Free Beaten, Seared, and Sauced by Jonathan Dixon

Sunday when I decided to watch
The Calf Slaughter
. I logged onto the CIA website and went to the online video library. I cued it up, sat back on the sofa with my laptop, and hit Play.
    There was Sebald, twenty years younger, brown haired, face unlined. He was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and green rubber boots, and stroking the head of a calf. It’s important, he was saying in a thick accent, that when an animal is slaughtered, it feels no stress, no fear. It degrades the quality of the meat. And, more, the very fact of the animal’s existence means that if it dies, it needs to die humanely.
    His hands kept playing over and around the calf’s ears and neck. The animal’s eyes were both plaintive and stupid. Before the slaughter, he went on, the animal had to be somehow “stunned.”
    “I will now stun the calf,” Sebald said. He took a step back, pulled out a Luger, aimed, and put a bullet through the calf’s head. The video was in real time, and twenty-five minutes later, he had the calf skinned, gutted, and ready to be butchered.
    For the rest of the day, my mind kept returning to the opening of the video, with the calf and then the gun, and Sebald petting the animal. With a lifetime of butchering behind him, when those hands—with so much dying accumulated in his fingers—touched some part of an animal, it must feel a shiver run over its flesh.
    I LEFT HOME THE first morning, like I would for the next seven days, at 4:45, and arrived around 5:30. I got breakfast with Adam and another classmate, a kid named Josh, a seventeen-year-old straight out of high school, who had way too much enthusiasm. After we ate, we went up to the fourth floor, found the classroom, and waited for Sebald. It was the end of August. The sun was climbing over the peaks of the Catskills, and I got lost watching its progress.
    Sebald walked into class. He seemed even taller than he had in the hallway. His white instructor’s jacket looked like a sail. I couldn’t get over the size of his hands. He greeted us all and gently explained the rules: no tardiness, no deviation from the uniform; come equipped every day with typed answers to study questions, a calculator, a notebook, and your knives. Failure to do any of these things would result in loss of points. Excessive point loss meant failure for that day. More than two failures meant you failed the class.
    He seemed relieved when he was done with this part. Then the class really began. “Unfortunately, for us to eat,” he said, “something—something—has to die. And that animal—or plant—deserves our respect. It demands our respect. It demands our attention. Our commitment to not waste it. If nothing else, this is what I want you to learn here.”
    I was remembering the duck. I was right there with him.
    “I have respect for people who choose to be vegetarians, for people who make ethical choices and stand by them. But I also know that death is part of life. And I believe that when an animal’s life is taken, it carries a big responsibility on our part to make sure that nothing about that death is a waste, that that death is treated ethically and responsibly.I’m sure you’ve all heard how the Native Americans would apologize to the animals they hunted. You should keep that lesson in mind.
    “It’s also our responsibility to make sure that death comes humanely. I have worked my entire career to make sure that when I participate in the slaughter of an animal, that it feels no fear, and feels no pain.”
    His brow furrowed. “I know that kosher and halal butchers claim that their methods are the most humane, the most painless. But I’ve watched it being done. I don’t want to get started on that.”
    There was a very long pause as Sebald stared down at his podium. Then he arranged his papers, took out a roll call book, and said, “Adam, you are the group leader, so you can have the first question: Define the term ‘meat.’ ”
    Adam answered correctly, straight out of