Killing It: An Education is as unflinching as one might imagine a book with that title to be, but it’s also humanizing and thoughtful—with the butchery comes a journey of self-realization applicable far beyond the realm of animals or food.
What Davis really takes on in Killing It is the tension, as she puts it, between 'life, death and dinner.' She wants readers to contend more immediately with the act of killing and eating an animal ... For anyone who has kept up with the food world during the last 25 years, much of this material will feel overly familiar. Too often Davis’s insights and questions appear better suited to the village idiot in Agen than to an American reader in 2018 ... There are too many of these 'golly-gee' moments in Killing It, moments that leave you wondering if Davis was really ever that naïve ... Her prose skitters along with her own insecurities, becoming thin and abstract rather than rich with the details of her engagement in the gritty work she clearly loves. Rather than leading us to grapple with what she presents as the transformative power of looking death in the eye, Davis’s approach seems to suggest that we not take her book too seriously.
You'll know after the first ten pages of Camas Davis's involving, thought-provoking gastronomic memoir, Killing It, if this is a book for you ... Davis is a vivid writer and she's highly persuasive on the subject of grappling with culinary truths that most of us like to ignore.
