Introducing the Slaughter Daughter

“Nice to Meat You”: The S.D. Bio

My name is Lindsay, but those who know me refer to me as Slaughter Daughter. It’s a name often misunderstood, as I don’t look the type who’s dismembered a carcass even wielded a butcher knife. The name-the creator of which shall presently remain anonymous-was born of the knowledge that my father and uncle are butchers and of the assumption that I know a lot about butchering myself.

My dad’s a butcher-I’ll give you that. He owns a small slaughterhouse in the rolling hills of Northeastern Pennsylvania where we butcher about 50 “head” a week, make sausages and bologna, and package meat for a host of colorful farmers to sell at their local market. But I am just the office assistant at this quaint abattoir. And to be honest, the only killing I do is of the occasional fly that happens upon my desk. And yet the name remains…

About a year ago, I decided that I wanted to learn more about my father’s vocation and so I left behind the high rent, cable bills and cramped apartment of New York, and began working full time in the Leona Meat Plant office, my childhood bedroom a temporary dwelling. Some days I’m left questioning why I chose an occupation in which stray animals are known to scamper across the parking lot and a rogue meat particle isn’t uncommon on your shoe. But more often, I’m dwelling on the recent realization that a slaughterhouse serves a purpose beyond killing animals and turning them into food. What we do for our customers by processing their farm-raised pigs, cows and sheep is a vital step in the emerging sustainable food movement. Anyone can put a cow in a field and fatten it up on grass for a summer. But until it makes that trip to the butcher, it will never provide you with local, sustainably-raised meat. The morbid reality is that without small, local butchers, you can say goodbye to the local livestock farmer.

Despite the fact that I don’t do any “slaughtering” myself, the name has come to represent my role as an advocate of sorts.  Apart from my daily desk job, I’m off on a mission to explore the role of the small slaughter house in a world where butchers are “Rock stars” (thank you New York Times), it’s hip to make sausage in your apartment, and “slow food” is here to stay.  On a darker note, small butcher shops are closing their doors left and right. The few that remain are can barely keep up with the overwhelming demand of farmers to get animals processed.

As the Slaughter Daughter, I explore, ask, and answer for small butchers, farmers, and meat eaters in this troubling situation. I’m hoping to learn a lot in the process and maybe, one day, have a solution. Either way, this is a conversation that we all need to join, be that in the meat room or the market, the field or on the farm. Let’s get it started.

S.D.

Slaughter Daughter
By Lindsay Debach

    It’s a shame that we so naturally accept the circumstances into which we are born. By the time we are old enough to go to preschool, we’ve already acknowledged the people and places around us as our world, and a few years later, we take that world, in all of its uniqueness (be it good or bad), for granted. Puberty hits and it’s that same world that we more often than not regret, despise, and try to conceal. That world that we ultimately resent could be our country of birth, the language that we speak, or the color of our skin. But what it takes time to realize is that all those bits and pieces of our world comprise the person see in the mirror every day. In my case, I took for granted my father’s occupation, and in so doing, failed to see the profound influence his work had on my way of life. His unglamorous post ultimately showed me that the details of our past need to be accepted in all of their glory or pain before we can see clearly the road ahead.
      My father is a butcher. He doesn’t have a potbelly or drape strings of sausages from his hands. He doesn’t have a mustace or wear one of those little straw hats, either. He does boast that he could skin a cow at the age of 10, can strip the meat from a carcass down to the bones and can season ham and bacon to perfection. Like his father before him, who started the Leona Meat Plant in 1963, he’s been in the meat business his whole life. There was no question who would take over the shop once my grandfather retired. My dad and uncle became managers of the place in the early 80’s.
    Recently they began raising their own grass fed beef, a process that we’ve all had an active part in, be it watering the cows, or mowing the pastures. Indeed, the little butcher shop we tenderly refer to as “Leona Meats” has always been quite a family affair. My cousins and I would, since we were toddlers, walk in to visit our dads at work, casually passing the sterile white tables strewn with knives, the open case of chickens, and the bits of raw hamburger meat on the floor.
    Since I was old enough to remember, I’ve known what the inside of a cow looks like, the way a pig twitches as it dies, and know that there are exactly 50 cocktail wieners to a pound. I’ve never had to worry about going hungry and to this day I’ve never ordered a steak in a restaurant, knowing I can get the best beef at home. Often we’d watch as people came to drop off animals for the slaughter: cows, pigs, sheep, and (on rare occasions), even ostriches would stare blankly from behind the white slats of the holding pens. Whenever friends came over, the visit always included at trip down to the shop, where they’d gawk in amazement at the sides of beef hanging in the cooler, the cow heads in the bone barrel out back, and the puddles of blood that got washed off the kill floor. But the fact is, the blood stains on my dads’ white apron and coat never deterred me from giving him a hug. I accepted that fact that my dad cut carcasses all day, that the dog licked his shoes clean some nights when he came home from work and that the knives in our kitchen were always sharp. Being a vegetarian is something that I’d never be able to do with an honest heart. Meat has been my bread and butter.
    However adolescence is inevitable. Encounters with the meat plant evolved from unwonted to routine to detestable. The reason: we were now required to work there. I don’t remember how old I was the first time my dad asked me to help out in the shop, but I remember it involved measuring bits of cubed beef into one-pound bags. At first I thought it was kind of cool. The oversized butcher coat and apron that I wore swathed me in white and I felt important. But after ten minutes of grabbing the chilled meat chunks and fumbling them into their plastic receptacle, I was-to put it gently- over it. My hands felt like they were going to fall off, and the smell of raw beef was giving me a taint of nausea.
    Working at the meat plant never did regain its novelty. From 5th grade on, my brother, sister, cousins and I spent our last day of school each year in one of the plant’s coolers doing what we came to refer to as “clamming.” Around the beginning of June the town Vets Club would have their annual clam bake, and would order all of their mollusks through the Leona Meat Plant. The clams would come to us on a truck in bushel bags of 400 or so, and it was our job to dump them out, wash them, and bag them up by the dozen in little white cheese cloth bags so they could properly bake. While the rest of our class was out enjoying the first hours of summer vacation, the Debach kids were stuck in a meat cooler freezing our fingers trying not to cut ourselves on broken clam shells. In December, it was ring bologna: we’d have to grab it off the racks where it cooled after being put through the smoke house, and then cry-o vac every ring. If we needed money, if dad needed help, if mom wanted us out of the house, we’d work at the meat plant. There was always something to do, and if you couldn’t find anything then, as dad used to say, “you can always slice bacon!”
    During high school, in order to afford a class trip to England, I made the jump from part-time help to full-time employee when I agreed to work for the entire summer in the retail part of the plant. Somewhere between counting out Hormel Cocktail Smokies and slicing the chipped beef I decided that as soon as I could help it, I wouldn’t ever have anything to do with this place again. I saw butchering as a dirty, smelly, vomit-inducing occupation. One so unglamorous that I was embarrassed to tell people what my dad did for a living.
    Still I couldn’t seem to erase the Leona Meat Plant from my identity. During move-in day at college, my roommate gave a silent stare in the direction of the cardboard container of books I’d just plopped on the floor. They were in a huge box that I had taken from the meat plant and that had probably in its initial incarnation housed a rib eye or a top round. “Is that blood?” I looked up from unpacking to tell my curious roommate that yes, it was blood, and that no, it wasn’t human. My dad was a butcher. Move-out day of that same year gave me an even harsher reminder of my past. ON the afternoon that my parents were to come get me at school, the family car happened to be having some motor trouble. Even in my relief to be leaving college for the summer, I was mortified when my mother and father arrived outside my dorm in a refrigerated meat truck. The “Leona Meat Plant” insignia and slogan shone boldly against the minivans and SUVs of the other normal families. I transferred to a college out in Chicago, a good 15-hour drive from home and from the family business. I came home less often, talked to dad less often, and little by little, managed to conceal my roots.



Throughout college I tried not to think about the butcher shop and the way I thought it invaded my childhood. But sometimes life’s circumstances have a way of making you confront your demons. The summer after I graduated, I moved home. Confused and daunted by the prospect of choosing a career path, I opted to work at the one place where I knew I’d always have a job: Leona Meat Plant. But this time I wasn’t bagging chickens or wrapping ground beef. I worked in the office, answering calls, chatting with customers about whether or not they wanted their pork shoulder cut into steaks or left as a roast and wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. So, I left. In May I packed my bags to come to New York, a city where no one would ever know that my first job involved raw meat and a deli slicer. I would be rid of that identity for good.

            At least that’s what I thought. Initially, I was swallowed by the excitement of living in New York, a new job, a new social circle. Leona Meats was  lingering part of my identity that no one had to know about. But upon each successive visit home, I'd be met with a  father and former boss who never ceased to remind me of what I had left behind. I'd known for a while that the family business wasn't anything ordinary: (the daily routine might involve capturing a runaway goat for slaughter or packaging cow tongue). But it wasn't until I'd been in a place where my identity was no longer defined by the butch shop that I realized there was something more to it I'd been missing. I was tapped on the shoulder with this realization on a summer visit home. It was about two months after I'd moved to the city. On a hot and muggy July morning I took my dad's invitation to come down to the pasture to help herd our grazing beefers from one end of the field to the other so they could eat fresh grass. Trapsing behind dad in overs-sized muck boots and dodging the occasional cowpie, I watched him as he opened one gate and closed another, talking to the cows in a half-serious voice. He laughed as they literally ran into the pasture with fresh grass. He was so invested in it, these were more than just animals, this was his and my uncle's pride and joy. And that's when it hit me: maybe this butchering thing wasn't just the bloody mess that I saw on the killfloor. Maybe, just maybe there was something dignified about it. My dad knew this trade inside and out; from the cows' favorite type of clover to how to properly tie-up a crown roast. My uncle too, they've perfected upon their craft for their entire lives, and the skills that they have are not only rare, but foster a tradition that began before sustainability became a commodity. I came back to the city after that trip with the notion that there was something more to what my dad did, and that I would be open to learning more about it.

            How it was to happen, I didn't know, but my chance came a few months later on a trip home for he holidays. I took every opportunity when I came home to be around the process, whether it was moving the cows, or looking at the fresh sides of beef hanging in the cooler. On a snowy night just before thanksgiving, my eagerness to learn more brought me back to that muddy cow pasture, The snow blows across the thin spotlight beam and illuminates the pasture before me. My uncle and my dad yell muffled orders to each other as they herd a hearty group of cows through a gate and to the 1200lb. bail of hay that awaits them. The rowdy bunch eagerly steps up to the mound of food and begins grazing, ignoring the blizzard that dust their thick winter coats. The men look on like proud parents. This, however, will be one of these animal’s last meals. In a few days, they will be taken from pasture and into the slaughter house where they’ll receive a blank shot to the head, hung upside down. The cow’s throat will be skinned, she will be bled, skinned, and cut into 500lb sides of beef and put in a cooler. Ten days after that, they’ll be boned out, cut into steaks, ground into burger or sausage, wrapped, labeled, boxed, and stuck in a freezer until their owner comes to pick them up.
    I follow my dad in to the meat plant where he and his brother are eager to see the beef killed earlier that day. In a small walk–in cooler with sterile white sides and a cement floor, hang six or so sides of beef. They are nearly 500lbs each, oblong slabs of waxy congealed fat and pink muscle.
    “They’re filled out nicely…this one looks really good…nice cover on the shoulder…bet we could get at least 1200 for him.” It’s a language I’ve heard all of my life, but that I still don’t understand. Or rather, one that I never chose to learn. That of killing, meat and commerce. I pull off my glove and reach out to touch one of the chilling carcasses. It’s lukewarm and sticky under my hand. A hard coating begins to form in the cooler’s chill, almost like an orange that’s been peeled and left out. It seems my dad and uncle can read these lines of fat and muscle as a map. Their hands don’t just graze over flesh, but over a canvas that they’ve been priming for decades.

(I love this paragraph above. I’m not sure where it fits because it does not lead me to the one below.  I need to know more about your realization of reconciliation… what was that process like personally and for your family. If it was uneventful make it up…)

   After that night, I haven’t thought about butchering in the same way. Watching two brothers read a map of flesh and bone allowed me to see that there is a talent here, an art that years of experience have fostered.  Never have I given a thought to the process, the craft, and the skill behind the blood and guts. Until now. We talk about that period in our lives where we “find ourselves,” but I never thought it meant making peace with what your father does for a living. Since I was old enough to remember, I’ve seen the butcher shop floors covered with blood and bits of fat, I’ve seen the red stains on my dad’s white apron and coat. I’ve been embarrassed of the sordid conditions my father worked in, the way my hands smelled like meat after I’d worked there all day, and that I road home from college in a meat truck. I’ve rejected and concealed these facts about myself but never have I thought about accepting them. It’s when you stop running from the inevitable that you are able to turn around and face it; to use what lessons it offers and pack them up with you in your kit-bag. Moving away from home I began for the first time in my life to view this whole slaughterhouse idea from a different perspective; one of respect. To see that it is unique, I’m in a neighborhood now where weekly butchering classes are attended by hundreds of eager city dwellers, where a fresh cut of meat is a wonderous additon to a meal. I’ve been surrounded with such talent my whole life, true craftsmen, and I never even realized it.  It’s when you stop running from the inevitable that you are able to turn around and face it; to use what lessons it offers and take them with you. Now I’m coming to terms with the "slaughter daughter" that I am, the only owner and keeper of a childhood working in a butcher house, of a father who possesses the craft of butchering. Of an artist whose work involves reviving a vanishing skill: the ability to take a living animal and use it respectfully and conservatively for human consumption. I have much to learn about such an art, but at least I’m getting to the point where I recognize that there is a language being spoken. One that someday, hopefully, I will understand.