How Much Do You Want to Know About How Your Meat Gets to Your Plate? [View All]

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AlterNet / By Anneli Rufus

Butchery Classes and Parties: How Much Do You Want to Know About How Your Meat Gets to Your Plate?
Watching chefs' glistening blades slash fat, muscle and bone is the grotesque new fad in high cuisine.

October 23, 2010 |


As big as a sofa, the beast lay slit up the front, haunches jerking, ribs gleaming, as quick knives sheared away its meat. As part of a program on futurism last fall at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, seven female butchers were invited to carve a 600-pound steer. Watching their glistening blades slash fat, muscle and bone, the audience began to scream.

"It was a frenzy," says Angela Wilson, who was one of the butchers. With her partners Tia Harrison and Dave Budworth -- better known in foodie circles as "Dave the Butcher" -- Wilson opened Avedano's, a traditional butcher shop, three years ago in San Francisco. Every week, the trio cuts up a grass-fed, hormone- and antibiotic-free lamb, pig and side of beef -- all locally and responsibly raised on small farms. They do this the old-fashioned way, with a handsaw, boning knife and scimitar. It's part of a new revival signaled by the whoosh and crunch of flesh departing bone.

Over the last 20 years, American butcher shops have nearly vanished, vanquished by cheap, neat, bandsaw-cut, prepackaged supermarket meat. The butchering of animals by hand became a dying art. But now it's back. "These days, people want to know again where their meat is coming from, just like they want to know where the rest of their food is coming from," says Wilson, who finds the three-hour experience of butchering a lamb "meditative and relaxing. It's one of my favorite times."

As a crashed economy coalesces with the food revolution and the DIY revolution, a new generation of conscientious consumers "don't want anything to go to waste, so they're starting to care again about what happens to the whole animal -- even the cheaper, less-desired cuts." ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/food/148586/butchery_classes_and_parties%3A_how_much_do_you_want_to_know_about_how_your_meat_gets_to_your_plate/