After losing her job as a food journalist, Camas Davis felt totally lost, out of love with her life and the world. She had spent her career writing about food, but she had never forced herself to grapple with how it got to her plate. Now she wanted to change that, she wanted to experience something real. So she travelled to France to learn the art of butchery. There, in the rolling countryside of Gascony, surrounded by farmers and producers who understood every part of the process, she realised it was time to make a change.
Killing It is a book about a woman doing something simultaneously extreme and unexpected, yet incredibly simple - a return to a relationship with food we only lost a few decades ago. It is story about turning your life upside down and starting again, it is about falling in and out of love, and it is about understanding what it means to be human and what it means to be animal too. After losing her job in journalism in 2009, Camas Davis set out to learn the art of butchery and charcuterie. Unable to find appropriate classes or schools in the United States, Davis travelled to Gascony where she found dozens of mentors from which to draw experience and an endless supply of good stories. Upon her return to the USA, she founded the Portland Meat Collective, a one-of-a-kind meat school, and since then she has written about her adventures in butchery and has been on NPR's This American Life. In 2014, she formed and launched the Meat Collective Alliance, a nonprofit whose mission it is to help individuals and communities start their own Meat Collectives across the USA. A deeply personal female narrative memoir about life, love, death and dinner, set in the world of butchery.
