Whether you’re an omnivore or vegetarian, it’s unlikely that you’ve ever seen the inside of a slaughterhouse or the bottom of a kill floor. Though the production of animals for food supplies the average American with seven ounces of meat per day, we are largely not doing the killing or butchering—but someone else is.
People are beginning to wonder where their food comes from and meat is often the first product called into question. If a restaurant is serving only filet mignon on the menu, what happened to the rest of the cow? On Superbowl Sunday, when Americans ate 1.25 billion chicken wings, where did we put the rest of those seven-hundred-fifty-million chickens and who ate them? If I didn’t kill the pig that became the pork on my plate, who did?
Butcher in Hong Kong
(Flickr)
Whole animal butchery has been called a lost art. But, once upon a time, it was a skill most people possessed. If you wanted to eat meat, you weren’t picking it up in a grocery store. Whether you raised the animal on your farm, hunted it in the woods, or bought a whole chicken at the market, it didn’t come on a Saran-wrapped Styrofoam plate with a label.
Today, according to Camas Davis, founder of the Portland Meat Collective, people don’t even know the difference between slaughter and butchery and certainly not how to do either one.
It was in that spirit that she began the Portland Meat Collective, a school that teaches people to get closer to their meat. Offered on a class-by-class basis, people drop in for a variety of reasons. Some are vegetarians or vegans wondering if they could even kill an animal if they tried, a personal test. Others want to eat better meat—buying a share or side of a whole animal and butchering it for personal consumption.
Davis describes her school as “for a Regular Joe who either wants to learn a little more about meat or wants to be able to talk to his butcher differently.” In Portland, they offer six to eight classes a month, with names like “Slim ‘Janes’ and Jerky,” “Rabbit Two Ways,” and “Basic Pig Butchery.” Class sizes are limited to ten people and are under $275 for even the longest four-hour class.
It might not be cheap to learn how to butcher your own food but, under the Portland Meat Collective model, people don’t have to attend a more formal program like Fleisher’s butchering school in Upstate New York to personalize the meat that we take for granted. For many people, a few hundred dollars and a few hours is a much easier proposition than the full three days and $1500 of a program like Fleisher’s.
And, many of those people don’t live in Portland or near any of the other major foodie destinations for that matter. Davis has gotten emails from people all over who want to learn how to butcher a whole animal but don’t have the resources to do so.
As a result, the Portland Meat Collective has started raising money to start Meat Collectives Across America—or so goes the title of their Kickstarter campaign which raised 100% of its funding in only two weeks.
“You know, I don’t really want to rule the world.” Davis said about the plans for new Meat Collectives. “I’m totally fine with other people taking the model and running with it.” Because people have come to her Portland classes with such varied reasons for being there, she hopes that these new groups can tailor classes to their needs. Whether that’s as a business or a volunteer-run nonprofit, Davis just hopes that people will be creative enough to find what works for them.
While there will be a period of initial training for new test markets, Davis hopes to make the materials for new classes available online. For a woman who has received numerous criticisms for promoting a carnivorous lifestyle, she truly seems interested in bringing the knowledge of how to be the right kind of carnivore to the public.
Davis, once a vegetarian, was never a very good one. “I was literally hungry because I wasn’t eating. No fault of vegetarianism.” That part of her life came to an end after a stint teaching creative writing and theater in a Maximum Security prison. When the warden sent her back with the inmates, she looked skinny, sick, and anemic. “You’re one of those vegetarians aren’t you?” said the first woman Davis met.
So she set out to get some meat on her bones; the right kind of meat. The response butchering classes like the Portland Meat Collective have gotten shows that she’s not alone in wanting eating meat to be a skill we’ve mastered, not an unfortunate reality to be forgotten.
The skills gained in a Meat Collective class raise people above a model where they have to eat only chicken wings or only three cuts of steak simply because they don’t know what to do with the rest of the animals. That’s not home cooking; it’s a lack of education about the many other uses—equally delicious—for the meat we bring into our kitchen.
Whole animal butchery seems especially bloody because it’s so hands on. But what it recognizes is that eating animals is a violent enterprise, whether you’re doing the cutting or leaving it to someone else. As Davis says in the Kickstarter video, it’s through exposure to classes like the Meat Collective’s that people might “really rethink their relationship to food and specifically to meat.” What else is education for?
-Tove K. Danovich