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The kids were wearing aprons over their jeans. When it wasn’t their turn to butcher, they gossiped and texted friends photos of the dead pig, which was splayed out on a jigsaw of white cutting boards, its head sitting nearby, gazing on; its eyelids had been sliced off during an inspection for parasites. On a counter, industrial plastic bins were marked: bellies, loin/chops, shoulders/roasts, hams, bones/trotters/hocks. The students took turns removing the pig’s feet and breaking the animal down into four “primals”: shoulder, loin, belly and ham. Then Davis stepped in to show them how to butcher it into the cuts they’d seen at the grocery store and the ones they hadn’t. She picked up a leg, peeling off the skin with her blade, removing the “H-bone,” and then turned it toward her students. “Instead of muscling through this,” she said, “I’m going to use the tip of my knife to feather through the fascia,” the pig’s connective tissue. Davis held the knife in a butcher’s grip and delicately separated the muscle groups to reveal a roast. “Now it’s your turn.”
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Butchery is a new course being offered by the Oregon Episcopal School, an independent preparatory academy that prides itself on “inquiry-based learning.” Each year, the week before spring break, called Winterim, is reserved for experimental education projects. Some students go dog-sledding in Minnesota. Others play Dungeons & Dragons or opt for an intensive course in the art of hat-making. Recently, an English teacher at the school, Kara Tambellini, read an article about the Portland Meat Collective and proposed a course on butchery.
And so Davis, who has taught butchery to mothers and young professionals, to beer brewers and bike messengers, but never to high schoolers, devised a weeklong curriculum that covered the basics. This included a field trip on a Friday, when she took the students to a local farm to meet and select a pig, whom they named Wilbur and then, realizing she was female, renamed Wilburess.
The next Monday morning, the class met up with Wilburess again at a local slaughterhouse, along with her 30-year-old owner, Bubba King, who had a thick brown beard and bounced a 5-month-old baby named Ulysses on his hip. When the recession hit, King explained, he borrowed some farmland — though he had no previous farm experience — to raise pigs. He learned how to butcher them on YouTube. Eventually, he got in touch with Davis, who, through the Meat Collective, gave him a formal lesson. Now her students buy his hogs for their butchery courses. King sells them for $3.25 per pound of hanging weight, which is how much an animal weighs after it has been slaughtered, gutted and drained of its blood. Wilburess, at 171 pounds, earned him $536 — he gave the students a discount.
In this farm-to-table era, community-supported-agriculture shares — in which families purchase farm goods through a weekly subscription — have become increasingly popular. Nowhere is that more true than in Portland, where people take their food ethics, among other things, very seriously. There is a sketch in the first episode of the IFC comedy “Portlandia” in which characters played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein persistently nudge their waitress for information about the chicken on the menu. After asking if the chicken was raised organically and about the size of its roaming area, they find out that the chicken was named Colin and that it grew up on a farm 30 miles outside Portland; later Armisen is handed the chicken’s citizenship papers. (The line between Portland and “Portlandia” often blurs; for example, Armisen gave the commencement address to Oregon Episcopal’s graduating class.)
Six months before that episode was broadcast, I moved to Portland, and while I was unpacking boxes in my new house, a neighbor stopped by and asked me if I wanted to buy a cow. I went silent for a moment, then asked the only question that came to mind: “Where would I put it?” My neighbor, standing in my doorway wearing his bike helmet, handed me a brochure. “I found two people already, so you’d get one-fourth of the cow,” he said. He pointed to an address. “You can visit him here.”
It’s not as easy to get farm-to-table meat, however, as it is rhubarb and pattypan squash. Meat regulations are strict, and they dictate that animals must be slaughtered and processed (gutted, cleaned and butchered) at a U.S.D.A.-approved facility before entering the commercial market. There is an exception: If no one is making a profit, and the animal is going to be used only to feed family and friends, it can be slaughtered and processed at the owner’s discretion. The loophole was probably intended for cattle ranchers, but city folks can use this exception to purchase a live animal (or a share of it) before it is killed. Meat C.S.A.’s are catching on throughout the country, and Portland — where its legal to have three or fewer ducks, chickens or pygmy goats on your property without a permit — is already three steps ahead. What better way to learn about the ethics of your meat than to slaughter and butcher it yourself?
The Portland Meat Collective — a group of butchers and chefs that offers classes on meat production, butchery, cooking and, yes, slaughter — was founded by Davis, a self-described “meat thinker.” She challenges her students and the larger community to engage with all aspects of meat production, whether that means visiting animals at farms or learning the skills to put them on their plates. The collective gave its first butchery course in 2010 and now holds classes in commercial kitchens, charging $100 to $300 per class. In the last three years, it has educated more than 1,000 students. The collective plans to introduce a Kickstarter campaign to expand the model nationwide. They’re considering Seattle and Hood River, Ore., as test markets.
As a result of being a nose-to-tail carnivore, Davis has been called everything from a killer to an anti-feminist by animal activists, who might be surprised to learn she once was a vegetarian herself. (When I asked her why she began eating meat again, she replied, “I was hungry.”) The organization that leased Davis a commercial kitchen for Winterim asked that we not mention its name, and when Davis initially visited the space, someone asked how she was going to contain the pig’s blood. “What blood?” she said, and the reply revealed that the owners thought she was going to walk a live pig through the front door and kill it in front of nine teenagers. This ignorance, Davis says, is telling of our relationship to the animals that we eat — most of us don’t know the difference between butchery and slaughter.
Here’s how Wilburess actually died. At the slaughterhouse, she walked down a chute into a kill room where Latin dance music was playing. A man applied an electrical prong to the back of her head to stun her senseless. He sent another stun to her heart to induce cardiac arrest. Then he checked her eyes for rapid movements and, finding none, pierced her brachial artery. He moved her body into a vat of scalding water to loosen the hair follicles. Then she was placed on a table to be dehaired. A worker hung her body on a hook, eviscerated it, then cut it down the middle. The students watched it all. No one fainted. No one cried. (Though a few kids admitted to their teachers later that they were considerably shaken.) As for Davis, she said that the first time she witnessed a slaughter, she broke into tears, and nearly every time she visits a slaughterhouse, she gets choked up.
The reasoning underlying the Portland Meat Collective, she says, is that by taking part in the process, we begin to think of how to use the animal differently. “Once you slaughter a pig, you dehair it, you butcher it, you wrap it and you put it in your freezer, it’s so much work you don’t want to waste it,” Davis says. “It’s special.” Two days after Wilburess’s slaughter, Davis cut off the pig’s head and started listing its possible uses. “Once I take the face off, there’s a lot I can do with this. I can make my jowl bacon. I can leave the face intact and make porchetta di testa. I can dry the pig ears and give them to a dog. I can make headcheese.” She pointed to the area just next to the jaw. “The more a muscle works, the tougher it is, the more flavorful it is. Imagine how much these worked — the cheeks!” The students watched in silence. “They’re delicious.”
The first animal Davis ever slaughtered was a chicken. After that, she killed a rabbit. “I’ve never figured out how to fully articulate what happens,” she said. “I don’t feel guilty, and I don’t feel bad. It is a pure and intense experience, but it is the most complicated experience you can have in terms of living and dying.”
The way the Portland Meat Collective teaches rabbit slaughter is by having a person sit in a chair with a rabbit at their feet and gently place a broomstick over its neck. When you pull the body, the stick breaks the rabbit’s neck. Sometimes, it goes badly. “This one guy pulled the body so hard, he ripped the head off,” Davis told me. “I came home from that class and curled up on a couch and didn’t move for a day.” In a separate incident last year, activists stole 18 rabbits from a breeder who supplies the Meat Collective. Among the group of stolen rabbits was a nursing mother, and because she’d gone missing, several 10-day-old rabbits died. Davis wrote an essay about the incident that was later adapted for the radio program “This American Life.” (Again the line between Portland and “Portlandia” blurred; it turns out one of the suspected rabbit thieves was an extra on the TV show.)
As a kid, Davis hunted and fished with her family, and one summer she worked in an “intentional community,” where bakers consulted their astrological charts before baking bread. As an adult, after working at National Geographic Adventure and Saveur, she moved west in 2006 to become the food editor of Portland Monthly. There, Davis experienced — and later wrote an article about — “the tastiest cut of beef you’ve never heard of”: bavette. But when she set out to buy it, she was stymied. No butcher carried it or could even tell her where the cut was located on the cow. The chef at the restaurant where she first ate bavette couldn’t tell her exactly where on the animal it came from; nor could the guys at the meat shop, who mostly wielded their knives not to butcher an animal but to cut open boxes and pull out ready-made cuts. Eventually, she discovered that the bavette was located between the sirloin and the flank. It is known as “flap meat” in the U.S., and typically tossed into the container reserved for grind.
In 2009, in search of a deeper understanding, Davis went to France to study with an American cooking teacher named Kate Hill and to serve as an apprentice with a family of butchers and farmers named the Chapolards. She doesn’t speak French, and the Chapolards didn’t speak English, so she learned their craft through risk and repetition. She made some costly mistakes, like the time they handed her what she thought was a shoulder primal, and she cubed and skewered it, only to realize it was actually a ham. “I basically just lost them hundreds of dollars,” she recalls.
The Chapolards would say, “Why would you do this thing that’s not for beautiful, smart women?” It wouldn’t be the last time she ran up against this question, which often carries the implication that, given her relatively short apprenticeship in the world of butchery, she has traded on her looks to gain fame. She’s aware but not concerned about the focus on her unexpected appearance. “I don’t want to capitalize off it,” she says, “and I kind of do.”
After a summer in the Chapolards’ cutting room, Davis returned to Portland and found a job at a specialty-foods store called Pastaworks, where she tried to bring European butchery to the meat counter. “Let’s not do individual pork chops,” she suggested. “Let’s put the whole loin in the case so it looks beautiful and we can cut individual chops.” But the loin was unrecognizable to her customers. “Is that tuna?” they asked. So later that year, she decided to start a school that would replicate her experience in France by purchasing whole animals from small farms and teaching people how to butcher them by hand. “If we gave people the opportunity to try and come up with an alternative system of meat production,” Davis once wrote in response to an online comment by a vegetarian, “we’d a) eat a lot less meat, and b) really dedicate ourselves to thinking about what it means to kill an animal for food, thereby c) causing us to recalibrate our respect for the animal world.”
On the last day of butchery class, the students made sausages. They loaded a meat grinder with chunks of pork shoulder, fatback (the layer of hard fat used to make lard) and spices. The grinder returned the pork to the students in ribbons, which they packed into the chamber of a sausage stuffer. Each student fit intestinal casings onto a nozzle and churned a crank with one hand while using the other to coax the cased sausage into a spiral.
I asked Alex, a 17-year-old wearing a fencing-team jacket, how it felt to make sausage out of a pig he knew by name.
“I hate the feeling of raw meat,” he said.
“Then why’d you take this class?” asked Sean, a 17-year-old with a side interest in baking cheesecake.
“I felt like I had to know,” Alex replied.
Another student, Sophia, 19, who showed promising knife skills throughout the week, said that in the dorms, her butchery lessons hadn’t been so well received. “Everyday someone asks, ‘What did you kill today?’ ”
“It’s a slow education,” Davis said of teaching people the origin of their food. She has received requests from all over the country asking her to start meat collectives in other states. “Here, it’s been pretty easy to create an alternate economy,” she says, estimating that about one-third of her students go on to purchase meat directly from farmers. But she also points out that in Portland, they’re lucky to be so close to sources of livestock. “We have the Willamette Valley and eastern Oregon that’s full of great small farmers.” Other cities are not so connected, physically and otherwise, to local agriculture. “I had a woman who wanted to start one in Baltimore, and I was like, ‘How far away is a good farm, whatever that means to you?’ ” The woman took her best guess. “She said, ‘I don’t know, 500 miles or something?’ ”
Once the sausages were made, the class poached them, then browned them on a flattop griddle, then arranged them around the edge of a ceramic platter piled with green lentils. I wondered if the students would suddenly balk, preoccupied with the knowledge that, after days of butchering, they were about to eat an animal they’d once seen alive.
When they sat down at the table, they didn’t even wait to pass the platter. They reached over one another, spooning heaping servings onto their plates. They scarfed it down and fought over the last links.
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