The Honest Carnivore

What is a Meat Collective?

A Meat Collective is a one-of-a-kind meat school and community resource that offers hands-on classes to consumers in whole-animal butchery, cookery, and charcuterie, as well as on-farm slaughter. For each Meat Collective class, local farmers sell whole animals to students who in turn learn from seasoned butchers and chefs how to transform a whole carcass into food. Students go home with a lot of good, clean, fair meat and increasingly rare knowledge. Chefs and butchers share their craft. And farmers sell directly to consumers who support humane and sustainable farming practices. The result? A growing community of informed omnivores who are inspired to eat meat more responsibly and to support a more responsible meat production system.  

The Meat Collective Movement:

The Honest Carnivore is not the only Meat Collective in the country. We are part of a growing movement. The very first Meat Collective was founded in 2010 in Portland, Oregon. In 2014, the Portland Meat Collective’s founder, Camas Davis, launched a nonprofit, the Good Meat Project, with the mission to inspire responsible meat production and consumption through experiential education. One of the programmatic goals of the Good Meat Project is to spread the Meat Collective model to other communities. As such, the Good Meat Project helped The Honest Carnivore to launch and succeed. While The Honest Carnivore is its own business entity, we work closely with the Good Meat Project and the other Meat Collectives around the country to achieve the same mission. To find out who the other Meat Collectives are around the country, or to find out what it how to start your own Meat Collective in your community, go here.