Eugene weekly., January 25, 2018, Page 39, Image 39

MEAT
ISN'T JUST
MURDER
Eugene Meat Collective teaches the ancient process of
food preparation from butchery to sausage making BY RICK LEVIN
T
hat hamburger you’re biting into: An animal
died for that. It was killed and bled out and
cut up and ground down into a ropy mush by
grand industrialized processes, only to appear
on your plate as a circular chunk of flavorful
protein, all prepared behind the glittery curtain of con-
sumer convenience. Hey, presto!
This is not some morbid ideological statement meant
to shame the meat-eating public but, rather, a simple and
proper assertion of fact. And the fact that most of us are
divorced from this fact — that the vast majority of us are
not willing to slaughter, or even think about slaughtering
the food we eat, and yet continue to eat it — is a bit of
magical thinking that points to a serious rupture in our re-
lationship to just about everything: food, nature, the cycle
of life and death itself.
At Eugene Meat Collective (EMC), the idea is to stitch
people back into a direct relationship with the meat they
eat, and in so doing restore them to a mode of life that has
held for the vast majority of human history, before it was
disrupted in the past 200 years or so by mass industrial-
ization and rampant consumerism — namely, our inti-
mate involvement in feeding ourselves, instead of merely
being fed. This is an extension of the farm-to-table move-
ment, and so, quite literally, grassroots in nature.
In its mission statement, EMC lays out its “philosophy,”
which doubles as a decent description of what, exactly, the
collective offers: “…We believe that a shared, communi-
ty-minded education in slaughter, butchery, meat cookery,
and charcuterie can provide an effective and necessary
JONATHAN TEPPERMAN, FOUNDER OF
EUGENE MEAT COLLECTIVE
P HOTO S BY T R AS K BEDO RT HA
EUGENEWEEKLY.COM/CHOW
path to rethinking our food system. Plus, it’s been our ex-
perience that food is far more pleasurable to eat when we
are involved in the decisions that lead to its preparation.”
In other words, EMC is a private, hands-on butchery
school where anyone interested in becoming more in-
volved with the meat they eat can learn everything from
slaughter and preparation to sausage-making and proper
storage.
“The problem is disconnectedness from our food and
the natural way of things,” says Eugene Meat Collective
founder Jonathan Tepperman. He says he became part of
this burgeoning national movement in a “roundabout”
way, through a growing interest in wilderness survival
and the urban homesteading he first encountered in Co-
lumbus, Ohio.
Influenced by journalist Michael Pollan, who advocates
restoring food to its proper place in local homegrown cul-
ture, Tepperman became more and more passionate about
sourcing his own food. “I had major issues with industri-
alized meat,” he says. “The adult thing to do is to kill an
animal myself. There are no meat-eaters who have a leg
to stand on when it comes to disparaging thoughts about
hunters,” he adds, pointing out that it’s often hunters who
make the fiercest conservationists.
After relocating from Ohio to Eugene in 2015, Tep-
perman was introduced to Camas Davis, who in 2009
launched the first Meat Collective in Portland before go-
ing national with the Meat Collective Alliance in 2013.
Davis urged Tepperman to head up a chapter in Eugene,
and he’s been going full bore ever since. In partnering with
local chefs, he’s offered classes on everything from lamb
and pig butchering to clamming and pâté making to local
restaurants, culinary kitchens and even campgrounds.
For Tepperman, the idea of reconnecting people with the
ancient processes of butchering and meat preparation carries
purposes far beyond the merely pragmatic. “We all feel like
something is wrong,” he says, pointing out that our alien-
ation from the source of our own sustenance has profound
effects on how we feel about life — its purpose, its meaning.
“Fundamentally, eating is death,” he says. “In order
for us to eat, other things die. We have been raised to be
infantile around our food, and especially around meat.”
For Tepperman, that act of killing and preparing meat
is a tradition as old as humanity itself, and it creates a
sense of connectedness to nature and to each other — the
very foundation of human culture.■
For more information about Eugene Meat Collective, including a
schedule of upcoming classes, visit eugenemeatcollective.com, visit
the EMC Facebook page, call 408-489-0819 or send an email to
eugenemeatcollective@gmail.com.
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