Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  The evening temperature drops to negative ten. Too cold for another cigarette, too cold for anything but bed. Tomorrow I will teach my first class as a member of the permanent faculty. There’s no going back to my student days, no magic restoration to a former self. It occurs to me that perhaps this fear and sadness is also a crutch. If I am crippled with doubt, I don’t have to write. I don’t have to risk disappointing myself with a bad novel or discovering that it is in fact true that I can’t write another book at all. In order to continue after these first jarring and sudden successes, I must find some way to understand ambition on my own terms.

  I could spend the next three years as I’ve spent the last three: stuck. I might, as I have in the course of writing this essay, arrive at some truths about the mechanisms of my tangled relationship with my dreams and accomplishments. This might get me moving again, or it might not. If my grandmother, an elegant survivalist if ever there was one, were still alive, she’d shrug at my dilemma as if to say: all of that might be true but you still have to get on with things, a sentiment my mother echoes nearly every time I talk to her. They’re right. If I’m honest, what I want is a neat answer to all of my questions, and instructions about the way forward. I won’t get those things, of course. Nobody does. But I have my mother and grandparents and their parents, their lives and labor and the ways they kept going through the worst, and the best. In my scramble to get a foothold in this new life, perhaps I can borrow their strength for a while. That’s enough being scared, they’d say. We didn’t do all of this struggling so you could just give up. Get up now. Take a step. Then another. Then another, like we did.

  Girl with Knife

  CAMAS DAVIS

  “All right. Are you ready? Why don’t you try on this dress and we’ll see how it looks on you,” the stylist says.

  It’s 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 are black too. Leather. Knee-high. Three-inch heels.

  She points me to a dressing room that has been fashioned out of a sheet hung from the ceiling by clothespins. I step out of my jeans and T-shirt and into my costume.

  The dress is meant for someone who is more well-endowed than I am, but my stylist works her magic with a few safety pins attached to the dress at the back. The boots are too small for my big feet, but I only have to stand in them for a half hour or so while I pose for the camera.

  “How do you wear your makeup normally?” the makeup artist asks me.

  “Natural.”

  “Ok. We’ll make it look natural then.”

  I look 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 says and then laughs and then I laugh and then everyone in the room—his assistants, the stylists, the PR people for the knife company that have chosen me to be a spokesperson for their new ad campaign—laughs 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’s 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 says, demonstrating. He wants me to hold it so that the sharp edge is pointed straight at my face. I grip the cleaver—it’s heavy. The pose feels awkward and dangerous, which is maybe the point, but I can’t be sure.

  “Like this?” I ask, tentatively.

  “Okay. Maybe not. How about if you grip it with your hand like this, and rest the back of it on your shoulder?”

  “You know, I don’t even really use cleavers,” I tell him. It’s true. I don’t. Not really. I’ve only been studying to be a butcher for a little over a year at this point, and I don’t yet have the confidence it takes to be able to cleave a straight line, say, through a rack of ribs, with a few deft swings of my arm. If I need to get through bone, I use a handsaw, or if all I have is a cleaver, I use a dead blow mallet, hitting the top of the cleaver with it as I would a hammer to the head of a nail.

  Besides, while cleavers have become the most iconic tool of butchers, the butchers I’d been learning from in France and Oregon didn’t use them much. I’d learned that the bulk of butchery—the process by which animal carcasses are transformed into edible cuts of meat after an animal has been slaughtered and eviscerated—could mostly be done with a short, thin, flexible blade that more closely resembles a paring knife than a cleaver. The butchery I’d witnessed dwelled more in the realm of subtle finesse, tiny flicks of the knife that separate fascia from muscle, muscle from bone. Dramatic, demonstrative, sweeping arcs of the cleaver are an occasional part of the equation, sure, but that particular image is more folkloric than anything else. Despite knowing all of this, I’d bought into the folklore too, and so my not yet being able to use a cleaver with confidence meant that I felt, almost constantly, like a fraud.

  I had 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. The knife company had flown me from Oregon to New York City—where, in my former life, I’d been a magazine editor, mostly covering food and drink. They’d put me up in a fancy hotel and planned to photograph me before they came out to Oregon to film me further. I’d been chosen alongside two men, both seasoned chefs, to take part in their new ad campaign, which would feature people in the culinary world who were, in the campaign’s words, “defining the edge.” They had agreed to pay me a small amount of money for the work, but it had felt like a lot to me after spending six months surviving on unemployment checks, maxing out my credit card to learn butchery in France, and then spending a year working for just above minimum wage at a restaurant and then a butcher shop. After that, I’d taken a chance and launched my own meat school, the Portland Meat Collective, with the mission to inspire everyday people to make more responsible choices about the meat they eat, by way of hands-on, experiential education. It was a project for which I’d recently received an increasing amount of media attention, thus the knife ad. 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. A former lifestyle magazine editor. But not a butcher. Definitely not that. Not yet anyway.

  “Okay,” the photographer says, “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!”

  When the story of the last eight years of my life started appearing in newspapers, the headlines usually went along these lines: “Woman leaves job as magazine editor, runs away to France to learn butchery.” In magazines, it became a little more nuanced. In a publication like Woman’s Day, the headline might read something like, “The New Mrs. Cleaver: One Woman Trades in Her High Heels for a Life in Meat.” Esquire might strike a cheekier tone. Perhaps, “Fresh Meat: A Woman, a Pig, and a Six-Inch Boner.” (In the meat world, “boner” is shorthand for “boning knife,” the kind of blade most often used to remove meat from bone.) Here’s a sensational headline that actually appeared in Vice recently: “This Ex-Vegetarian Is Teaching Portland How to Cut Up Cows.”

  None of these headlines are false, per say. In fact, I was once a vegetarian. I did leave my ten-year career as a magazine editor to learn butchery. I did in fact trade in pen and paper for a boning knife, although I prefer the five-inch variety.

  But in each headline, we also see the p
ower of spectacle hard at work. A vegetarian who now teaches people how to kill animals? How’d that fall from moral grace happen? A magazine editor turned butcher? What kind of person makes that kind of career change in these modern times? Indeed, not only is a magazine editor probably not well suited for the job of butcher, but also our culture has decided that hardly anyone is well suited for it, save for automated machines and underpaid migrant workers.

  The spectacle perhaps hardest at work in these headlines, of course, is my gender. Because, before industrialization took over our food system, we did think some people were well suited for the job of butcher and those people were, and still are, largely men. But “The New Mr. Cleaver: One Man Trades in His Penny Loafers for a Life in Meat” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. The fact that I’m a woman in this context makes me doubly out of place, doubly unusual, doubly a spectacle. However, this very fact—and the accompanying possibilities for clever headlines—has also, curiously, garnered me much recognition and success.

  And that recognition and success have given me the opportunity to meet and learn from smart, talented people I would not have otherwise met or learned from. It has brought lucrative grants, a book deal, the chance to be a spokesperson for a food movement I strongly believe in. It has taken me into communities working hard to reform our country’s meat production system. It’s even pushed me onto a red carpet with Martha Stewart who, as cameras flashed, told me the best way to harvest a turkey is to feed it vodka first.

  But when I left my career as a magazine editor eight years ago and set out to learn how an animal could be transformed into food I had no such ambitions to be recognized publicly as a butcher. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a butcher. I wasn’t sure about much of anything, really. I did know this: that I’d spent ten years prior to that diligently working my way up the masthead at various lifestyle publications, translating the world around me into perfect story angles, cheeky captions, spectacular headlines. I’d been wholly engrossed in mediating the lives of others, working twelve-hour days for a decade to tell readers how to eat, where to hike, and what to drink. And then, a new editor-in-chief at the city magazine I’d been working at decided she didn’t like me, and so she got rid of me—although the official story was that they couldn’t afford me anymore. I was shocked. Disappointed. Clinically depressed, actually. But I was also done. Done thinking about every single experience that unfolded in front of me as a potential magazine story. Done coming up with clever headlines. Done working for dysfunctional bosses. Done.

  I was ready to reinvent myself and, given my bleak financial situation, I needed to do so rather quickly. I craved, on the most basic level, the opposite of what I had done for the last ten years. I wanted to do something unmediated, something that, at the end of the day, kept me fed or clothed or sheltered, but which did so in the most direct way possible, and not because I’d come up with a clever headline and gotten paid or praised for it. The work I began looking for, that I felt better cut out for, was the kind of work I’d originally come from: carpenters and mechanics, scratch bakers and cooks, people who fixed and assembled things, people who hunted for their own food, who gardened and canned their own tomatoes, people who worked with their hands.

  What I really wanted to do, what I’d started thinking about even before I’d lost my job, was to learn a skill. A skill skill. The kind that could, at least theoretically, keep me alive by putting food in my mouth, even if I had no job. The kind of skill no one could take away from me. A skill that would help me survive no matter what situation I found myself in. Magazine writing had come to feel very much the opposite of that.

  “But why meat? Why not learn how to grow vegetables? Why not become a yoga instructor instead?” I am often asked.

  I’d spent much of my magazine career writing about food, and one of the big mysteries that remained for me was meat. I knew, more or less, having grown up hunting and fishing, how it got to our tables the old-fashioned way, and I’d read plenty about how it got to our tables the industrial way, but I’d never fully taken part in the basic, pre-industrial processes by which it got there. I didn’t really know, not in any intimate way. And I had a hunch that the loudest people in the morality debate over meat in America didn’t really know either. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a butcher. But, at the very least, I wanted to learn, in the most intimate and direct way possible, how an animal went from being alive to being dead and then to becoming a steak on the table. I wanted to grapple with that. I wondered whether, by inserting myself into the process, I might land somewhere new inside the argument. I’d already been a vegetarian. I’d already blindly eaten whatever meat the grocery store provided me. Was there a choice somewhere in the middle that would feel right? In order to find out, I was willing to jump right in and learn. It seemed as direct and unmediated a skill as I could possibly pursue.

  But I did not, at the time, have much of a clue as to what I would do with this particular skill or whether I would ever turn it into a job or career, or if I would even like doing it. I certainly didn’t imagine that I would be acknowledged publicly for it, even if, as a former magazine editor, I knew quite well that it all made for a very good story.

  It didn’t seem like a tall order to me, but it was: I was looking for a mentor or two who wouldn’t blink an eye when I asked them to teach me, who would gently and patiently guide me in the ways of knife and bone, and who wouldn’t ask me too many questions about why I was there.

  I ended up going all the way to France to find those mentors. They were four French brothers in white meat smocks with thighs and calves as thick as prosciutto hams and two of their wives with personalities just as sturdy—a family who owned every part of getting pork to people’s tables. They grew the grain to feed their pigs; they ran a cooperatively owned slaughterhouse; they did all the butchery and charcuterie themselves; and they sold all the meat at local outdoor markets. Their operation was far from the factory-farm model that was so common back in the States. Two days a week, I stood in the cold sal de coupe, or cutting room, in white rubber boots that were two sizes too big for me, cutting up shoulder for brochettes and trimming belly for ventrèche. When I did something wrong, they told me. When I did something right, they told me. They were busy and tired, but they were patient teachers. One day a week I worked the market, watching customers haggle over blood sausage and pig ears. I also visited the abattoir and witnessed the swift and hopefully painless, but nonetheless totally visceral, slaughter of animals for food.

  Not an easy thing, that. But not a hard thing either. Not exactly. It was something else completely, something I had no vocabulary for. Each day I stared down these massively complicated concepts of life and death and sustenance and yet, somehow, the whole equation felt quite simple. My teachers taught me how to understand what killing an animal for food meant and how it would change my place in the world forever. By the end of the first week, I felt, for the first time since my childhood, rooted in the real world. And for just a little while, before I returned home and started my meat school and began to field calls from the New York Times and Martha Stewart Living, before I found myself posing in a little black dress with a great big cleaver for a billboard in Times Square, before people started to call me a butcher even though I wasn’t one, before I found myself in court staring down a crowd of angry vegans, before I launched a nonprofit and got a book deal and started speaking publicly about meat reform, my life, my very existence, finally, felt elemental. I had no money and no job and no specific purpose, but in setting about to learn this one thing—the very definition of ambition, I suppose—I felt supremely proud and satisfied. Learning felt delicious. Not knowing what I was really doing felt totally acceptable. I remember saying to a few friends, “I can actually feel my brain growing.” I imagined brilliant red and hot pink new pathways twisting and turning their way through the tired, bored, overused gray matter of my brain.

  When I returned home to Portland, Oregon, by no means a confident butcher
, I landed a job at a restaurant that did some whole animal butchery and then I tried my hand working at a butcher shop. I was eager to keep learning—I had ambitions to keep learning—but I quickly discovered the men at the shop had no interest in teaching me, or even talking to me. “You’re not a butcher,” one of them—a sweaty, resentful, judging young man—made sure to remind me. “You’ll never be a butcher.” He was like a little boy, pouting and crying, because he had not been given the red truck he had wished for at Christmas. His rage seemed laughable and old-fashioned to me. I would be lying, however, if I didn’t say that he was one of the main reasons I quit the butcher shop and started my own meat school. I called it the Portland Meat Collective. The idea behind the Portland Meat Collective, as I have always told it publicly, is to bring the kind of hands-on education I had in France to my community in Oregon. But I also started the Portland Meat Collective so that I could keep learning. The sweaty, resentful, judging man certainly wasn’t going to help me.

  Portlanders are known for being obsessed with the provenance of their food, which meant my idea for the Portland Meat Collective was successful almost immediately. I asked whole animal butchers, retired meat science professors, slaughterhouse workers, chefs, and self-taught backyard meat producers to teach the classes and they said yes. I sourced whole, half, and quarter animals from small, local farmers who were raising their animals in a thoughtful, sustainable, humane fashion. I offered hands-on slaughter classes, whole animal butchery classes, sausage classes, pâté classes, charcuterie classes. And, without having to do much marketing at all—in fact, in the seven years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve never once sent out a press release or purchased an ad—all manner of people signed up as students: young, old, female, male, Republican, Democrat, doctors, lawyers, bike mechanics, truck drivers, college students, and everyone in between. Classes sold out within hours of announcing them. In each class the students learned how to transform an entire animal into food. They picked up knives and cleavers and inserted themselves into the process by which meat—not just any meat, but clean, fair, local meat—got to their tables. Just as these experiences had changed me in France, so too did they change the students. They began to think more critically about where most of the meat we eat in America comes from. They began buying from better sources. They ate less meat. They questioned our industrialized meat system. I’d not only created a business that changed others, it also changed me. I’d managed to create a business that allowed me to make a living and keep learning, the reason I’d gotten into this in the first place.