KILLING IT

LEARNING THE ART OF BUTCHERY

CAMAS DAVIS Picador, 341pp, £16.99, Oldie price £12.79 inc p&p

The essence of this book is laid out on the slab in its first chapter, which describes the slaughter and dismembering in a small, family-run abattoir in Gascony of a 700lb pig. It is, wrote Taylor Antrim in Vogue, a ‘gastronomic memoir’.

Thirtysomething Camas Davis from Portland, Oregon, loses her job as a magazine editor, splits from her boyfriend and buys a flight to Toulouse to learn the art of wholeanimal butchery as it is practised by 1 per cent of the meat industry, ie, at the opposite end of the spectrum from boneless chicken breasts in Styrofoam packaging. This, wrote Hilary Rose in the Times, was ‘cradle-to-grave, nose-to-tail pig business. They grew the grain that fed the pigs, fattened them in their fields, slaughtered them in their slaughterhouse, then used every single bit except the oink for food.’

The second part of the book deals with Davis’s founding of the Portland Meat Collective, whereby she aims to educate her fellow Americans in the French way of killing and eating. In amongst it all is the equally bloody tale of her love life. Cree Lefavour for the New York Times was unimpressed: for anyone with an interest in food, ‘much of the material will feel overly familiar’ and her ‘insights and questions appear better suited to the village idiot in Agen than to an American reader in 2018’, leaving one to wonder whether she really was ever that naive. Ouch.