by Camas Davis
“Where do burgers come from?” I asked the students.
“Meat,” they said.
“What kind of meat?” I asked.
“Beef,” they said.
“What kind of beef?”
“Ground beef!”
“Where does ground beef come from?”
“Cows.”
“What do we know about those cows? How were they raised? What did they eat? How old were they? How were they killed? How do you get ground beef from a live cow? What part of the animal does it come from?”
Silence.
We brainstormed what we knew: that most of the hamburgers we ate probably came from larger factory farms or confined animal-feeding operations—I led the witnesses only a little, providing them with statistics and other factual evidence to inspire their answers. We brainstormed what we collectively knew about factory farms: “cramped,” “gross,” and “stinky” were words the students threw out.
I asked them if they had ever heard the term “grass-fed” or “grain-fed,” and then we brainstormed what we thought we knew about these terms.
“Don’t all cows eat grass?” one student asked.
“At the beginning of their lives they do,” I said, “but most of them are eating grain by the time they’re adolescents, even if grain isn’t something they can easily digest.”
I gave a brief overview of diet, breed, exercise, muscle definition, and the various legal and informal definitions of humane, and then I drew a butchery diagram of beef.
“What part of the animal do burgers come from?”
Silence.
“Can we even know for sure? How might we find out?”
This is how most of our conversations went. I asked them what they thought they knew and what they were even allowed to know. Then I asked them what purpose it might serve not to know, and urged them to figure out how they could know more.
We made two different kinds of burgers the first day: one using pasture-raised, grass-fed beef, and one using factory-farmed, grain-fed beef. To make our burgers, we ground the meat ourselves, first examining the difference in muscles from different parts of the animal. We inspected the fat, comparing the color and texture of each.
As the ground meat and fat coiled out of the grinder, a few students closed their eyes in disgust. “Gross!” one of them said.
“Let’s talk about ‘gross,’” I countered. “This is going to be turned into a burger that you will gladly eat. Will it be gross then? If not, why?” I asked them as many open-ended questions as I could, in order to get them to switch on their brains and think.
When we tasted our burgers, I asked them if they could taste the difference. Most preferred the grain-fed, factory-farmed burger.
“Why do you like that one better?”
“Because it’s what I’m used to,” one student said.
“Now that you know how that burger meat was raised, does that change anything?”
The students blinked at me and said, “Maybe.”
* * *
—
ON THE SECOND DAY, we visited Bubba and Sarah’s farm. The students met the pig that we would be butchering later in the week and chose to name her Wilburess.
Bubba showed them what she’d been eating for the past seven months, and how much space she’d had to move around in the pasture. He encouraged them to pet her and to feed her pieces of raw squash. We led the students—in their skinny jeans and hoodies, clutching their cell phones, texting their friends selfies with the pig—to the barn, where a sow had recently given birth, and they cooed over the fuzzy baby piglets.
I felt like the bearer of bad news, but as the students reached into the pen to pet the piglets, I reminded them that Bubba would be taking Wilburess to the slaughterhouse over the weekend, and that on Monday we would witness the slaughter.
“Do any of you have any questions or concerns before we go on Monday?”
“Do we have to watch the slaughter?” one girl asked.
“It’s your decision. We aren’t going to force you. But the idea is that we’re going to show you every part of the process of how meat gets onto your plate. We’re going to show you the most ideal version of that process, but the process isn’t always as ideal. Remember, not all pig farms look like Bubba’s, and not all slaughterhouses are going to look like the one we go to on Monday. I’m not here to tell you how to feel or think. But I guarantee you that as you go through this process, you will never look at meat the same way again.”
“Can we take pictures?” a young freshman boy asked.
“No,” one of their teachers said. “We’re all going to leave our cell phones and cameras at home.”
“Let’s respect what’s unfolding in front of us and try to be present for it,” I said.
I wasn’t sure whether the students, all coming of age in the era of Snapchat and Instagram, even knew how to do that, but I hoped they would figure it out.
* * *
—
A FRIEND WHO WORKED at the slaughterhouse had swung a visit to the kill floor for us, convincing the suspicious plant manager that my intentions were pure. In the parking lot of the slaughterhouse, the manager laid down the rules. No cell phones. No cameras. Wear protective clothing at all times. Stay quiet. Follow my directions.
“None of you are journalists, right?” he said, chuckling afterward at the absurdity of such an idea.
After the students booted up and donned their hard hats and white butcher’s smocks, the manager led us, single file, into a viewing area to the side of the kill floor. Between the noise of the hoses they used to spray the carcasses down, the continuous air-pump sound of the bolt gun, the music blaring from the radio, and the hiss of the blowtorches used to scald the hair off the pigs, we couldn’t hear the plant manager very well, so the students, suddenly appearing so much smaller in stature than they had in the parking lot, stood there watching and sniffing the air, without much in the way of a translator. I watched the students watching. Their faces were straight, somber, serious, which is not to say I couldn’t also see empathy on their faces. At the same time, none of them turned away at any part of the process. No one joked with the people next to them or looked the other way. They were all clearly present.
As we filed out, the students remained quiet—a stark contrast to their usual joshing around with one another.
Once in the parking lot, I asked them how they were doing.
“I was surprised at how I felt,” one said. “I don’t have any words for it.”
“I felt sad,” one girl said. “But it also wasn’t as horrible as I thought it would be.”
“I imagined something different. It was almost too calm,” another said.
“I’m not sure if I will eat meat again or not.”
I urged them to try to find words for it if they could that night. And I told them that in two days we would be butchering our pig carcass and making sausage and bacon and ham, which they would all go home with to feed their families.
* * *
—
WHEN THE STORY came out in The New York Times Magazine, the backlash was immense. I spent another month fielding angry e-mails and death threats by phone. (On the other hand, my classes also sold out much faster than usual.) “Disgusting” and “sickening” were the words of the hour from online commenters, many of whom said they ate meat. I was getting tired of playing nice.
Parents argued that it was inappropriate to teach young children to be “violent” and to “objectify” animals. I was accused of teaching children “disassociation,” when, in fact, association had always been my goal—association that forced all of us to grapple with how to eat and be in the world.
One of my students responded to the angry online comments.
As a student who actually partook in this weeklong class, I can say with certainty tha
t it has changed my views on meat and the meat industry. Am I a vegetarian now? No. I will still continue to eat meat, but now I eat meat a little less frequently, and always in awareness of the means that got it to my table. . . . Also for those criticizing the school, please understand that every student who participated in this class voluntarily signed up for it. I personally signed up for it because as a meat eater I felt it was important to understand the whole process and have a greater understanding of meat beyond the packaged meat that so many people buy from supermarkets every day. If anyone has questions, please ask! I’m happy to share my experience with you!
Not a single person responded to him, but I was proud of him anyway. No amount of dogmatic thinking or online shaming would ever take away my dedication to those students and their grappling.
FORTY-ONE
At the tail end of the year of the rabbit, I ended up writing an essay about Bunnygate for a local humanities journal, and the story got picked up by the public radio show This American Life. As a result of that story, people from all over the country began contacting me to ask if I would start a Meat Collective in their community. In the year of the pig head, I open-sourced my educational model, raising money on Kickstarter to help individuals in Olympia and Seattle start their own collectives, and then launching an entire nonprofit, the Good Meat Project, whose mission is to spread my educational model across the country. Andrew and I were also planning a wedding for that summer, which made the year of the pig head an incredibly busy year, especially once Martha Stewart’s people called me.
“Congratulations,” her editor in chief said when I answered the phone. “Martha wants to give you an American Made award and fly you to New York for the ceremony.”
“A what?” I said. I’d never heard of this award.
She went on to explain that Martha had chosen to give the award to ten entrepreneurs who “showed innovation and creativity in their respective fields.” We’d be featured in the magazine and in online videos. How did Martha even know about me? I wondered.
A few months later, Martha sent a film-and-photography crew out to Oregon and asked me to stage a class, so that they could better control lighting and props. For the shoot, I had about six volunteer students gather around me at a table as I worked on a side of pork. About halfway through, the photographer’s assistant pulled me into another room to ask me if I could get two of the students out of the picture, in a way that wouldn’t seem obvious.
“Why?” I asked.
“We’re just going for a certain look,” she said. “And some of them don’t have it.”
Right. This was Martha. Everything needed to be just so. But I made the photographer’s assistant figure it out. We didn’t discriminate in my classes.
After the students left, I posed for the camera with various knives, and the ever popular cleaver, of course. Then they had me lay out different cuts of meat for them to photograph.
“Why don’t we start with recognizable cuts,” the photographer said. “Like pork chops, and maybe bacon.”
I put a piece of belly on the table in front of him.
“Could you maybe trim some of that fat off? And is that skin? Maybe trim that off, too.”
“But bacon is made of fat.”
“Yeah, but our readers are into healthier living.”
“I thought you wanted the cut to be recognizable as bacon?”
“Okay, that’s fine, let’s just take the skin off, then,” he said.
“Why the skin?”
“Because people won’t like it. They won’t know what it is.”
“But that goes against all the reasons I do what I do.”
“I know, but it’s just not appetizing,” he said.
“But it is! I just made a Thai sausage with pigskin in it the other day,” I said.
“Right. Well. I’ll just shoot the pork chops, then.”
Enough with the pork chops, I wanted to say. Every time you show a picture of pork chops, you convince more people that pigs are made of nothing but pork chops. This is why we have to produce so many pigs, in the worst of ways—to satisfy all the people who want those pork chops. Let’s show the pig head. Let’s show the tongue.
As if reading my mind, the photographer turned his camera to the pig head.
“Hmm. Could you maybe wrap that head in butcher paper but still make it recognizable as a pig head?”
“Why not just photograph it unwrapped?” I asked.
“I just don’t think Martha’s readers will be able to handle it,” he said.
I sighed. I wrapped the pig head with a few long pieces of butcher paper and some masking tape. It looked like an unidentifiable, crinkly white meat football.
The photographer’s assistant frowned.
“Hmm, let me take a stab,” she said, unwrapping the pig head and starting over. She proceeded to work her magic, wrapping the white butcher paper just so around the snout and the cheeks so that the paper clung tightly to the contours of the pig head. It looked a little more like a semi-realistic, albeit artistic, rendering of a pig head instead of a football. “Now we just need some toothpicks to make the ears stand up,” she said.
I laughed. But she wasn’t kidding.
“Could you just hold the pig ears up for me?” she said as she poked toothpicks into them to prop them up, and then wrapped paper tightly around each of the ears.
“There!” she said. “What do you think?”
In the face of this utterly astounding bit of porcine origami art, I had no words. Martha had awarded me with publicity, a free flight to New York, a free hotel room near Bryant Park, a fancy reception in Grand Central Terminal, a party, a tour of her magazine offices, and a feature in the magazine, because of my proven “innovation and creativity.” But here we were masking the very things my innovation and creativity had been in service of. Here we were covering it all up with white butcher paper.
“It looks good,” I said, and then grabbed a Sharpie and wrote PIG HEAD on it.
* * *
—
EARLIER THAT YEAR, at the request of many of the farmers I now worked with, I’d taught a pig-head butchery-and-charcuterie class to twelve students in Portland. The stated goal of the class was to teach people how to turn every part of the head into food. My unspoken goal was to force people to confront the fact that meat comes from animals, the head and face being the most visceral reminder of that.
For the class, I taught the students how to remove all the meat, fat, and skin in one piece, how to extract tongue from skull, how to season everything correctly, and then how to roll and tie it all together and, through roasting or poaching, transform that into a rich and hearty porchetta di testa—an Italian-style head cheese—that you could then slice and serve with mustard and crusty bread for an appetizer or as an accent to a meal.
A reporter for a local alternative newspaper decided to write about the class. “Barnyard Butchery: The Decadence and Horror of Butchering a Pig’s Head,” his headline read. The use of the word horror made me wince, because it would surely elicit a response, but I liked the adjoining and.
“If there are five basic food groups,” he wrote, “there must surely be more that are too cerebral and unquantifiable to make it into the federal labeling process. I often like to say pleasure is a food group we shouldn’t discount; this [class] carved out new territory beyond that. Or rather, it exposed long-buried territory we see only flashes of when we get our hands dirty and cook: involvement, pride, and understanding. It also, in a decadent fashion, was a challenge, a risk, and a thrill, made all the more satisfying for its sensual reward.”
One reader, a meat eater, just didn’t get it.
“Let me start off by saying that I eat meat,” she wrote in a letter to the editor. “Let me add that I don’t think that working in the meat department at a grocery store makes you a bad person by any stretch o
f the imagination. If my neighbor prides himself on BBQ ribs, more power to him (and pass the cole slaw). I have known many fisherman [sic], but none made a fetish of the entrails.
“At the same time, making a fetish of stripping the meat from a pig’s head as art, entertainment and as a public act is just plain creepy. Not dissimilar from her public butchering of animals widely considered as pets.”
The author went on to suggest that “normal” hunters or backyard chicken raisers wouldn’t ever do such a thing, and that while there were things we had to do in this life, like kill mice, we shouldn’t normalize “getting into death for fun,” as I was apparently doing by teaching people how to turn a pig head into food.
She signed her note “Oregon Mamacita.”
How I wished Oregon Mamacita would sit at my table and let me cook for her. We had so much to talk about.
In my world, I’d tell her, a normal hunter who takes the life of an animal should feel a responsibility to turn the entire animal into food. In Oregon Mamacita’s world, a hunter, apparently, should kill an animal, use only some of the cuts, and leave the rest for the birds, because eating any other part would apparently be creepy.
In France, the people who worked at meat counters cleaved pig heads in half every day, respectfully, in the name of thrift and sustenance, and turned them into pâté de tête. Yet I hadn’t heard anyone accuse these butchers of “making a fetish of stripping meat from a pig’s head as art and entertainment.”
In Gascony, Kate and her neighbors and friends taught me that when your chicken got too old to lay eggs, you turned her into poule au pot. You’d maybe throw the iron-rich heart onto the grill or into a confit, and turn the liver into mousse. To Oregon Mamacita, any backyard chicken raiser who used “entrails” for food was not normal.
How did we get here, Oregon Mamacita?
And she was hardly alone. Oregon Mamacita was the kind of reader Martha’s photographer had in mind when he asked me to wrap that pig’s head in butcher paper.