Killing It

by Camas Davis

  A few students introduced themselves as farmers—some rural, some urban—and said that, while they’d started raising chickens, they didn’t know how to properly kill them when the time came. A timid stay-at-home mom said her kids were entering college and she was interested in getting into the meat business. At the last minute, a young woman confined to a wheelchair was loaded out of the back of a van by another woman—her “surrogate”—whose job would be to convey, as best she could, to the young wheelchair-bound woman what it was like to slaughter a bird.

  And then we began. Demonstration first. Scalpel. Palate. Carotid arteries. Check the eyes for activity. Levi spoke calmly, using medical terms to explain what was happening to the bird’s body. As the bird bled out, the students remained silent, but interested, alert, curious. Our shared witnessing brought us all together. It also forced each of us to separately confront our own singular fragility and mortality in the face of another animal’s death.

  Levi explained that this was the most humane way to kill the bird and that by humanely dispatching the animal, we were ensuring that it did not unnecessarily suffer, but we were also ensuring that the meat of the bird had the proper amount of lactic acid, thereby preventing unappealing flavors and textures.

  “Although,” I added, “some of these are older birds—at least I think they are—so even if you kill them well, they are going to have a good amount of bite if you don’t cook them right.”

  The bird was a carcass now, in technical terms, and not so much a body, and so Levi moved on to the next step, showing the students how to dip the carcass into a pot of nearly boiling water and swirl it around gently to loosen the feathers.

  “Make sure you know the bird is dead before you do this,” he said. “If he’s not, he’ll feel the hot water and start flapping his wings, and then you’ll feel the hot water, too.”

  Levi walked us through feather plucking, which transformed the bird into a pale, naked, vulnerable form.

  “Why don’t you all partner up and get this far, and then I’ll show you how to eviscerate them,” Levi said.

  “One last thing,” I said. “You need to either commit to doing this or don’t do it at all. Hesitating means the bird will suffer. If you are doing it wrong, we will intervene. If you can’t do it, we’ll do it for you, or, if you like, you can take your bird home still alive. It’s your bird now.” I sounded cold, but I needed them to feel the weight of the responsibility, even though the burden of these twelve birds’ deaths, in many ways, fell to Levi and me.

  * * *

  —

  AND THEN, ONE BY ONE, we watched twelve adults awkwardly attempt to pick up their especially agile, wily birds. With their legs bent, their backs hunched, and their arms and hands fully extended out in front of them like Frankenstein, they’d walk slowly toward a bird, trying not to scare it, and then lunge at the last moment. It mostly seemed to work.

  When half of the students had gotten hold of their birds, we instructed them to partner up with another student and begin the slaughter process.

  They all stood motionless, blinking at us, holding their birds close to their chests, caressing them. It’s one thing to watch a slaughter; it’s another thing to do it yourself. Most of them had never had to do this before. I’m pretty sure all of them wondered if they were the right person for the job. I wondered, too.

  Levi and I moved from student to student, helping them work through the process. Their confusion, their frustration, their worry that they were doing it wrong played out in mostly identical ways.

  “I don’t see the artery. Where is it?”

  “You won’t necessarily be able to see it,” we said, “but if you push the feathers up like this and put your finger to its neck and feel its pulse, that’s where the knife should go.”

  “Am I hurting the bird?” To which we responded, gently, “You’ll know if you are hurting it,” or, “It’s probably uncomfortable, but you are not hurting it.” Or, in a few cases, “You will hurt it if you don’t finish this now. Stick the knife in fully. Now. Do it,” we would command.

  A few hands shook. A few faces turned red. One young woman said she didn’t think she could do it and paced back and forth for a while, but then she did it. After her bird bled out, she set it down on the ground and walked away from the group. I followed her.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  Her eyes appeared watery.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I just feel . . . different . . . somehow.”

  All of the students were quiet, somber, respectful.

  They dipped their birds in the hot water and then sat on overturned buckets and stumps, plucking their birds, talking about their families, their jobs, how their grandparents and great-grandparents once lived, and, finally, about food. I apologized to the students who’d ended up with the Silkies—they truly were scrawny—telling them the story of my travails at the livestock auction.

  “Hopefully they will be so full of flavor, it won’t matter how little meat is on their bones,” I said.

  In the film that Jill made, we then see the students gathered around Levi as he cuts an incision between the bird’s legs, puts his hand inside the bird, pulls out a fist-size mass of brightly colored organs, and shows the students the intestines, the spleen, the liver, the kidneys, the gizzard, the heart. While he’s talking, the camera pans to the woman who hadn’t been sure she could kill her bird. She looks to the faces of each of her classmates for confirmation of her own clearly complex feelings. Her lips and nose are drawn slightly upward, as if in disgust.

  The camera cuts to the hands of the students as they hesitantly cleave heads and feet off and then pick through their birds’ organs, marveling at the surprising colors and forms. The surrogate for the woman in the wheelchair cups her hand underneath the wheelchair-bound woman’s gnarled hands and places a chicken heart in them, then the liver, then the lungs.

  At one point we discovered that some of our roosters were in fact not roosters at all. The Francophile found a beautiful, fine string of tiny yellow egg yolks in his bird, each at a different stage of development.

  “In France,” the Francophile said, “these are considered delicacies.” Then he picked one of the tiny yolks up, tipped his head back, and put it in his mouth. A few people laughed uncomfortably. Others began asking questions. “Is that really how they eat them? They don’t cook them first? What does it taste like?”

  This prompted Levi to remind everyone that salmonella (as well as campylobacter) can occur naturally in chickens’ guts—not to mention chickens’ feet, feathers, and beaks—and that, while not all strains of salmonella cause us harm, it was important to take precautions by keeping the guts away from the edible parts of the bird’s carcass, keeping the carcass as cold as possible during and after processing, and cooking chickens to the right temperature.

  As we walked up to the farm’s main house, each student carrying a plastic bag of freshly killed chicken, the students continued to ask questions.

  “So how do you cook a liver?”

  “Is the heart good to eat?”

  “When are you going to teach a pig slaughter class?”

  These classes were taking the students down the same rabbit hole that my time in France had sent me down. None of us had even known how many questions we had—or which questions to ask—until we’d taken this one step into the real-world problem of how to kill an animal for dinner. These were questions whose answers, not that long ago, were all around us, passed on from grandparent to parent to child. But who was there to answer these questions now? Purdue? Tyson? They weren’t answering their phones. And I could only assume the way they raised and killed and processed their birds was a far cry from how Grandma did it.

  In the farmhouse, we poured wine into glasses and spooned the coq au vin I’d made into bowls. We sliced crusty baguettes and passed around ramekins of Levi’s chicken
liver mousse and the Francophile’s buttery head cheese. As the students ate, I talked about using old birds for the dish, how, even though I’d tried my best to buy what looked like older birds at the auction, I could not be sure of their age.

  One student asked whether there were farmers who specialized in older birds. I said that the demand for young, tender, pale, mild chicken was too high in America. “If you guys want older birds, you’ll either have to produce them yourself or start demanding them from farmers you know. But you’ll also have to pay a higher price.”

  The meal wasn’t perfect. The meat was a bit dry and it flaked into minuscule strands, as opposed to adhering to the bone of each cut, most likely because the bird I’d used had not been as old as I’d wanted to believe it was and I’d overcooked it. The Francophile made sure to complain once again that I hadn’t used a more authentic recipe. But we’d been as authentic as we could have been, given our limited resources and the gap of lost knowledge we were trying to bridge, given the fact that we lived in America, land of bland, boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THE CLASS, I searched online for Paul Bocuse’s coq au vin recipe. The recipe’s headnote read:

  “He was a tough guy and he therefore required slow cooking. I must say that in yesteryears in Burgundy, roosters were at least three kilos and had run a good deal before making their way into the pot. Today roosters found in the market under the name of coq au vin are not as muscular and probably require shorter cooking times. But, either way, the wine needed to prepare this dish should always, obviously, be from Burgundy.”

  Even Bocuse could no longer find the right bird for the job.

  At least I had used a good Burgundy for the dish.

  A month or so later, Jill and her fellow students debuted their final projects for a public audience at one of the many old movie houses in Portland that serve beer and pizza. Andrew and I showed up just as Jill’s film, which she’d titled Good Bird, began. In the beginning, I am crouched underneath the low chicken-wire roof of the chicken run in Andrew’s side yard, unable to stand up straight, attempting to corral the roosters into their respective carriers. I keep snagging my bright-green T-shirt on the chicken-wire roof and yelping, a large creature stuck in a shelter that is way too small. I was reminded of the scene in Alice in Wonderland in which she drinks a magic elixir that makes her grow to the size of a giant, while standing inside a very small house. My body in that chicken run, getting caught on the chicken wire, reminded me of the awkwardness of my project, its vulnerable, maybe even impossible, nature. I scrunched down in my seat.

  By the time that sick, suffering bird made its appearance on the big screen, I had already left the theater and hidden in the cramped women’s bathroom. I couldn’t watch the rest of it. It had been a respectful film, but not a serious one. The charming, madcap lightness of the scene cuts, the timing of the whimsical accordion music Jill had chosen, had even made the audience chuckle a few times, and yet the burden of all these birds’ deaths, captured on film, overwhelmed me. I didn’t want anyone to think I took any of it lightly or had been foolish or even careless in my endeavors.

  Andrew came and found me.

  “What’s wrong? Why are you hiding?”

  “It’s too public,” I said. “I don’t want it to be that public.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  By the summer of 2010, a year after I’d returned from France, my Portland Meat Collective classes—from pig and beef butchery to sausage making—continually sold out. I was able to start paying myself. I was also making decent money working at Evoe and doing bookkeeping for my brother, I still wrote occasionally—but only when I wanted to—and I was finally off unemployment. Yet I still felt something was missing. I wanted to work in a butcher shop. It was what friends and family had imagined when I told them I wanted to “be a butcher” and then run away to France. It was what I’d imagined, too.

  So when Matt and Stu, the two guys Jo worked with at the Pastaworks meat counter, decided they were ready to move on—or maybe it was decided for them—I applied to work there a few days a week, in addition to everything else I had going on. Jo put in a good word for me, even though it was probably a disastrous idea for her and me to work together more than we already did. We were still struggling to maintain a platonic friendship, occasionally giving in to our more complex feelings for each other, and whenever this happened I would fall into a guilty rage, which I aimed at Jo, as well as at Andrew, without his understanding where it came from.

  I started my first shift before Matt and Stu left. Dressed in yet another white butcher’s coat two sizes too big for me, I learned one very important piece of information from them: don’t talk while operating the meat slicer. Matt and Stu went out of their way to tell me this, but once I started up that spinning metal blade of death myself, Stu made sure to gab at me nonstop, and I promptly sliced the tip of my right ring finger off. I wrapped a foot-long strip of gauze around my gushing wound and topped it off with a latex glove, ready to keep working, but the store’s general manager insisted I go home for the day.

  On my way out, I glared at Stu, who laughed and yelled, “Don’t talk so much next time, honey!”

  Thankfully, Jo trained me for my second shift. After a quick tour of the meat case, she quizzed me. “What do you think we sell the most of?”

  “Ground beef?” I guessed.

  “Close. We sell a shit-ton of sausage,” she said, arranging two dozen spicy Italian links in a plastic tray. “Next is ground beef and pork. Then bacon. Then steaks and chops and tenderloin. Then leg and shoulder roasts. Then stew meat. Then charcuterie. Oh, and lots of chicken breast.”

  I asked Jo where the rest of the parts of the animals went, and she explained that they rarely got whole animals in. Instead they ordered only the subprimals and retail cuts they knew they could sell, like beef and pork tenderloins, whole pork bellies to make their own bacon, plus boneless pork shoulder for grinding or sausage.

  “Where do all the parts come from?” I asked.

  “Various distributors. A few local farms and ranches, but only those willing to sell us primals or subprimals. Most of the pork comes from Carlton Farms,” she said. “But the pork shoulders we use for sausage come from Mile End Farm.” Mile End, where we’d gotten pigs for our first Portland Meat Collective classes.

  “What’s Carlton Farms?” I asked. I’d seen the name on a lot of “farm-to-table” menus around town.

  “Most people think it’s a farm in Carlton,” Jo said, referring to a town about an hour southwest of Portland. “But it’s really just a slaughterhouse that buys live animals from other farmers, slaughters and processes them, and then sells the parts wholesale.”

  “Who are the farmers?”

  Jo shrugged. “I keep asking, but they never tell me.” Many years later, I had the chance to ask the president of Carlton Farms, and he wrote, in an e-mail, that they buy “natural pigs” (his use of quotation marks) who are raised by “family farmers” (again, his use of quotation marks) and that most of them came from the Hutterites, “who specialize in agriculture as you may know.” He did offer that they also worked with Oregon farmers who are raising heritage pigs, but I gathered that these did not make up the majority of their sales. When I asked him how the pigs were raised and which Hutterites he was referring to, since so far as I could tell, Hutterites, an ethnoreligious branch of Anabaptists, lived all over Canada and America, he offered no further details. To this day, well-meaning chefs in Portland put the Carlton Farms name on their menus when they want to tout their “local ingredients.” In truth, most of the pigs were likely only killed locally.

  “All right, honey, we gotta make at least a hundred pounds of sausage today, enough to last us for the week.”

  Jo walked me through the quirks of their ancient meat grinder. “Don’t screw the arm on too tight. . . . If it starts to rat
tle, knock it on the back side with the flat edge of this cleaver.” Then she set me up in the front window with a tall manual sausage stuffer.

  “If a pretty woman like you stuffing sausages in the front window doesn’t bring in the customers, I don’t know what will,” she said.

  She was joking, of course, but I wondered whether something similar hadn’t crossed the minds of Pastaworks’ owner too. One of the first customers I helped, a woman, told me how much friendlier the counter seemed with women behind it. I could relate. As a customer on the other side of the meat counter, I’d always found the men who worked there to be gruff and intimidating, even a touch angry.

  * * *

  —

  BUT NO WOMEN applied for Matt’s and Stu’s positions, and soon Jo and I had some new colleagues to contend with. Our first new recruit, Mike, was in his late twenties, but he’d worked as a butcher for a decade—on kill floors, in processing facilities, and at grocery store meat counters up and down the West Coast. He was a diminutive, sweaty creature with a penchant for death metal and a Napoleon-style chip on his shoulder that was much too large for his tiny frame. Nonetheless, unlike us, he was a real butcher, and we were excited to learn from him.

  We convinced Pastaworks’ managers to let us get a couple of whole animals for Mike to work on, and for the first few weeks he patiently answered our questions as we watched him break down lambs and pigs. But over time, he began to withhold his knowledge, especially as Jo and I began getting more media attention for the classes we were putting on. When one national food magazine identified Jo and me as “butchers,” Mike was quick to tell us, “You’re not butchers. You’re meat counter workers.” He was right, of course: we weren’t yet butchers. We were still learning. But in his words I detected a more permanent classification: we were service workers, the female kind, and that’s what we would always be.