks me, “If it’s so hard, why do it?” I believe that doing something hard makes me a better person, a more realistic and responsible one. That easy makes us supporters of a system of meat production gone totally awry. That is what I think Levi had meant when he told me that the day slaughtering a pig no longer felt “a little horrific” would be the day he would cease to eat pigs.

  We toured the rest of the facility with Bob. The room where they air-chill their chickens. The room where the beef carcasses age. The room where the sides of pork hang. The room where more men and women—mostly Latino—clad in chain mail and protective gloves, stand elbow to elbow, all day long, cutting pork and beef primals.

  Before leaving, I asked Bob if he would teach a class for us.

  “I want to do the class here, in this facility,” I said. “I want your employees to be there, too, to teach us what they know.” I wanted my students to meet the people willing to do the job that they were unwilling to do, the job that allowed them to believe they were exempt from the entire process.

  Bob looked at me as we stepped out into the summer light. “There’s a few people here who might not see the point in that, but I do. I’ll see what I can do,” he said.