Greg Houston
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After we finished our bowls of fabada—a saffron-scented white-bean soup containing blood sausage, freshly ground chorizo, and cubes of braised pig trotters—one of the cooks stood up to announce the second course. "We're going to have a Hector salad," he said. "We sautéed up some Hector liver, and there's some Hector bits, as well as confit pork that wasn't from Hector, though he came from the same litter."
Naming the pig we were about to eat sat ill with me, but I understood the impulse. Most of us about to dine on this animal had watched him die the day before.
At 9:30 on a cold, clear Sunday, I arrived at a Port Orchard farm and felt my ribs start to constrict. All week I'd been slipping the day's excursion into conversation as nonchalantly as I could. What are you doing this weekend? Oh, going to a party on Saturday and a pig slaughter on Sunday. Most people, even vegetarians, expressed more interest than revulsion, but all of us treated my attendance as an unpleasant duty. No one asked if they could come along.
But I was attending the slaughter out of a sense of obligation as much as curiosity or appetite. Organizer Gabriel Claycamp was calling the event a "Sacrificio," a re-creation of the Iberian tradition in which an entire village turns out to kill a pig and make sausages, hams, and other forms of preserved pork while feasting on more fresh cuts. (You can read about an authentic sacrificio in Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour.) Slaughtering a pig for winter is still as common an experience in many parts of the world as attending a Super Bowl party is here.
Seattle has certainly seen animals killed for pig roasts, barbecues, and other private celebrations, and several local butchers do sell live animals for that purpose. Last February, underground-restaurant organizer Michael Hebberoy and Portland chef Morgan Brownlow invited a dozen Seattle chefs to a Vashon Island farm for a private master class in whole-hog slaughter and butchery. But Claycamp's Sacrificio may have been the first combination slaughter, butchery class, and dinner held for the public. "First and foremost," he said later, "I wanted people to walk away feeling like it was a respectful celebration, and that the animal was as far as possible from the polystyrene packages people pick up in the supermarkets."
To me, attending the Sacrificio was part of my evolving relationship with meat. The fact that I, like many of my friends, talk about an "evolving relationship with meat" represents a cultural shift in itself. My parents both grew up in the country, killing chickens and rabbits for dinner. My dad worked in a butcher shop throughout high school, and our family (with the exception of my sister) never anthropomorphized animals or expressed distaste for meat. I think that as a society, though, we're developing a schizoid approach to meat: As we grow more and more distanced from the realities of meat production, and as we long more and more for an emotional connection to it, we've inflated the killing of an animal for food, something that one or two generations back was simply a practical necessity, into a cathartic, therapy-requiring event. Especially in Seattle, especially after the publication of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, urban diners are feeling the need to be more "conscious" of where their food comes from. A host of food trends—the explosion of farmers markets, the incessant labeling of farms and artisanal producers on restaurant menus, the growing concerns about raising and killing domestic animals humanely, the ascendancy of pork, chefs' recent love affair with offal—were all coming together in this one event.
My own relationship with meat shifted three or four years ago, when I promised myself that if I was going to eat it, I would do it as consciously as possible. That meant two rules. One: Accept the idea that I'm a predator eating the flesh of a dead animal. I eat, and enjoy, as many parts of the beast as I can stomach (including the stomach). I do not hide from reality by eating boneless, skinless, antiseptic chicken breast and justify my consumption as simply a means of adding "protein" to the meal. Two: Recognize that I eat more meat than my body needs and that meat doesn't need to be central to every meal. When I'm off work, these days I only cook meat a few times a month, mostly for family members who love it more than I, and my daily meat consumption rarely exceeds 3 or 4 ounces.
Somehow, though, that wasn't enough.
Claycamp is not a man to make a small gesture. The chef and cooking instructor, who showed up to the event coiffed in tiny, barrette-sculpted braids, is the guy behind underground restaurant Gypsy, famous for its 16-course dinner parties, page-long application for mailing-list supplicants, and spot on Bourdain's Travel Channel show. (I reviewed Gypsy's more casual, public sibling, Vagabond, in July 2007.) Above ground, he and wife Heidi run Culinary Communion, a six-year-old cooking school that teaches everything from how to boil water to how to break down a whole (dead) pig, and Claycamp's most popular classes are his charcuterie series teaching the fundamentals of curing and smoking meats.
