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.
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."
