Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Killing It: An Education
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and activist. Portland Monthly, Portland, OR, food editor, 2006-09. Portland Meat Collective, Portland, founder and instructor, 2009–. Good Meat Project, Portland, founder, 2014–.
WRITINGS
Contributor to magazines, including Saveur and National Geographic Adventure.
SIDELIGHTS
Camas Davis is an activist for what she calls ethical meat production. In 2009, Davis and two friends went to France to learn animal butchery and meat processing from a family of farmers who produced pork economically, using every part of the pig. When she returned to her hometown of Portland, Oregon, she founded the Portland Meat Collective, a school where students can take hands-on courses in slaughter, butchery, and cooking. She hoped to replicate what she learned in France and to “create a more informed consumer base that would support sustainable farms, humane meat production and processing, and a shift toward responsible whole-animal eating and thinking,” according to the Portland Meat Collective’s website. She is also founder of the Good Meat Project. a nonprofit organization advocating for responsible meat production and consumption. She has detailed her experiences and philosophies in the memoir Killing It: An Education.
Davis, who was a vegetarian for a time in her teens, says that many people do not wish to give up eating meat, and she seeks to make meat-eaters aware of what goes into bringing the product to their tables. She calls for animals to be slaughtered in the most humane way possible, and for using all parts of an animal as food. She urges consumers to know where their meat comes from, avoid factory-farmed products, and on the whole to eat less meat. “Buying [meat] and not asking any questions or thinking anything about where it came from is a big part of the problem,” she told Taylor Antrim in an interview for Vogue‘s online edition. “I also think demanding cheap meat is bad thing because you’re then supporting a system of meat production that is inhumane, bad for the planet, and bad for us. “
In Killing It, she describes witnessing the slaughter of a pig in France–she did not do any of the pig slaughtering herself, although she has killed rabbits and chickens–and learning how to create various cuts of meat from the animal. The two months she spent gaining these skills gave her a more intimate relationship with meat production, and she felt increased respect for animals that are used for food. The experience also made her an advocate for sustainable livestock production. She goes on to detail the sexism experienced by female butchers, and her feelings about her newfound fame as an activist for mindful meat-eating. She details what was happening in her personal life as well–the trip to France came after she lost a job as a magazine editor and broke up with a longtime romantic partner. She went on to have other relationships, with both men and women, including another female butcher.
Several critics found Killing It informative and engaging, even if her graphic passages on slaughter may be hard for some to read. “the meat-squeamish might skip over” these sections of the book, but this is just the audience that Davis wishes to reach, remarked a Kirkus Reviews contributor. In BookPage, Lily McLemore explained: “Davis surmises that a large part of Americans’ unease toward meat is ultimately wrapped up in the big fear: death. Davis wants to inspect that fear, handle it and understand the whole bloody mess of it.” The author, McLemore noted, “puts uncomfortable, complex truths out on the table, no matter what they are, and digs in.” She also chronicles a “life-altering journey” and does so in “lucid, striking prose,” McLemore added. Amy Wang, writing in Portland’s Oregonian, called Killing It “an absorbing confessional that opens with the uneasy relationship we Americans have with our meat but quickly levels up from there to explore issues of gender, identity, community and purpose.” Davis, she said, “writes smoothly and surely, and the book reads almost like a novel, with characters who grow and develop, intriguing settings … and conflicts aplenty,” many of the latter involving her romantic life.
Minneapolis Star Tribune commentator Amy Wang thought the portions about Davis’s love affairs have “a soap opera-ish air,” and she preferred “the far more fascinating discussions around livestock sustainability, about being raised as a hunter, about being a ‘girl butcher’ in an overwhelmingly male profession, about navigating an complicated culinary landscape of vegetarians, meat-eaters, vegans and groups such as Rabbit Advocates, about being covered by the media complete with cleaver and little black dress.” In a similar vein, the Kirkus Reviews critic observed: “The writing, like her life, clicks into place when she loses herself in the subject matter.” A Publishers Weekly contributor recommended the book highly, praising Davis’s “powerful writing and gift for vivid description.” Readers will “feel as if they, too, are embarking on a life-changing journey,” the reviewer concluded.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Davis, Camas, Killing It: An Education (memoir), Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
BookPage, August, 2018. Lily McLemore, “The Beating Heart of the Matter,” p. 18.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of Killing It.
Oregonian (Portland, OR), July 19, 2018, Amy Wang, “Camas Davis’ New Memoir Tells the Story of Her Passion for ”Responsible Meat,'”
Portland Monthly, July, 2018, Natasha Tandler, “How Portlander Camas Davis Turned from Journalism to Butchery.”
Publishers Weekly, April 30, 2018, review of Killing It, p. 50.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), July 20, 2018, Kim Ode, review of Killing It.
ONLINE
National Public Radio website, https://www.npr.org/ (July 24, 2018), Terry Gross, “Food Writer Becomes a Butcher to Better Understand the Value of Meat” (excerpts from Fresh Air broadcast).
Penguin Random House website, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/ (August 30, 2018), brief biography.
Portland Meat Collective website, https://www.pdxmeat.com/ (August 30, 2018), brief biography.
Vogue website, https://www.vogue.com/ (July 25, 2018), Taylor Antrim, “Can We Eat Meat Ethically? Ask Butcher-Memoirist Camas Davis.”
Camas Davis
Photo of Camas Davis
Photo: © Cheryl Juetten
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Camas Davis is a former editor and writer for magazines including Saveur and National Geographic Adventure. In 2009, she traveled to southwest France to study whole animal butchery and charcuterie and subsequently founded the Portland Meat Collective, a transparent, hands-on meat school that has become a local and national resource for meat education and reform. In 2014, Camas launched the Good Meat Project, a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring responsible meat production and consumption through experiential education across the country. Camas and the Portland Meat Collective have been covered in media outlets such as the New York Times Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and Cooking Light.
Quoted in Sidelights: “create a more informed consumer base that would support sustainable farms, humane meat production and processing, and a shift toward responsible whole-animal eating and thinking,”
What's a Meat Collective?
A Meat Collective inspires responsible meat production and consumption through hands-on, transparent, experiential education. The Portland Meat Collective is the first of its kind in the country. Our classes are taught by seasoned butchers and chefs. We source our animals from local farms we can trust. And our students, though diverse, have one thing in common. They come to learn.
GO TO: History Philosophy Our Partners Instructors Farms
We are a one-of-a-kind meat school and community resource in Portland, Oregon that offers hands-on classes in slaughter, butchery, meat cookery, and charcuterie. For each PMC class, local farmers sell whole animals to students, who in turn learn from seasoned butchers and chefs how to transform the animals into everything from pork chops to bacon. Students go home with a lot of good meat and increasingly rare knowledge. Chefs and butchers share their art. And farmers are able to sell directly to consumers who appreciate their sustainable farming practices. The result? A growing community of informed omnivores who support responsible meat production and consumption in America.
History
In 2009, Camas Davis, a magazine editor and food writer, traveled to France to study whole-animal butchery and charcuterie with Kate Hill and the Chapolards, a family of farmers and butchers who owned and operated every part of getting pork to people's tables, from growing the grain to feed their pigs to doing all the butchery and charcuterie themselves. The Chapolards were able to sell every part of their animals as food to their customers at outdoor markets each week. Their customers ate meat economically, often as an accent to a meal, and with a reverence and respect that Camas had not experienced in the States.
Upon her return home to Portland, Oregon, she founded the Portland Meat Collective to bring the same transparent, hands-on experiences she encountered in France to her community. Her hope was that by bringing more people into the process by which good, clean, fair meat gets to our tables she could create a more informed consumer base that would support sustainable farms, humane meat production and processing, and a shift toward responsible whole-animal eating and thinking.
In 2014 Camas launched the Good Meat Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to inspire responsible meat consumption and production through experiential education not just in Portland, but across the country. With the help of the MCA, Camas is spreading the Meat Collective model to communities as close as Seattle and as far away as Detroit and even Gainesville. We’re now a movement!
Philosophy
Keep Meat Real. It’s our motto because it’s our philosophy. We believe that everyone is entitled to an understanding of the myriad, often confusing ways that food gets to our tables. The more we become skilled participants in this process, the more control we have over the system that feeds us—and the more we can change that system for the better. A shared education in humane slaughter and whole-animal butchery, cookery, and charcuterie provides an effective path to rethinking our food system. We source good, clean, fair, humane meat from local farms for all of our classes and are dedicated to teaching people how to use the entire animal for food. Eat better meat and less of it—that’s our motto too.
Our Partners
Over the years, we have been lucky to have found individuals and businesses who are excited to let us host our classes in their kitchen or event space. In 2017, our founder, Camas Davis, partnered with The Nightwood Society, a collaboration of women farmers, chefs, butchers and creatives who have banded together to produce extraordinary experiences around food and wine. The Nightwood is a private event space, a creative incubator, and it is also home to a rotating series of classes, including Portland Meat Collective workshops. We are grateful to have joined this tribe of talented women and even more excited to be able to hold our classes in the Nightwood space.
Also, check out the Good Meat Project! In 2014, PMC's founder Camas Davis launched the Good Meat Project to spread the Meat Collective education model across the country. Today, the Good Meat Project seeks to inspire responsible meat production and consumption through experiential education that is targeted to eaters, feeders, and seeders. Find out more about the Good Meat Project's programs here.
Camas Davis
OWNER OF PORTLAND MEAT COLLECTIVE, WRITER, MEAT THINKER
In 2009, Camas Davis, a magazine editor and food writer, traveled to southwest France to study butchery and charcuterie with Kate Hill and the Chapolards. Upon her return, she began working at a local meat counter and founded the Portland Meat Collective with the goal of bringing the kind of transparent, hands-on educational experience she had in France to her community. Camas has learned from many different mentors over the years and now teaches PMC classes on occasion. "Running the PMC means I never grow stagnant, as a teacher and as a lifelong student," Camas says. In 2014, Camas launched the Good Meat Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to inspire responsible meat consumption and production through experiential education. Camas and the MCA are helping to launch dozens of Meat Collectives across the country. She continues to write about her experiences in meat and is the author of Killing It (Penguin, 2018), a memoir about her adventures in the world of meat.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Buying [meat]and not asking any questions or thinking anything about where it came from is a big part of the problem,” she told Taylor Antrim in an interview for Vogue‘s online edition. “I also think demanding cheap meat is bad thing because you’re then supporting a system of meat production that is inhumane, bad for the planet, and bad for us. “
Can We Eat Meat Ethically? Ask Butcher-Memoirist Camas Davis
JULY 25, 2018 4:42 PM
by TAYLOR ANTRIM
Camas Davis
Camas Davis
Photo: Daniel Berman
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You'll know after the first ten pages of Camas Davis's involving, thought-provoking gastronomic memoir, Killing It, if this is a book for you. That first scene describes, in graphic detail, the slaughter of a 700-pound pig in an abattoir in Gascony, France. "This felt to me like a private moment that I shouldn't be allowed to witness," Davis writes of the pig's death, "but I did not turn away. I was here to learn, after all. I was here to do something hard and real."
"Hard and real" here is the practice of whole-animal butchery—which she learns after maxing out her credit card, flying to Toulouse and apprenticing with a French farming family. Davis had previously lost her job at a magazine in Portland, Oregon, and descended into something of a personal crisis. She realized she was desperate for a change, for unmediated experience, to get out of her head and work with her hands. As someone who had written about food as part of her career, she found herself asking where the meat she ate came from. And could she have a more ethical, thoughtful, and honest relationship with the whole subject of meat eating?
Davis is a vivid writer and she's highly persuasive on the subject of grappling with culinary truths that most of us like to ignore. Like, the death of animals, and how to make those deaths meaningful. She learns in France how to use nearly every part of an animal for food—not just the chops and cuts Americans are used to. The first half of Davis's memoir describes her sometimes fumbling education in this kind of butchery. In the second half she brings what she's learned back to Portland, restarts her life, and creates the Portland Meat Collective, an organization that teaches classes in butchery and sausage making. (She also runs the nonprofit, the Good Meat Project, which aims to increase responsible meat production around the country.) I spoke to Davis about her book and about how we can all practice more thoughtful, ethical meat eating.
That first scene is intense!
I didn't set out to make it as visceral as possible, but also I knew that I wanted the book to be honest and transparent, so it felt like it would be dishonest to write that scene any other way. I also realized that it needed to be at the beginning to set the tone for the rest of the book. It sends a signal that I’m not going to couch any of this for anyone. It's going to be very much what it is.
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What was the hardest thing you had to do while learning butchery in France?
I think it was probably that—witnessing slaughter and witnessing someone do it in a way that seemed as humane and painless as possible. It really made me think about why it is that we all don’t all kill our own food and why we rely on other people to do it. Personally, I don’t even know how to shoot a gun, so I’m not going to kill a pig myself any time soon. I have killed chickens and rabbits, but it's always been with someone who really knows how. In terms of butchery it was sort of like any skill. When you start out you feel like it's all impossible but then you sort of just set out to do it. That said, I wouldn’t say I have yet learned to master the cleaver. In order to cleave a straight line you have to practice for a long time, and you have to figure out the relationship between your brain and your eyes and your hand. It's just like doing target practice.
9781101980071_KillingIt_JKF.indd
Photo: Courtesy of Penguin Press
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What are the biggest issues with the way most of us eat meat?
Buying it and not asking any questions or thinking anything about where it came from is a big part of the problem. I also think demanding cheap meat is bad thing because you’re then supporting a system of meat production that is inhumane, bad for the planet, and bad for us. And then I think the third thing would be being only willing to eat certain parts of the animal, and not seeing the entire animal as edible—which means we have to produce a lot more meat to meet that demand for pork chops and steak and ground meat.
But how do we familiarize ourselves with unusual cuts?
If you look a little bit beyond the surface of the cookbook world there are books that will teach you to cook cuts that you wouldn’t normally be used to buying or seeing in the store. It's pretty basic once you understand how an animal moves. There are some muscles that move a lot over an extended period of time and some that move a little in fast spurts, and the former are going to be cooked on low heat for a long time and the latter are going to be cooked on high heat for a short amount of time. In terms of acquiring those cuts, anyone selling meat is going to be happy to sell you whatever you ask them for, if you ask for it. You may have to get them to special order it, but no butcher I know is going to turn you down if you’re willing to buy, say, a bag of pig hearts. The easier way is to maybe go find a farmer at a farmer's market or an indoor market and ask if you can buy a quarter of an animal, and see what you get. Put it in your freezer and look online and see what you can find about cooking an eye of round or a skirt steak. It does take a little more time and research and thought...
Which many meat eaters aren't up for.
There's a pride out there in not knowing—like, Oh no, I would never eat that part of the animal because X. Or there's that cringe at the thought of where meat comes from. I think that cringe is dangerous. Obviously I’ve gone to an extreme and gone in search of knowing all the things, but what struck me in my own journey was even just knowing a few things totally changed the way I thought about meat and the system that gets it to my table.
What were those things?
Just going to France and seeing them use every single part of the animal for food. Yes we sort of know it's all edible, but not really. We don't think about parts of the head or tendons or skin—I hadn’t really understood how all those things can be turned into food and how you can make meat last by turning it into more concentrated version of itself. And I think understanding that not all meat is created equal. That a grain-fed factory-farmed pig is going to be very different in terms of flavor and texture than a pasture-raised pig that maybe is allowed to live five or seven years instead of the six months that most pigs are slaughtered at. It just so happens that when an animal is allowed to roam around and live the essential life that it should be living, you end up with a more delicious and more interesting protein.
How do you regard vegetarianism?
Oddly a lot of the people in [the ethical meat] movement were once vegetarian, which is interesting. I think that if there is this spectrum of meat eating, with vegan and vegetarianism on one end and buying meat from somewhere and not thinking twice about it on the other, we are closer to the former end of that spectrum. We also realize that are are many many people who do not want to give up meat or who don’t see it as a black and white issue.
The organization you started nine years ago, the Portland Meat Collective, is still going strong. What are the most popular classes?
By far it's pig butchery and sausage making. Those classes sell out right away. The third is charcuterie. People really want to know how to make bacon.
Food Writer Becomes A Butcher To Better Understand The Value Of Meat
July 24, 20182:37 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
Terry Gross square 2017
TERRY GROSS
Fresh Air
Camas Davis is the founder of the Portland Meat Collective. "Because I now am involved in the processes that get that meat to my table, I just understand the value of it," she says.
Cheryl Juetten/Penguin Random House
Is it possible to slaughter animals and eat meat in an an ethical way? That's the question food writer Camas Davis set out to answer when she moved to the southwest of France to apprentice as a butcher on a small, family-run farm and slaughterhouse.
Being so close to the butchering process took some getting used to — "I had to really confront my own moments of cringing or turning away or not wanting to see or know," she says. But ultimately Davis felt she had the answer to her question.
Davis came away from France feeling that "not all meat is created equal — and subsequently not all animal farming is created equal." She says the key to being an ethical carnivore is thinking carefully about how the animals are treated and where the meat is coming from.
"It's my theory — or it's a theory that I've developed over time, through my own education — that the further in we go, the better choices we make, the more agency we have in changing [the] system that brings food to our table," she says.
Davis is the founder of the Portland Meat Collective, which teaches people about conscientious farming, slaughtering and eating. Her new memoir is Killing It.
Interview Highlights
Killing It
Killing It
An Education
by Camas Davis
Hardcover, 339 pages purchase
On what goes into "ethical meat"
I don't think we all sit on the exact same part of what I think of as the "spectrum" of meat eating. And so it really depends on where you come from. On a basic level, I'm interested in a couple of things: How land is used to raise the animals that we eat for meat. ... I'm interested in ... pollution practices. I'm interested in resource management. And is the food safe for us? Do the animals have a good life? Do they have a good death? And then, on our end, when we're eating that meat, is it is it safe? Is it nutritious? Is it delicious? So all of those things play into this complicated puzzle that is ethical meat.
On how electrocution is used in slaughter
I know that sounds terrible, but essentially the idea behind humanely slaughtering an animal is that you quickly render them senseless to pain, and electric electrocution is one of the ways that they do that. And then once they are rendered unconscious ... then you would bleed them and then they are dead. ... It was all very quick and quiet and surprisingly not violent-looking, which was, I think, the most surprising part of it.
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THE SALT
In 'Appetites,' Bourdain Pleases The Toughest Food Critic (His 9-Year-Old)
If it's done wrong — if the pig is not stunned correctly, and "stunned" is the term we usually use in the industry to describe that part of the process — then the animal will feel it, and you'll know pretty immediately. So the whole goal is to keep it pain free.
On how stress affects the quality of the meat
The more stressed we are, the more adrenaline we have running through our body, the more lactic acid builds up in our muscles. And all of these things can — if not relieved before or during the death — result in tough meat. It can result in dark meat. It can result in mushy meat. So there are a lot of chemical reactions that can occur based on how that stress happened and when it happened.
On eating less meat than she used to
I don't buy it from the grocery store anymore. I fill a freezer that I have in my basement with a side of pig for my family and friends, too, and maybe a quarter of beef, if that, and a few chickens and that's mostly it. Sometimes we do supplement with a visit to the farmer's market or sometimes my husband sneaks in some grocery store meat and we have a little interaction about that.
I just eat less of it. It's also more of an accent to my meal; it's not a main course. Because I now am involved in the processes that get that meat to my table, I just understand the value of it. I pay a lot more money for it and therefore can't afford to eat as much as I used to. It's just really a special occasion for me, and an accent, more than anything else.
On the misleading labels on grocery store meat
It's a tricky landscape and unfortunately, most of the labels that exist are very vague, vaguely regulated if regulated at all, and can sometimes mean very little. Even in sort of mainstream grocery chains that I go to now, I see signs that say, "farm to table," or "family farms," or "natural meat," and, in fact, the way the regulations are worded, that doesn't have to mean anything whatsoever. So, it's hard. It's very it's very difficult to navigate that landscape. The only thing I say is you have to ask questions.
Farm Fresh? Natural? Eggs Not Always What They're Cracked Up To Be
THE SALT
Farm Fresh? Natural? Eggs Not Always What They're Cracked Up To Be
Roberta Shorrock and Mooj Zadie produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Maria Godoy adapted it for the Web.
How Portlander Camas Davis Turned from Journalism to Butchery
Her new memoir, Killing It: An Education, chronicles the long, bloody move.
By Natasha Tandler 6/19/2018 at 4:04pm Published in the July 2018 issue of Portland Monthly
1782
Camas Davis
IMAGE: COURTESY CHERYL JUETTEN
For roughly two months in 2009, Camas Davis, once an editor at this very magazine, geared up daily in rubber boots, a hairnet, and an oversize white butcher’s coat. Her mission: to learn how to split swine inside a 45-degree cutting room at a small-scale slaughterhouse in Gascony, in southwestern France. The first time she chopped a pig’s head with a cleaver and held the brain in her hand, for example, proved a revelation.
“I felt kinship,” she says. “Reverence. Wonderment. Trepidation. And melancholy.”
In her new memoir, Killing It: An Education, out this month from Penguin, Davis describes this life-altering moment as part of a long, bloody transition from the “heady meta world of writing magazine stories to sawing through bones.”
As a food reviewer in Portland pre-New York Times hype, Davis had been troubled by how even the city’s best farm-to-table joints couldn’t identify the origins of the meat on her plate.
“Whenever I wrote about meat, I could only get so far in my reporting if I started asking too many questions about where it came from,” she says. After her stint at Portland Monthly (from 2006 to 2009) and the end of a 10-year relationship, Davis used the last sliver of silver left to her name—a forgotten credit card—and hopped on a flight to France. She eventually found herself on the farm of the Chapolards—a three-generation family of seed-to-sausage pig farmers and butchers—who had agreed to teach her whole-animal butchery.
“I went to France to confront a reality I had, for most of my life, chosen not to,” Davis explains in the book, adding later: “If anyone asked me where the ham on my plate came from, I wanted to be able to tell them, from beginning to end, how it had gotten there.”
Throughout her life, Davis had a complicated relationship with meat. She spent her childhood hunting with her father, but was a vegetarian as a teenager. When the Chapolards taught her the steps to turn a 700-pound sow into charcuterie and the essential ingredients for a cassoulet, Davis finally gained a sense of “ownership” in the meat-making process. “Maybe not the kind of total ownership the Chapolards had achieved,” she writes in Killing It. “But certainly a reclamation of knowledge and skill taken away from us once industrialization took over our food system.”
Today, Davis teaches students how to transform a live animal into a tasty cut of meat at the cooking school she founded, the Portland Meat Collective. For serious DIY chefs and aspiring butchers, Davis’s classes might be a more realistic option than dropping everything and going to France.
“When you learn how to butcher the whole animal, you really start to think,” she says. “We need to be willing to pay more for meat, we need to eat better meat, and a lot less of it.”
Filed under
Memoir, Butchery
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Quoted in Sidelights: “the meat-squeamish might skip over”
“The writing, like her life, clicks into place when she loses herself in the subject matter.”
Davis, Camas: KILLING IT
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Davis, Camas KILLING IT Penguin Press (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 7, 24 ISBN: 978-1-101-98007-1
Finding beauty and moral high ground in the abattoir. In this debut memoir, Davis recounts the period when
she was laid off from writing for a weekly paper in her native Portland, Oregon, and decided to become a
professional butcher and local farming activist instead. When the first few butchers she sought out
dismissed her attempts to learn the trade, the author maxed out her last credit card to study for seven weeks
on a cooperative farm and slaughterhouse in Gascony, France. Davis' apprenticeship introduced her to a
different kind of industry, a radically local form of vertical integration wherein they slaughtered, butchered,
and sold every inch of the animals they raised to customers living within driving distance. These
conscientious slaughtering and curing methods inspired Davis to seek out other earnest, like-minded
practitioners when she returned home. With few resources besides her partner, Joelle, a fellow female
butcher, and her way with words, Davis helped start the Portland Meat Collective, one of the first
organizations of its kind dedicated to educating American consumers about the provenance of their meat
and to promoting the less familiar cuts and methods that whole-animal chefs around the world have been
serving for generations. Though the meat-squeamish might skip over the visceral descriptions of killing
animals, Davis writes for them in particular. The author and her ilk believe those who eat meat have a moral
obligation to source it as conscientiously and locally as possible. The author writes almost as much about
her love life and her search for authentic self-redefinition as she does about carving carcasses. She relates
her simultaneous relationships with a man and a woman, her pratfalls as a butcher's apprentice, and the
shambling state of her affairs in general, but the writing, like her life, clicks into place when she loses
herself in the subject matter. The making of a young female entrepreneur rendered in unvarnished detail.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Davis, Camas: KILLING IT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723270/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5bfff361.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723270
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Quoted in Sidelights: “powerful writing and gift for vivid description.” Readers will “feel as if they, too, are embarking on a life-changing journey,”
Killing It: An Education
Publishers Weekly.
265.18 (Apr. 30, 2018): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Killing It: An Education
Camas Davis. Penguin Press, $27 (352p)
ISBN 978-1-101-98007-1
With grace and power, first-time author Davis tells of how she traded a keyboard for a cleaver. After being
laid off from her job as an editor at an Oregon magazine, Davis revisited a long-held dream: working as a
butcher. She then reconnected with an acquaintance, Kate Hill, a cookbook author and cooking teacher
living in Gascony, France. Hill led Davis through a foodie's dream journey--with Armagnac, foie gras, dried
duck prosciutto--and gave her a primer on the cultural preferences in cuts of meat (while Americans enjoy
ribs, the French prefer to turn the loin into bone-in pork chops). Davis writes eloquently of the affinity she
felt for the trade--"the act of butchery is, if nothing else, an immediate one requiring you to locate your own
body in the present tense." The road wasn't without bumps, particularly what Davis calls Bunnygate--animal
rights activists who excoriated Davis and her business partners for slaughtering rabbits for food. After
returning to the U.S., Davis founded the Portland Meat Collective, a school in Oregon dedicated to meat
education that she still runs. Descriptions of the butchery process are wonderfully detailed (to cut into a pig
skull, "pull the skull and the lodged cleaver into the air ... and bang it down on the table"). Her powerful
writing and gift for vivid description allow readers to feel as if they, too, are embarking on a life-changing
journey. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Killing It: An Education." Publishers Weekly, 30 Apr. 2018, p. 50. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537852285/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=19d10192.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “Davis surmises that a large part of Americans’ unease toward meat is ultimately wrapped up in the big fear: death. Davis wants to inspect that fear, handle it and understand the whole bloody mess of it.” The author, McLemore noted, “puts uncomfortable, complex truths out on the table, no matter what they are, and digs in.” She also chronicles a “life-altering journey” and does so in “lucid, striking prose,”
The beating heart of the matter
Lily McLemore
BookPage.
(Aug. 2018): p18.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
Camas Davis cares deeply about the integrity of animals' lives. She is also a butcher. In her beautifully
written memoir, Killing It, Davis makes it clear that these two aspects of her life can peacefully coexist.
Davis' lucid, striking prose recounts a life-altering journey that began when, directionless and
brokenhearted, she booked a flight to France with the last of her funds to spend seven weeks learning how
to be a butcher in Gascony.
I met up with Davis at an airy coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, where she now runs the Portland Meat
Collective, a school where Davis and various chefs and butchers teach classes about responsible meat
consumption. Using animals sourced from local and trustworthy farmers dedicated to raising animals
humanely, the collective instructs the curious on slaughter, butchery and cooking practices.
But the road to the Portland Meat Collective was a crooked one for Davis. Growing up in rural Oregon,
Davis regularly went hunting and fishing with her father and grandfather, both avid outdoorsmen. "I wasn't
squeamish about dead fish or guts or plucking feathers from ducks," she says. "It was just a part of how I
thought about the world." In her teens, however, the hunting and fishing fell by the wayside, and she
eventually became a magazine editor and entered a long-term relationship with the man she thought she
would marry.
"In my late 20s, early 30s, I was very orthodox. I worked for magazines, that was what I did, that was my
career. I was going to do it forever." And then it all fell apart. After leaving her relationship, she lost her job
as a magazine editor in Portland. Davis was despondent, but she also realized that she was now free to do
whatever she wanted, and what she truly longed for was authenticity--not to just write about the genuine
article, but to live it.
It was then that she decided to return to her childhood connection to land, life and death by exploring
butchery. "I've sort of been fascinated with it for years, as a food writer," she says. "I was always very
excited to work on stories about butchers or about chefs who did butchery, or even just a cut of meat. For
some reason, that subject matter felt like it had more of a story than a tomato--which is not true. A tomato
has as much of an interesting story as anything else. But I guess the story of the tomato is much more
accessible, and I'm always the person that's like, 'I want the inaccessible story.'"
Staying with Kate Hill--an American living in France who hosts travelers on gastronomic journeys --on her
compound in Gascony, Davis ventured out to find the inaccessible. She went to work for the Chapolard
family on their farm, and it was with them that she found something she felt was truly authentic. The
Chapolards raise their own pigs on grain they grow themselves, and they own a nearby co-op
slaughterhouse. The family gathers together to butcher the animals, and they turn every part of the pigs into
hams, loins and the more obscure delicacies that Americans balk at: head cheese, blood sausage, trotters.
They then sell the products at market. Davis was enamored with their practices, but she doesn't romanticize
it.
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"There's so much about the disappearance of the agrarian way in modern times. It's now becoming this
myth, this caricature," she says. "There's definitely this sort of nostalgic ideal of what a butcher is." Davis
makes it clear that there's not much about butchery that is charming. "I really struggle with that in the work
that I do. I never want to give the impression that any of this is easy--that it's easy to kill an animal, or that
it's easy to raise good meat, or that it's easy to sell the whole animal." But Davis is committed to bringing
meat to the table that comes from animals that lived good lives and died as humanely as possible. It's a
serious matter, and Davis is a serious, deeply curious woman who is driven to poke at what others find
unappealing.
Like pig brains, for example. In Killing It, Davis reflects upon the brain from a pig's skull that she's just
cleaved open: "So much of what we do is in the service of keeping opposing ideas at bay inside ourselves.
Isn't this what we're doing when we eat meat without taking part in the process that brings it to our tables,
without ever being required to stare back at the animal that made that meat possible?"
To take part in this process is to grapple with a uniquely American wariness of food, in particular raw meat.
"I think, generally, we're weirdly afraid of food [in America]. We're afraid of what it will do to us, we're
afraid of how to use it in the kitchen, we're afraid of where it comes from. And yet, we don't really do
anything about that fear."
Davis doesn't shy away from that fear; she seeks it out and confronts it. She begins her memoir by
recounting a pig slaughter, watching the life drain out of a 700-pound sow. "There's a lot of assumptions we
make about what that moment [of death] is like," Davis explains, "and some of those assumptions are
correct. It can be gruesome. It can be like horribly haphazard. It can be mechanized and scary. But it doesn't
have to be."
Davis surmises that a large part of Americans' unease toward meat is ultimately wrapped up in the big fear:
death. Davis wants to inspect that fear, handle it and understand the whole bloody mess of it. "Everything
I'm writing about in this book about [the] death of animals for food is really just a larger metaphor for how
we think about death in general, and the ways in which we hide all of that."
When asked about her favorite cut of meat, Davis' answer comes as no surprise. "I tend to like the cuts that
no one else likes.... They tend to be cuts that you have to cook for a long time or smoke or grill on indirect
heat. The complex cuts." In that same spirit, Killing It puts uncomfortable, complex truths out on the table,
no matter what they are, and digs in.
INTERVIEW BY LILY McLEMORE
KILLING IT By Camas Davis Penguin Press, $27, 352 pages ISBN 9781101980071, audio, eBook
available MEMOIR
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
McLemore, Lily. "The beating heart of the matter." BookPage, Aug. 2018, p. 18. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547988061/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e53cf50e.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547988061
Quoted in Sidelights: “an absorbing confessional that opens with the uneasy relationship we Americans have with our meat but quickly levels up from there to explore issues of gender, identity, community and purpose.” Davis, she said, “writes smoothly and surely, and the book reads almost like a novel, with characters who grow and develop, intriguing settings … and conflicts aplenty,”
Camas Davis' new memoir tells the story of her passion for 'responsible meat'
Updated Jul 31; Posted Jul 19
Camas Davis' new memoir recounts how she became a butcher and how her story caught national attention.
Camas Davis' new memoir recounts how she became a butcher and how her story caught national attention. (Author photo: Ross William Hamilton/2013)
1
By Amy Wang awang@oregonian.com
The Oregonian/OregonLive
Some people might pick up Camas Davis' new memoir solely in search of tidbits about her life as "the lady butcher" behind the Portland Meat Collective. And that's fine.
But "Killing It" (Penguin Press, 352 pages, $27) is about more than how to take apart animals and turn them into chops and charcuterie. It's also about how one woman learned what really mattered to her and how to build a life around it.
Davis will discuss her new book in an appearance at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 24, at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.
Among Portland foodies, Davis' name and story are well-known. Once Portland Monthly's food editor, she was laid off in 2009 and subsequently went to France to learn butchery from a family in Gascony (dubbed last year by The New York Times as "the most delicious corner of France"). Their slow-food approach, she decided, could best be described as defiant. "And maybe that kind of defiance was what I'd been missing in my life," she mused. Upon her return to Portland, Davis founded the Portland Meat Collective, which now describes itself as "a community of informed omnivores who support responsible meat production and consumption in America."
In the early years of the collective, it seemed Davis couldn't help making headlines: She was targeted by thieves who stole rabbits the collective had been raising for butchery classes, a debacle Davis refers to as "Bunnygate" in her book. She was featured in The New York Times in a story accompanied by a photo of teenagers posed Norman Rockwell-style in front of a pig's head she was holding. She met and received an award from Martha Stewart, who told her the best way to kill a turkey.
Related: Camas Davis talks American butchery, animal-rights activists and Portland Meat Collective's nationwide expansion (Q&A)
Davis reflects on all those experiences and more in "Killing It," an absorbing confessional that opens with the uneasy relationship we Americans have with our meat but quickly levels up from there to explore issues of gender, identity, community and purpose. She writes smoothly and surely, and the book reads almost like a novel, with characters who grow and develop, intriguing settings where most readers have never been (a French farm kitchen, a Woodburn livestock auction, a Portland-area slaughterhouse), and conflicts aplenty (oh, what a tangled love life she did lead).
Ultimately, Davis' real triumph isn't that she's succeeded with the Portland Meat Collective but that she's done so on her own terms. One story she tells in the book sums it up neatly. She's just butchered venison for the first time, in public, for a demonstration, at a hunting and fishing convention. Afterward, a man who was in the audience tells her that he ran a meat processing facility for a half-century. "You did pretty darn good," he says. He doesn't tell her she did good for a woman or for a former restaurant critic; he doesn't seem interested in anything about her, in fact, except for what she's just done.
"It was a relief, however fleeting," Davis writes, "to finally be seen."
Quoted in Sidelights: “a soap opera-ish air,” and she preferred “the far more fascinating discussions around livestock sustainability, about being raised as a hunter, about being a ‘girl butcher’ in an overwhelmingly male profession, about navigating an complicated culinary landscape of vegetarians, meat-eaters, vegans and groups such as Rabbit Advocates, about being covered by the media complete with cleaver and little black dress.”
Review: 'Killing It: An Education,' by Camas Davis
NONFICTION: An American food writer heads to France to learn about butchering meat.
By Kim Ode Special to the Star Tribune JULY 20, 2018 — 10:03AM
CHERYL JUETTEN
Camas Davis Photo by Cheryl Juetten
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When we talk about barbecued ribs, smoked bacon, succulent roasts and braised thighs, we’re talking about hogs and cattle and poultry. Right?
Of course we are. Yet when the French butcher teaching Camas Davis his profession saw that she knew little of his language, he began pointing to his butt, to his thigh, to the muscles along each side of his spine — his loins — to better illustrate his cuts.
This set Davis on her heels. In her 32 years of dining, she’d never “given much thought to the intricacies of a pig’s anatomy in relation to my own.”
She began to understand how hogs, like humans, use their muscles and why we sear a chop, but throw a pork shoulder into a Crock-Pot.
“Killing It: An Education” is about coming to terms with killing and butchering dinner. But it is no pat paean to the carnivorous life, which is both its strength and detriment.
Davis is lost after being laid off from her job in Portland, Ore., as a longtime food writer and editor. She candidly writes that her personality might have played into the magazine’s decision. She’s also broke.
Killing It, by Camas Davis
After a career of writing about food, she decides to actually do food and become a butcher. She knows of an American woman running a cooking school in France who will take labor in lieu of tuition.
That it changes her life is a given. Davis went on to found the Portland Meat Collective, a cooking and butchery school that’s become a national resource for creating “a growing community of informed omnivores who support responsible meat production and consumption in America.”
That Davis is a skilled storyteller also is clear. And perhaps her story of becoming a champion of carnivores cannot be told without the personal relationships that influenced her work.
But there is a soap opera-ish air around her attachments: A 10-year relationship with Tom ended along with her job, which led to a rebound fling with Will. Then she met Joelle, a rare kindred female butcher, with whom she balanced a love affair with Andrew for some time before telling each about the other. (While Andrew then pretty much disappears in the book, they apparently remain together, judging from her loving acknowledgments to “A.R.”)
Yet this is — even from someone in their 40s — a memoir. Relationships come with the genre.
That they seem distracting likely is due to the far more fascinating discussions around livestock sustainability, about being raised as a hunter, about being a “girl butcher” in an overwhelmingly male profession, about navigating an complicated culinary landscape of vegetarians, meat-eaters, vegans and groups such as Rabbit Advocates, about being covered by the media complete with cleaver and little black dress.
Davis takes the essential need to eat and compels us to examine how, why and what we consume, without preaching or judging.
“Killing It” could be a provocative choice for book clubs, given how it propels an examination of our relationships with animals as commodities, as companions, and as coq au vin.
Kim Ode is a former writer for the Star Tribune. On twitter: @Odewrites
Killing It
By: Camas Davis.
Publisher: Penguin Press, 339 pages, $27.