(THEY BOTH LAUGH)

Underly, who helped organize Meat Camp, is something of a rockstar among American butchers. She’s most famous in meat circles for winning an online video contest called “Who’s Your Butcher?” and for her recent James Beard Award-nominated book, The Art of Beef Cutting.

Both her grandfather and father were butchers who practiced an artisanal craft that’s been nearly wiped out by the industrialization of meat. Her father’s shop got put out of business by competition from big-box retailers.
“I saw what it was like when my dad came home from work after hanging beef changed to box beef and how it changed something within his soul,” Underly said. “It’s like, I wanna bring THAT back to the community. At the core of my heart is training and education, and I have a dream, and I’m working on a business plan opening up a school to bring the trade back … teach them the economics, teach them what to do with the fat, with the jowls, so we’re not going to waste, and they can go back in other environments and build businesses.”

There were other lessons these women were learning from that hog carcass, as it went piece by piece into sausage casings and the smoker and the paté molds.

For Lilly Baker, who used to work on a goat farm before moving to Chicago, breaking down the pig was one more step in the evolution of her thinking about meat-eating.

“I’ve been vegetarian in the past,” Baker said. “And after being around domestic animals, and participating in the slaughter, and now the breakdown, and seeing how that animal really turns into a finished food product, I definitely have a lot more respect for that myself. And I’m more comfortable eating meat that I know has been respected at all points in the process, from when it was born to when it ended up on my table, and maybe less comfortable eating meat that wasn’t treated in that manner.”

And for Rachel Miller, the sous-chef at a super-hip restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., called Bondir, the lesson was about something else. She relished the all-chick vibe.
“I love it,” Miller said. “It’s a lot more comfortable. I hate to end up sounding sexist on the other end of it, but, it IS a man’s world, in the butchering and the cooking. It’s been hard enough findin’ short-order cooking jobs as a girl. That’s what I really love about the energy here, is that it’s not domineering, it’s not a pissing contest, which gets really old.”

What Miller was learning at Meat Camp had everything to do with the sustainability of the butcher —especially the female butcher.

“Butchering is not about being strong, about carrying 150 pounds,” she said. “It’s about being smart. It’s about knowing where to cut to save yourself the energy. And if you put your knife in the right spot, you can yield the same amount of meat, you can make the same amount of money as any big burly dude.”