22: Meatpaper
Interview with Amy Standen, Co-editor, March 2008
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
With many magazines and journals, the title and a quick glance at the content immediately let you know what to expect. Figuring out what WoodenBoat or True West are about is hardly rocket science. But occasionally there's a periodical that must be read in full, and even then can't be summarized in a sentence or two. Meatpaper is one of those publications. Based in San Francisco, it is a quarterly independent publication of forty to fifty pages per issue.
Launched in 2007, Meatpaper is a well designed, colorful, and serious magazine that addresses the role of meat in our culture from a surprising variety of perspectives. It's not a cooking magazine, but it has a few recipes. It's not a hunting magazine, but it has a few hunting stories. It's not anti-meat, but there's a story about a store dedicated to fake meat made of soy or gluten. There's poetry, humor, and depictions of art featuring meat. One story is about meats Native Americans ate like beaver tail, buffalo, and rattlesnake. There's a story about kosher slaughtering, an interview with a meat inspector, and an article challenging the view that prehistoric men brought home all the protein. Images include Ponca Indians skinning a buffalo, a portrait composed of ground beef on a white background, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky in the meat locker, and a woman in a flank steak dress.
What to make of all this? To wrap my mind around what Meatpaper is all about and to bring you along for the ride, my guest is co-Editor Amy Standen. She shares editing Meatpaper with Sasha Wizansky.
Steve: Amy, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Amy: Thanks, it’s good to be here.
Steve: Meatpaper is described on the cover as "your journal of meat culture." What is meat culture, and why have a magazine about it?
Amy: Meat culture is something that Sasha and I have been watching with amusement take shape over the last few years. It’s a growing curiosity about meat and meat of course as a food, but also meat as a metaphor. You would not believe how many artists we meet who are painting really beautiful, detailed oil paintings of meat, or how many sculptors are using meat as an actual medium for their work. Meat is just this really rich metaphor. It’s something that’s sort of troubling, it reminds us of our bodies, it reminds us of our mortality and our relationship with animals. But then of course meat as a food is something that there’s more and more talk of these days. Chefs are looking into ways of using the entire animal, not just parts of it. I know people who are signing up for amateur butchering classes right and left, we’re seeing that all across the country. People who are learning to hunt who have never hunted before. It’s what we call the fleischgeist, it’s this explosion of interest in meat.
Steve: Fleischgeist, a play on the word "Zeitgeist," is of German origin. Is there anything particularly Germanic about meat culture?
Amy: Um, I don’t think so [laughs], not that I know of. That would be something certainly interesting if there were. I should say we’ve had some interest from Germany. We’ve been written up in a German art magazine, the name of which I’m forgetting. I think we even have a couple of subscribers in Germany. But no, I don’t think it’s particular to any nationality, though certainly where we see it most is in the States.
Steve: Something Meatpaper does very clearly is show the many ways people have relationships with meat, both literally and metaphorically. You touched on several of those areas. I'd like to ask you expand on a few of those that I’ll mention that have been featured in the magazine so far. Let's start with meat as imagery in art and cinema. Can you explain a little about that?
Amy: We ran a piece a couple of issues ago about meat’s starring role in movies, basically since movies began. We have Rocky punching meat in a meat locker to work out. Meat in that movie was a symbol of raw masculinity, and also of the working class. Only people of a certain class back in those days at least encountered meat in that form. Upper classes would only see meat after it had been prepared. So this rawness and disturbing image of meat and its class connotations were really powerful in that movie. Then you have other movies where meat is, um, I’m thinking of “The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover,” I’m not sure he wrote about it in that story, where you have meat that is just supposed to shock us. You know, and not a superficial shock. It’s a confrontation with something very troubling, something that has a visceral power over us as human beings. I think filmmakers of course, there’s the famous horse head in “The Godfather.” Few things you could put in a person’s bed in the morning could disturb them more than a huge piece of meat. It’s a way of cutting straight to a very basic human instinct, and in a lot of films a real human fear.
Steve: How about meat as a business?
Amy: As a business?
Steve: Yes.
Amy: Well, that’s something we’re seeing changing. Once upon a time there was just one kind of meat to get, at least here in the States, in the mass market kind of way. That was meat that came from huge industrial ranches. Now we have this whole new industry that’s grown up that is based on the idea of starting small, of treating the animals well, feeding in the case of cows grass instead of corn, and of giving people a direct connection to the lives the animals led. I don’t have any numbers to back this up, but I think anyone could tell you this is an exploding industry. It’s connected of course to the interest in slow food and the interest in sustainability in general. This is a business that didn’t exist twenty-five years ago, at least certainly not at the scale we have now. I think there’s a very strong business angle. There’s of course meat CSA’s [Community Supported Agriculture], this idea of ranches selling meat just to a club of people, so you can buy direct from the ranch and have a relationship with a particular ranch and go to the place where that animal lived. All of these things didn’t exist before, and there wasn’t an interest in them before, but this is part of the Zeitgeist.
Steve: How about hunting stories, or relationships with meat in terms of hunting?
Amy: Michael Pollan had this very influential work, first an essay that a lot of us read in the New York Times, then it was also in his The Omnivore’s Dilemma, this scene where he goes hunting. He, like a lot of urban foodie people, environmentalists, had never been hunting before, and felt like, “You know, if I’m going to eat meat, I should have the experience of going out and killing it myself, and preparing it, and seeing the entire process that brings an animal to my dinner plate.” I don’t know if that’s what started it, but I hear more and more and more people who are doing this. Apparently the guy who took Michael Pollan hunting is just besieged by requests to take other people out hunting. There is a real interest of people who had no necessarily strong outdoors experience, they didn’t grow up in rural areas, but who are saying they want to hunt. They want to see what that’s like. I think a lot of people come back from this trip, and think “You know what, maybe I don’t want to eat animals any more.” But a lot of other people say “I’m going to keep eating animals, but the experience of having killed it myself makes me realize how important it is that I eat animals that lived a decent life.” So we hear a lot of that.
Steve: How about cooking rituals? Not just cooking to cook, but the ritual of cooking.
Amy: The ritual of cooking, that’s something we hear a lot about. We had a story in I think our first issue about a goat slaughter in Mexico, a very long ritual of preparing this animal, cooking the blood, making various dishes, making sausage from its intestines. This was a ritual that took three days that had special rules for different members of the family. The more you hear about this, when you happen to edit a meat magazine, you start collecting these types of stories from different cultures about how meat is prepared and ritualistically prepared. Of course Native American traditions have a very strong role of ritual in the preparation of bison or any large animal. I think you just find in cultures that meat is a serious thing. It’s rare, it’s incredibly nourishing, and there’s very often a recognition that this is an animal that we had a relationship with when it was alive. That relationship is changing, and we need to mark that transition somehow. That’s a common thing that had been lost in American culture, mostly to the extent that people who are really interested in food practice rituals. We’re starting to see a little more of that coming back.
Steve: How about our relationship with meat as a metaphor for how women are depicted?
Amy: Well that was probably, you know when you look at not the early meat art, but the early contemporary meat art, so Jana Sterbak is a Canadian artist who did the first really subliminal piece of meat art in the early 1990’s. She made a dress of flank steak and hung it on this sort of wan, emaciated model. People were just really freaked out by this dress. It just really sort of shocked them. It didn’t sit well with a lot of people. What Jana Sterbak’s point, and the point we’ve seen a lot of other women artists make since then, is that when dress a woman in meat, or, you know, or have a woman interacting with meat, you’re really making a statement about how women have traditionally been looked at in culture, as an object, as a piece of meat, something to possess and devour, something without agency of its own, and something only of flesh, without a real sentience that anyone cares about. That’s a dramatic statement, but I think that’s the point that a lot feminist artists have made over time and in some sense continue to make. We definitely saw a big movement of that in the 1990’s.
Steve: I had the general sense when reading Meatpaper that the general perspective is a feminist perspective. Would you agree with that?
Amy: No, I wouldn’t. I mean, I think to the extent that the editors are women, I guess you would say that our perspective is feminist. But you know if it was a magazine put together by two men, you probably wouldn’t say that it was chauvinist, not in a negative way, but a masculine perspective on meat. I think both of us of course are actually just interested in everything. I think feminist perspectives on meat are interesting, but I also think stories about meat that really have nothing to do with a particular gender or polemical objective are interesting, too. I consider myself a feminist, but like anyone else that’s just one of the ways I look at the world, certainly not the only one.
Steve: Sure, and one of the things I really noticed with Meatpaper is, when trying to come up with a description of it, it’s impossible to pigeonhole. I get the sense that you and Sasha are really striving to look at meat culture from every conceivable perspective. Is that a goal of yours?
Amy: Yeah, definitely. One of things we’ve always been clear about, at least with each other, and we try to make it clear in our editors’ letters, and when we do interviews, we really aren’t taking a stand on what most people consider to be the big question around meat, which is whether or not it’s ethical to eat it. We have in Issue 3 two interviews right next to each other. One is with a woman who slaughters animals in her back yard and eats them very enthusiastically. The other one is with a guy named Jeffery Masson who’s a very well known animal activist who lives in New Zealand, and a very serious vegan who makes the point that if an animal is sentient, has feelings, emotions, experiences, we have no right to take its life from it. Animals have a right to life just like humans do. I find that a very powerful argument. So I think we have always wanted to have all perspectives. We think being a vegetarian is a reaction to meat, just the same way that being an omnivore is a reaction to meat. All of those things are part of the fleischgeist.
Steve: The other day at Easter dinner, eating our ham and lamb, one of my nieces said that if people had to kill their own animals for meat, if they had to do the killing process, that everyone would be vegetarian. In a way you’ve already answered that, but what would you personally say to my niece if you’d been sitting there and she asked your opinion?
Amy: I think she’s right that a lot more people would be vegetarian. But you know, we have in most cultures throughout history, up until ours, people did kill their own animals. Anyone who grows up on a farm, probably, a big farm, kills animals and eats them. People have been killing animals and eating them for a long time. But I do think that what she’s getting at is that you care when you kill an animal. I haven’t killed an animal, at least a big one. This is what I hear. But when you kill an animal, you care about that animal. Not that you necessarily need it to live, but you have a real reason to be interested in the kind of life it lead and the kind of death it experienced. I think you’re more likely to want that death to be quick and painless, and would have more incentive to spare the animal from pain and fear before its death. So I think she’s absolutely right that we would have a different take on eating animals. Probably a lot of people would say “I’m not going to eat animals any more.” But I certainly don’t think carnivorism would become extinct if we suddenly had to all kill our own animals. I mean, people get used to it, you know.
Steve: Um-hm. The conventional wisdom in magazine publishing is that you have to have a tightly defined and targeted audience to attract advertisers and gain subscribers. Meatpaper has this eclectic view of the meat culture, which is a topic that most people wouldn’t immediately know what it means before they look into it a little bit. So given all of that, who's your audience, in this context, who are you trying to reach?
Amy: Sure. I certainly don’t know who all of our subscribers are by a long shot. But I think we’ve always felt our target audience is people a lot like ourselves in some respects, and not necessarily in others. I think those are going to be people who have a real interest, and who are curious people. People who have a real interest in what other cultures are doing, and in art, and in food, and who like to take a deeper look at something, which is a very vague description, but it probably also describes the readers of the New Yorker or Harper’s or Cabinet. These are all magazines that basically hang on an editorial direction that is just curiosity and quality. I put us in those groups of magazines. I’d say we’re even a little more tightly defined, because we have this single theme to our magazine which is meat. There is no magazine anything like that, like Meatpaper.
Steve: Right.
Amy: That has served us really well.
Steve: Who are your writers, and how do you recruit them?
Amy: You know, they’ve really just . . .the bigger we get, the broader our subscription base, the more bookstores we end up in, they really just come to us. I should be doing more recruiting of writers than I actually do, but we end up with a lot of people who pick up the magazine who think it’s really interesting, or who Sasha and I know because I’m a writer and a radio producer, and Sasha’s a designer, so she meets a lot of artists. People come to us and they say, “I have this idea.” They just kind of get it. This seems like a great place for a story that’s been kicking around in their head. So we get submissions all the time. We get a ton of them. We of course like anyone else turn down most of them. But our writers have been coming to us so far.
Steve: Who does your graphic design? I thought it was very good. I take it Sasha?
Amy: Yes, it’s all Sasha. Sasha takes complete credit for that. We have a lot illustrators and artists who contribute in various ways, but Sasha is the designer.
Steve: How did you guys learn how to produce a magazine?
Amy: Umm, we kind of figured it out as we went along. It was really something. It’s been a real learning experience for us. I have a background in journalism. Sasha has a background in graphic design and print production, so she knew printers, and how to design the magazine, mostly. I would say that the other parts of this—subscribers, advertising, the whole business end of it has been something that we’ve really just figured out. Bulk mail, the business of running a magazine has been really humorous, actually, and really fun, and every issue has been drastically easier to put together than the previous issue. We’ve pretty much made it up as we go along. We ask for help from a lot of people. We had someone who helps us sell ads, too, which is a critical part of it.
Steve: I noticed that so far that Meatpaper has fairly few advertisements. Do you think a meat factory corporation like Tyson or Simplot would ever advertise in Meatpaper?
Amy: I wouldn’t want to rule it out. We need more ads, and I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of somebody like that advertising. I think they would be smart to. Of course I’m as biased an opinion as you could get on this, but I think anyone who is dealing with the meat industry these days is seeing that it is changing, and that people want something very different from their meat producers than they used to get. I live near a Safeway, and I also live near a tiny artisan butcher shop that does only meat from northern California, meat that was raised sustainably, and that place is packed all the time. They have lines out the door. I think if you are a meat company, you are seeing that you need to start taking a more intelligent line to your customers. You need to start giving them more information, you need to start treating them like intelligent people and not just people who blindly buy whatever is on the grocery store shelf. Of course I feel like advertising in Meatpaper would be a great way to demonstrate that new consciousness, but I’m sure that’s the case we’ll try to make at some point, but we haven’t yet.
Steve: Launching a new magazine is always risky business, even for big companies with deep pockets. Are you and Sasha glad you took the plunge?
Amy: Oh, yeah, of course! It’s been fun. And actually we’re doing fine. We work for free. We both have day jobs, and this has not been a big money maker. We certainly weren’t expecting it to be a big moneymaker initially. We’ve been only pleasantly surprised by how well we’re doing, how many bookstores we’re in and how many subscribers we have. What we see is constant growth. It’s been a really, really fun experience. It’s very tiring and everything else, but what an adventure.
Steve: Is it the classic kitchen table, or do you guys have an office?
Amy: [laughs] I would say it’s definitely the classic kitchen table, apartment living room scenario. We look a lot classier than the impression you would have if you came and saw us.
Steve: A few months ago I interviewed the editor of WoodenBoat magazine based in Maine. It started as a kitchen table publication in the 1960’s and now it’s a very large enterprise.
Amy: Well that is a great example for us. You do see new magazines starting up all the time, and they get investors, and they hire a staff, and they hire really famous writers and photographers and everything, and they create a huge amount of debt, and the risk is just gigantic. Neither of us have the resources to do that, so we were forced by our own very, very simple salaries to keep this small. So we have kept ourselves out of debt, and we’ve kept ourselves on a scale that we can manage. In a way we’re more sustainable than a big risky adventure like, I can’t think of example right now . . ..
Steve: Like some Condé Nast magazine. . ..
Amy: Something like that, where you just have an initial outlay of three million dollars. That’s just not what we’re doing. So I think we sleep easier at night knowing that’s not the boat we’re in.
Steve: Where would you like Meatpaper to be in five years?
Amy: Umm, I would like it to be nationwide. Actually, I would like it to be international. We are seeing that happening, but our main distribution points are the coasts. But we’d like to see it going into progressive towns across the country, and we’d like to see much broader international distribution. We would like to have our content reflect that more. I mean, we’ve had stories from Israel, Mexico, Australia, Tunisia. We’ve tried to keep an international balance going, but we’d like to develop that even more. I don’t think we need this to be on the scale of a Condé Nast publication, but I think we would be very happy if we were reaching people all around the world with common interests, and also that we’re getting contributions from all around the world.
Steve: Well Amy, thank you very much for speaking with me today. I very much appreciate it.
Amy: Thanks so much for having us on, it’s been great to talk with you.
Steve: Okay, thank you. Subscriptions to Meatpaper are $28 for four issues per year. Subscription details are online at http://www.meatpaper.com/subscribe. Thank you for listening to Periodical Radio. I'm your host, Steve Black.