by Camas Davis
I also began to ponder teaching a class on my own, but I worried that, because I didn’t work in a butcher shop or as a restaurant butcher, I would somehow be seen as an impostor. Even though I’d written for magazines for more than a decade, I was still hesitant to call myself a writer, so why would I call myself a butcher after only a year of studying the craft? And yet, in classes, I often found myself interrupting the instructors in order to explain more clearly what they were doing, to add more context to the choices they made with their knives, and to urge the students to think about butchery on a deeper level than just Cut here, slice there. Even if I wasn’t the world’s most experienced butcher—although I was by that point a perfectly adequate one—I was an articulate one. Perhaps precisely because of my magazine background, I had always been a quick study, plus my verbal acuity and my writer’s understanding of the power of story and metaphor seemed essential to the art of teaching. At Grrls Meat Camp, Kate and Kari had urged me to try my hand at teaching, so I took their advice to heart and headed up my very first solo pig butchery class. I loved it. What had I been so afraid of?
On the heels of my first teaching experience, I developed a French-inspired duck-butchery-and-charcuterie class to teach students how to turn one duck into six different recipes, just as Kate and Jehanne did: duck confit, duck rillettes, duck liver mousse, crispy duck breast, duck prosciutto, and duck soup. I thought it would be too obscure for people, but the class sold out in a day. That said, in order to teach my students those recipes, I had to purchase a gallon of duck fat from a source other than my duck farmer. I hadn’t yet been able to find a farmer like Jehanne, and so I was still doing what Kate had said I shouldn’t do, applying Gascon recipes to non-Gascon ingredients. Still, the students went home excited to try their hand at duck prosciutto and confit. It was a start.
I began to see repeat students in my classes, and a significant number of them confessed to me that they were thinking of quitting their jobs so they could become butchers or farmers. Others told me they were ready to buy a side of pig or a whole lamb and break it down on their kitchen counter. Like proud parents, these students e-mailed me photos of the hams and bacon they hung in their basements. Chefs were starting to sign up, too, wanting to figure out how to incorporate whole-animal butchery into their menus. One meat distributor told me he’d seen a significant rise in the number of orders for whole animals from small local farms since the Portland Meat Collective showed up on the scene. A few guys who actually worked at local grocery store meat counters were also attending classes, confessing that, although they worked with meat every day, they’d never actually seen an entire carcass before.
The Portland Meat Collective was starting to feel more like a movement and less like an experiment. The more the PMC felt like a movement, the more the media came calling. And the more the media came calling, the more I realized that I was becoming a public face for that movement. The more I became a public face, though, the more I began to wonder whether I wasn’t becoming a certain kind of spectacle, the spectacle of a female butcher.
THIRTY-EIGHT
All right. Are you ready? Why don’t you try on this dress and we’ll see how it looks on you,” the stylist said.
It was a black number, the kind worn to cocktail parties, with a modest cut just above the knee and a gauzy, translucent back.
“And why don’t you try on these boots while you’re at it.” The boots were black, too. Leather. Knee-high. Three-inch heels.
She pointed me to a dressing room that had been fashioned out of a sheet hung from the ceiling. I stepped out of my jeans and T-shirt and into my costume.
The dress was meant for someone who was more well-endowed than I am, but my stylist worked her magic with a few safety pins at the back. The boots were too small for my big feet, but I only had to stand in them for a half hour or so while I posed for the camera.
“How do you wear your makeup normally?” the makeup artist asked me.
“Natural.”
“Okay. We’ll make it look natural, then.”
I looked like a drag queen.
Another dusting of powder on the nose, some mousse worked into my curly hair, another safety pin, and then the photographer.
“Wow. You have got to be the sexiest butcher I have ever met,” he said, and laughed, and then I laughed, and then everyone in the room—his assistants, the stylists, the PR people for the knife company that had chosen me to be a spokesperson for its new ad campaign—laughed, too, in the way that well-meaning people laugh when a well-meaning joke is told to simultaneously call attention to and distract from the fact that something out of the ordinary nags at us from the periphery. It was a gentle, communal, one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other laugh.
“So I was thinking you could hold this cleaver up near your face like this,” the photographer said, demonstrating. He wanted me to hold it so that the sharp edge was pointed straight at my nose. I gripped the cleaver—it was heavy. The pose felt dangerous, which maybe was the point, I couldn’t be sure.
“Like this?” I asked tentatively.
“Okay. Maybe not. How about if you rest the back of it on your shoulder?”
“You know, I don’t even really use cleavers,” I told him. It was true: I still did not possess the necessary confidence to cleave a straight line like the Chapolards did. If I needed to get through bone, I used a handsaw, or if all I had was a cleaver, I used a dead-blow mallet, like Adam Sappington had taught me, hitting the back of the cleaver with it as I would a hammer to a nail.
I’d anticipated this moment, and fretted over it, earlier that morning while on the 6 train headed down to Astor Place, where the shoot was to occur. A number of national magazine stories about the Portland Meat Collective had recently come out, and shortly after, a knife company had asked me to take part in an ad campaign. After brooding over it—Would I be selling out? Did I even deserve this?—I signed the contract, and then they flew me to New York City to photograph me before coming out to Oregon to film me. They put me up in a fancy hotel just a block from where I’d worked at Saveur. I’d been chosen alongside two men, both seasoned chefs, to take part in a new, ongoing ad campaign, which would continue to feature culinary professionals who were, in the campaign’s words, “defining the edge.” They agreed to pay me a small amount of money for the work, but it felt like a lot after almost two years of living so close to the bone. I had big, exciting plans to use the sum to pay for liability insurance for the Portland Meat Collective, and maybe a tube of lipstick.
But as the subway hurtled through the dark tunnels underneath Manhattan, I’d worried that if I posed with a cleaver, the image would convey that I was indeed a butcher. A bona fide, skilled butcher. The genuine article. How could I subtly convey to them that I wasn’t really a butcher? I was an educator. A thinker. A writer. An organizer. The founder and owner of a unique meat education program. But not a butcher. Definitely not that.
Of course, I had, by this point, started teaching classes myself. In reality, I did know how to butcher, I knew how to talk at length about butchering, and I was a damn good teacher. Still, I wasn’t sure I wanted to declare myself a butcher in such a public way. It was one thing for a magazine to decide, of its own accord, to call me a butcher, but quite another thing for me to sign a contract that had me posing as a butcher.
“Okay,” the photographer said, “that’s great. Now just turn the cleaver a little bit toward me. Gooooood. Great. Beautiful. And now look at the camera, but keep your head facing to the side. Look intense. Look like a butcher!”
* * *
—
A FEW WEEKS LATER, the knife company sent a film crew to Oregon. I drove them to Bubba and Sarah’s farm, and they filmed Bubba and me as we roamed the misty pastures, scratching the chins of pigs, feeding them vegetable and bread scraps from a nearby restaurant. They had me simulate a class, in which I demonstrated to volunteer student
s how to butcher a pig. They filmed me using a cleaver to break down a chicken, even though I preferred to butcher chickens with just a boning knife. Stylists and makeup artists followed me around, and the crew set up big lights in the old house that Andrew and I now shared, a house we were perpetually remodeling together—hanging drywall ourselves, painting our own trim.
When the ad campaign appeared in national food magazines, when my mom called because she’d seen a huge poster of me in a kitchen supply store in Eugene, when an old friend from my magazine days texted me a photo of my painted face on a billboard in Times Square—“Looks like you finally made it in New York,” she joked—I felt sheepish. In the ad, the two men had been dubbed “the Rebel” and “the Believer,” respectively. I’d been dubbed “the Poet.” I found some comfort in this. I didn’t write poetry, but I felt I was more of a poet than a butcher, and they’d rightly picked up on the fact that my greatest strengths lay in my ability to write and speak about butchery and meat reform. Although they called me a butcher—“a master butcher”—they also said this: “As a woman in a traditionally male dominated profession Camas is challenging expectations, breaking stereotypes and bringing intellectual depth to the art of butchery.”
But all I could think about was that I was a female poet-poser-butcher in a little black dress who wasn’t a butcher, and wasn’t even really a poet. It was lonely, this thought. I wished I could call Jo—I knew she would help me find the humor in it all—but she had since fallen in love with someone else and made it quite clear that she didn’t want to talk to me.
Whether I was right or not, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t my skill as a butcher, but the spectacle of my gender, of my singular and untraditional choice to study butchery as a woman, that was garnering me so much attention—not only from this knife company but from the media outlets that kept calling. Were they calling me a butcher because I was one? Or were they calling me a butcher because when they put the word lady in front of the word butcher, it had a certain sex appeal?
I felt as if everyone had assumed that, because I’d gone and done something so out of the ordinary as a woman, I was also extraordinary enough to master butchery in just two years. I was simultaneously a spectacle and an impostor. I felt looked at but not seen. It wasn’t that I didn’t want recognition—when any of us sets out to master a skill, having others recognize our own progress can be gratifying. It was that the recognition—whether in the form of a knife ad or a magazine story—seemed premature, misguided, even empty. All I wanted was to be seen for who I really was: a woman who chose to learn butchery and wanted to continue to learn, a woman who wanted others to learn alongside her. I wanted to be seen as someone in the process of becoming. But where’s the sexy headline in that?
At the same time, I knew exactly how the spectacle of my story benefited me and my cause. The headlines, my image in Times Square, didn’t just fuel the success of the Portland Meat Collective—these accolades were what allowed me to keep learning from teachers and mentors I wouldn’t otherwise have met, which was what I’d set out to do in the first place. I could have refused the interviews, the knife ads, but I didn’t.
And yet I kept hearing Mike from the meat counter. “You’re not a butcher. You’re a meat counter worker.” I wasn’t even that anymore.
* * *
—
EVEN AS I IMPROVED as a butcher, as I grew used to cutting meat in front of large groups of people and in front of the camera, I found it difficult to judge my own abilities.
You can do this, I kept telling myself. Just fake it until you make it. Was I really faking it, though? At some point, didn’t I actually know what I was doing?
That it was maybe even acceptable to just be okay at butchery, to have not yet mastered the skill and receive attention, didn’t sink into my brain, either. The only thing that mattered to me was that I was not really a butcher, at least not the kind everyone wanted me to be, the kind who wielded a cleaver with confidence.
It was meant to be flattering, this attention, this modern, post-feminist, you-go-girl praise—I understood that—but ultimately it felt like a rigged game. What I really wanted most was for someone to appreciate what I’d actually mastered and to help me figure out what I might still have left to improve upon. Just because I taught butchery, just because I spoke about it, didn’t mean I was done learning.
* * *
—
SHORTLY AFTER THE KNIFE AD came out, the organizer of a Pacific Northwest hunting-and-fishing convention called me up, asking if I’d be willing to do a series of venison butchery demonstrations. I’d never butchered venison, even though my father and grandfather had been deer hunters, but I knew that it would be similar to butchering lamb, which I’d done quite a bit of in the past year, so I said yes. For the demonstration, I stood behind a table surrounded by a sea of people who looked like the people I come from. Hunting caps. Wrangler jeans. Camouflage vests. Work boots. My dad even came to watch.
I was nervous, but I did okay. No one stood up and left in the middle of my presentation, and people came up to me afterward to ask more questions. As I was packing my knives, an older gentleman—blocky, with an intimidating scowl and the sort of thick, hamlike arms and legs that the Chapolard brothers sported—approached me.
“I used to run my own meat-processing facility,” he told me in a gentle voice that contradicted his stern expression. “Worked it for fifty years. You did pretty darn good. A lot of great information. Next time, remember to keep your elbows in near your torso when you’re cutting. You’ll be less likely to get tendinitis that way.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I said. And I meant it.
“Pretty darn good,” he’d said. And he meant it.
“Next time,” he’d said, with encouragement in his voice, because he believed there would be a next time. Because he recognized in me room for improvement. He did not seem fazed by who I was. He had not concerned himself with my headlines, my story, my anomalous narrative, my gender. It was a relief, however fleeting, to finally be seen.
THIRTY-NINE
A few short months after the ad campaign’s launch, Levi’s backyard—the same backyard that had birthed the Portland Meat Collective—became a crime scene.
Sometime between 1:30 and 8:00 a.m. on January 8, 2012, five adult rabbits, including two nursing mothers, and thirteen juveniles vanished from their cages in Levi’s backyard. Ten one-day-old babies were left behind and subsequently died.
That afternoon, Levi and I were set to teach a class on how to raise and slaughter rabbits for meat. The rabbits for that class had already been transported to the teaching location the evening before, so they had escaped the hands of kidnappers. Here is how those rabbits died: Within the span of one second, we broke their necks. Within the span of another second, their eyes closed, their nervous system shut down, their brains went dark. That was it. They were alive one second. Gone the next.
This is how the ten one-day-old baby rabbits, without the warmth or sustenance of their nursing mothers, died: Some froze to death. The rest starved to death. A few held on for a while with the help of a man-made nest of blankets and attempts to bottle-feed, but by the end of the day all of them were gone.
* * *
—
WHEN LEVI’S ROOMMATE, Chris, first discovered the day-old babies without their nursing mothers struggling to stay alive, he called Levi, who was helping me set up for the two slaughter classes—chicken and rabbit—that we were scheduled to teach that day. After he hung up, Chris tended to the most important detail: keeping those day-old babies alive and trying to ease their suffering. He was lucky enough to find a local organization, Rabbit Advocates, that had just received a donation of a couple of nursing mothers they were willing to loan him. But in the course of talking to them, Chris realized that those nursing mothers were the very same rabbits that had been stolen from Levi. They had been anonymously dona
ted to the organization that morning and then sent out to various homes to be fostered. When the Rabbit Advocates found out that the rabbits were originally headed for the dinner table, they refused to give them back, including those much-needed nursing mothers.
Meanwhile, the students were already arriving for the chicken slaughter class scheduled to start that morning. Thankfully, Sarah and Bubba had come to help us, so while the three of them began class, I did a little detective work.
A few days before, I’d received a suspicious phone call from a young man who gave his name as Randall Green, saying he was frustrated that the rabbit slaughter class was sold out. “Where will the class take place?” he kept asking me. Something about the guy hadn’t seemed right, so I briskly told him I was sorry we couldn’t help him and hoped he could take a class at another time.
On a hunch, I went onto Portland Meat Collective’s Facebook page and saw that someone going by the name Ron V Green had left a comment in response to our announcement of the rabbit slaughter class: “Shame on the Portland Meat Collective.”
Two hours into our chicken slaughter class, Robert Reynolds called me.
Robert had been in the middle of teaching a class himself when a young man walked in, claiming that the Portland Meat Collective had stolen his pet rabbit.
“He’s still standing there in my classroom,” Robert told me. “He seems crazy and I’d like him to leave.”
Levi and Bubba, two large and imposing country boys, jumped into Levi’s truck and drove over to Robert’s studio. Once there, they encountered the nervous young man, who, they told me later, gripped an empty pet carrier with a paint can inside. He gave his name as Noah Schwartz and said he’d heard a rumor that the Portland Meat Collective “stole people’s pet rabbits and slaughtered them for profit.”