BUTCHER RISING: BREAKING DOWN BEEF by DAVE LEONARD

There was a time long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away when there existed carbon-based humanoid life-forms called butchers. Butchers, back in this long forgotten time, were highly trained and really knew their stuff: they might have slaughtered animals, broke down and cut up (“dress”) meat, or simply sold the product. The best did all three.

Butchers had roamed the earth as part of guilds as far back as the Middle Ages, when their original job was to slaughter goats–they were called bouchiers then. Their skills were greatly appreciated and they grew more and more popular.

Their customers–people like you and I–learned from the butchers and became very good at roasting and barbecuing meat (and pairing it with good beer and wine in their backyards).

Butchers were serving humankind very well, indeed, and were repositories of butcherly protein-knowledge. But over time and during a dark and ugly period of our food history, butchers were cast out, excommunicated, from greater society. It was all part of a larger corporate, President’s Choice-ification and Monsantoizing of our food supply.

It was an epoch of industrial, ersatz food in which only an Orwellian “Processese” was spoken.

Butchers, who previously could be found happily plying their craft (even in sterile, “food-less” Grocery Stores to some extent) suddenly vanished. It was a time of protein gloom: small children believed that a steak or pork chop grew through spontaneous generation and magically appeared on Styrofoam(TM) trays and came abiogenetically wrapped in cellophane in a box from the bulk freezer section.

People had little idea about animal husbandry and preparing animal flesh and muscle for human consumption. They shied away from these terms and sanitized the pure fact that they were eating an animal. They lost all concept of how an animal was raised and taken care of–or how it should be raised and taken care of.

In fact, people never saw these animals whole because they came from sad feedlots hundreds and hundreds of miles away and without little context for their place on the dinner table.

But slowly, butchers re-grouped. They rose up to smite the gods of Spallanzani and his Moloch of spontaneous generation, and they took back their razor-sharp halberds, their high-tensile, stainless-steel meshed and Kevlar gauntlets and started butchering again. And it was good. And more customers tasted and said it was good and demanded more butchery and less Styrofoam(TM).

And a new era dawned (and some butchers were even happy enough to remain open on the Seventh Day).

Well, all facetiousness aside there is still a lot of work to be done in all of this reconnection with our food. But it is heartening to see the Bradys, DiPietros, and The Bauer Butchers of the world walking among us again and no longer shunned. Galen’s grip is still strong but it is weakening slowly.

These bouchiers are among the first crusaders out of the post-industrial and processed-food darkness that has clouded what we eat and our understanding of it. And we need to continue to “worship” them and build these reconnections. We need to do it for our health and the sustaining of our food supply.

One thing we need to do is have a little better idea of what we are even eating when we eat good meat. So please set aside a few moments now: in the accompanying video above, Matt Kendrick–The Bauer Butcher–takes us through a short course in breaking down beef. With a few slashes, some snicker-snack cuts, and a big ol’ band-saw, Kendrick shows you several cuts of beef and makes a few suggestions for how to cook them.

[We regret that audio interference makes some sections of the video sound like they were recorded inside NASA's International Space Station--Ed.]

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