Killing It

by Camas Davis

  A few weeks after Mike arrived, Pastaworks brought in Jonah, a born-again Christian with a Hare Krishna haircut, a Charles Ingalls sense of style, and a whole lot of self-conscious Portland hipster thrown in. He’d recently apprenticed at an organic farm in Colorado, where he’d learned to speak the language of “sustainable meat,” whole-animal butchery, and charcuterie. I gathered he fancied himself a sensitive man, but when he addressed female customers as “darling” and “sweetie,” it sounded mostly lecherous. The term mansplaining had not yet reached fever pitch in popular culture, but it goes a long way to describing his behavior toward Jo and me.

  I didn’t know if Jonah had read The New York Times butcher-as-indie-rock-star article, but he sure acted like one. He liked to bring in big hunks of salami and pancetta that he’d cured in his basement and hang them in the window of the butcher shop for all to behold—trophies that apparently attested to his authenticity as a real butcher.

  The presence of feisty, vocal women who wanted to be butchers and had strong opinions about how the shop should be run caused Mike and Jonah much consternation. A month or so in, I took it upon myself to create new communication protocols and order sheets. When Jo and I sat down with Mike and Jonah to review the new procedures, they rolled their eyes and slammed out of the meeting. They were having none of it. None of it, that is, except for the clipboard I hung on the wall for us to leave written messages for whoever had the next shift.

  One early morning shift, Jo and I encountered this note from Jonah:

  “Yo Bitches, I had a rough night so don’t get all up in my shit about not washing the dishes or cleaning the counter.” The expectation being that we would, of course, just shut our mouths and do the work he’d failed to do without complaining.

  Jo and I mostly rolled our eyes at all of this. Unlike these boys, we’d come from professional careers in which we’d quickly learned our way to the top and managed other people. Perhaps naïvely, we assumed we would be able to do the same in the world of butchery. But it became increasingly clear that that wasn’t going to happen here. Instead, the meat counter felt more like grade school recess—girls get the swing set, boys lord over the play structure.

  * * *

  —

  STILL, WE DID MANAGE to learn a few important lessons alongside them.

  One day, I walked in for my afternoon shift and saw Mike and Jo staring at a boneless pork shoulder on the counter.

  “Does this look different to you?” Jo asked me.

  The hunk of pork shoulder was extremely pale, and much larger than the ones we normally bought for making sausage. Very little fat ran throughout the knots of shoulder muscles, and a film of viscous, snotty-looking red fluid covered the outside. It didn’t look or smell very appetizing, either.

  “I think our order got mixed up,” Mike said. “This doesn’t look like Mile End’s pork shoulder.”

  Jo knew someone at the facility where Mile End’s pigs were slaughtered and further processed, so she called them to investigate further.

  After hanging up, Jo looked ashen.

  “I can’t fucking believe this,” she said. “They said that the order was right. That the meat looked different because it was IBP meat.”

  “What’s IBP?” I asked.

  “Iowa Beef Processors,” Mike said. He explained that while IBP was owned by Tyson, one of the four major meat conglomerates in America, Tyson still used the IBP name on its commodity pork and beef.

  “It’s shitty factory-farmed meat,” Jo said. “Apparently Mile End sells IBP pork under their name all the time to supplement when they’re running low on their own pigs, which is, apparently, quite often.”

  “How can that even be legal?” I asked.

  I’d recently become friendly with a local USDA inspector and decided to call her up. When I told her what had happened, she laughed at my naïveté.

  “It’s called co-packing,” she said. “And it’s perfectly legal. Any farm can buy any USDA-inspected meat and sell it under their name without having to disclose where it came from. They only have to tell you what slaughterhouse it went through, which is indicated by the USDA stamp on the meat.”

  “So there’s no way for me to trace this shoulder back to wherever it was raised?”

  “No easy way. Oh, and there’s plenty of farmers at the farmers’ market selling meat this way.”

  “That’s not considered fraud?”

  “It’s not. And probably none of their customers would ever be able to tell the difference.”

  I thought back to what Kate had said about Portland charcuterie. Not bad, but American.

  This felt so goddamned American. You could call yourself a farm, design yourself a logo with white picket fences, walk around with photos of your happy, humanely raised pigs, and no one would know that you were really selling them factory-farmed commodity pork. No wonder Mile End had been able to sell me pigs at such a low price on such short notice for my first class.

  Tricia, from Mile End, denied everything.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THE PORK SHOULDER debacle, Pastaworks let Jo and me order a whole pig from a new and, we hoped, more trustworthy farm, with the goal of figuring out whether we could sustain a whole-animal butchery program and stop having to buy meat from distributors and co-packers. The pig farmers grew their own grain to feed their pigs, and raised their pigs in open-air barns just like the Chapolards did. This time we knew to ask them if they co-packed, although they weren’t legally obliged to tell us the truth.

  We made sure to get the two sides delivered on a day when Mike and Jonah weren’t there, and together we came up with a fresh-cut list that very much resembled that of the Chapolards. It’d been a while since I butchered a pig, but I’d learned much at the two dozen or so PMC classes I’d held, and the process felt so much more instinctual now. In fact, for the first time, I managed to remove the rib bones and spine cleanly from the loin, so that I had a beautiful, long muscle to work with. I left it whole and proudly displayed it in the case, just as the Chapolards did in theirs, with a sign next to it. WE’LL CUSTOM-CUT YOUR CHOPS, it said.

  Only one customer asked about it that day.

  “Is that tuna?” he asked.

  “No, sir. That’s a fresh pork loin,” I said. “I can cut you off as thick or thin a chop as you like. Or I can cut a nice roast for you and tie it.”

  “Can you just give me one of those?” He pointed to a tray of slightly graying, but more recognizable, bone-in pork chops we’d cut from the other side of the pig. Something about seeing the whole muscle had turned him off. After a few days with no other inquiries, I cut my beautiful whole loin muscle into chops and they finally sold.

  A few customers did buy the pig ears for their dogs. And a few took a chance on our pâté de tête. But no one bought the heart we’d set in the case—which was maybe silly of us, given our particular consumer base. Even the Chapolards didn’t do that. Several customers complained about the price of all the meat. Jo and I ended up going home with the hocks and trotters, as well as the skin, bones, and offal, after it all sat in the case for days.

  At the end of the week, I asked our bookkeeper whether we’d made any money.

  “Are you kidding? We don’t even make money when we’re just buying box cuts. We probably won’t buy whole animals again.”

  I’d read about a growing number of small butcher shops around the country that claimed to run successful whole-animal programs that sourced from local, humane farms, but I wondered how much of a profit they were turning in the end, and how much product they threw away each week. I knew we hadn’t been the most creative with all the parts—and that developing a lasting, sustainable whole-animal program would take time—but even if we had been creative, would heart skewers or smoked ham hocks have sold? I could see how the bottom line at this particular shop would continue to prev
ent us from experimenting, would force us to supplement with commodity meat just to sell our hundred pounds of sausage a week, which was where the real money was. I wasn’t sure I wanted to work for a shop like that. I also had no interest in competitively comparing my soppressata with Jonah’s saucisson.

  At the end of the year, Pastaworks got rid of Jo for reasons that were never made entirely clear. In solidarity, I quit the meat counter, and Evoe soon after.

  I didn’t regret leaving. But I also mourned the ideal image I’d maintained in my head of a beautiful, friendly, successful butcher shop like the ones I had seen in France, selling every part of the animal, animals that had been raised humanely and with complex flavors and textures in mind, to people who were willing to pay for better meat, who understood the importance of eating the whole animal. We didn’t have this customer base, not yet. I’d known this, but, like the farmers I met across the counter at Evoe, had chosen to believe otherwise. I decided to dedicate all my free time to creating this customer base through my classes.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Once Jo and I weren’t working together five days a week, once Jo didn’t have to deal with my constant pulling her in and pushing her away, I think she realized that her life was much less painful without me in it. We’d loved each other in the way two stranded people clinging to a small piece of floating debris in a lonesome ocean might. We so desperately needed each other to survive, but in the end, we knew that one of us would abandon the other. We’d known this from the beginning, and yet we’d tried everything we could to get around it, to stave off the inevitable hurt. When we finally ended things—our friendship, our affair, our professional partnership—all the disappointment and loss I’d felt in the past two years swung back toward me, but it paled in comparison with losing Jo. It took me so very long to find the right needle and thread with which to stitch up that gaping absence inside of me, an absence that, in the end, I had brought upon myself.

  Almost simultaneously, Andrew announced that his work was moving him to Denmark for a year. Before he left, he asked me to marry him. Until then, I’d mostly managed to keep my ongoing difficulties with Jo from him, an intricate mental and emotional feat of compartmentalization of which I was not at all proud. I didn’t exactly feel deserving of Andrew’s proposal. So, before saying yes, I finally admitted to him as much of what had happened with Jo as I could find words for.

  I knew Andrew to be forgiving, generally. Still, I was surprised that he was willing to move forward from this, with me still in his life—whether because he could easily wrap his head around this complexity or because it was all entirely beyond his comprehension, I have never been sure. For a long while after, I’d lie in bed with Andrew and feel the sharp pain of knowing that his presence in my life would always be tied up with Jo’s absence. Inside the space between my regret and my relief, I tied a tiny golden weight, such that if I moved in just the right way, I would be forced to remember the profound heft of my own private and.

  Cleave (1): to divide by or as if by a cutting blow.

  Cleave (2): to adhere firmly and closely or loyally and unwaveringly.

  When Andrew packed his bags and moved to Denmark, everything went very quiet.

  * * *

  —

  I HELD A FEW CLASSES without Jo, but without her, I doubted myself. I doubted the whole project. She and I had played our respective roles perfectly in sync. At classes, she was the entertainer and I was the organizer. I didn’t think I knew how to play her role, too. She was also a cheerleader, not just for the students but for me, and without Jo there to root for me, I began to question whether what I was doing was even meaningful.

  In grief, I took a few months off from holding classes, sublet my apartment, and flew to Denmark, where I pitched some stories and continued working remotely for my brother in order to keep paying my bills. Andrew worked all day while I wandered the gray, cold streets of Aarhus, feeling sheepish and morose. I worried that this was the most inopportune time for me to abandon the Portland Meat Collective, but I felt relieved to be far away and anonymous. I didn’t want to be seen by anyone. I didn’t want my true, disingenuous self to be exposed—the self capable of stringing Jo along for more than a year, the self capable of keeping such an enormous secret from Andrew, the self capable of pretending she was incapable of causing others pain.

  But then Kate Hill dug me out of my hole once again. She’d decided to organize a last-minute gathering of women at Camont—Grrls Meat Camp, she called it—and since I was already in Europe, she said, I had no excuse not to come. For the event, she’d invited a small group of apron-clad, meat-wielding, dirt-under-their-nails women from North America to “butcher and bake, barbecue and bonfire” with their French lady counterparts.

  And so, in the middle of summer in Gascony, eight of us arrived at Camont with notebooks, butchery diagrams, and knives, ready to collaborate with a group of talented, matter-of-fact Frenchwomen, including the ladies of the Chapolards’ cutting room, Jehanne (of course), and several other female farmers and butchers I had not met my first time in Gascony.

  Kari Underly a second-generation butcher, arrived from Chicago with her new book, The Art of Beef Cutting, tucked under one arm. Cathy Barrow, the brains behind an online DIY-charcuterie-making contest called Charcutepalooza, flew in from Washington, DC, with a suitcase full of her preserved jams. Sarah King, a young, aspiring farmer I’d met in Oregon more than a year earlier, when she hired Jo and me to teach her and her husband, Bubba—they called themselves The Bubbas—how to butcher the pigs they raised, showed up with bottles of Oregon pinot. Barbara Gibbs Ostmann, a seasoned food writer who’d interviewed the likes of Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, made her way from St. Louis. Melora Koepke, a writer from Quebec, drove in from Bordeaux, and Beth Gilliam and Rachael Gordon, two meat-obsessed culinary students from Seattle, made their way to Gascony with suitcases ready to be filled with rillettes and jambon.

  It seems quite possible that this was the first gathering of meat-obsessed ladies in modern history—I’ll just assume the early Paleolithic period probably saw a few chance female meat swaps. Since then, Kate has held a Grrls Meat Camp in other locations around the world each year. And other women-only meat camps have popped up around the country as well.

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE WEEK, some of us stayed in old, funky trailers that Kate had added to her property since I left, while others slept on her barge, in the blue room, and in the Rapunzel-let-down-your-hair room. We took showers outdoors. Kate’s noisy rooster, Hank, woke us up before the sun.

  For the gathering, Kate wanted each of us to share our various skills. Kari led us in a beef butchery lesson, expertly showing us how to separate the bavette, flank, and skirt from the belly, showing us cuts I had never heard of before, the matambre, for instance, a “steak tail,” and “rose meat.” And I nervously led a lesson in pig butchery on a side of Chapolard pork, looking to Kari, clearly the most seasoned butcher in the room, for correction and friendly advice, which she gave me, generously and without judgment. I still had room for improvement, but, remembering what it had been like to stand in Kate’s kitchen and break down my first side of pig by myself, I realized I’d come a long way.

  The gathering was meant to be for women only, but Kate had a young lad, Dylan, from Ireland, staying with her that summer, and he didn’t mind a bit being surrounded by all of us. When we visited Jehanne’s duck farm on a day when she had no actual ducks to butcher, Dylan was even game to lie on one of the butchery tables and pretend to be a duck carcass so that, while all of us cackled away, Jehanne could, with her pointing finger, walk us through her basic butchery process.

  Daily, we marched into male-run butcher shops and asked them to show us their walk-ins. We drank too much Armagnac around the campfire, seared foie gras for dinner, drank Floc and ate rillettes for every happy hour. Kari regaled us with stories about her first jobs at meat cou
nters. Once, a male colleague threw a knife at her and barely missed. I told her about my struggles with Mike and Jonah at Pastaworks—struggles that paled in comparison with hers—and she nodded her head in solidarity. But she also said she thought things were changing.

  “Years ago,” Kari told me, “I was the only woman in my business. If I did trainings I’d see one woman in the corner. But somehow I’ve turned into the Mama Cass of the meat world. Now there are all these young people at the trainings, especially young women.”

  I’d thought that Jo and I were maybe the only young women in the world looking to learn this stuff, but now, I could see, we were just one of many called to this particular zeitgeist, a fleischgeist if you will.

  In the car, on our way to visit a one-woman pig farm, I confessed to Kate all the trouble I’d been through with Jo, whom Kate had met when she and Dominique came to Portland.

  “You don’t need her,” she said. “It’s time for you to own this thing yourself. Get on with it. Make it yours.”

  Kate was right. It was time.

  I met back up with Andrew in Madrid, where he’d traveled for work. We ate as much jamón as we had room for. I made sure to stand in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights for as long as the Prado would let me. I told Andrew he should come back to Oregon. That I’d be waiting for him. We planned to move in together when he did. And then I returned home to get to work.

  Back home, I added more classes to the roster. I held my first pig slaughter class with Levi, using two pigs that Sarah and Bubba King had raised in nearby Newberg. Levi and I held our first rabbit slaughter class. Bob Dickson and I finally held a beef butchery class in one of the cutting rooms of his USDA-inspected slaughterhouse and processing plant, with the explicit approval of his USDA inspector. Our students wore hard hats and hairnets, white coats and rubber boots. Cory Carman, the rancher who supplied us with our carcass, came to tell us about her grass-fed beef operation in the Wallowa Mountains. Bob’s employees walked around with meat thermometers and clipboards, monitoring our every move.