For most meat buyers, the product is pre-cut, wrapped up in plastic, priced, and sitting there in a cabinet at a well-lit store as a finished product. That’s how people buy their meat. They don’t know any other way. It’s a habit and hard to break. It seems like a pre-cooked version of pre-packaged food, sanitized and far removed from its source.
But in other parts of the country, there are still some meat shops with professional butchers. I’m fortunate enough to have about 6 in a 5-mile radius of where I live. In my experience, the product you obtain from a local butcher is another level of excellence. This applies to the steaks, the sausages, the minced beef, and everything else. The butcher is the way to go, if you can find one.
Such shops will typically be more expensive, but the difference is worth it. It’s hard convincing people of that these days, especially given the price increases over four years and the sharp declines in household real income. It seems instead that this is the time to save money.
As a result, most local butcher shops have taken a serious hit. They were closed down during COVID and they opened to a world of consumers desperate to save money. Still, they are keeping on and maintaining high standards.
I personally adore the butcher shop and all the conversations that can be had here about meats, feeds, processing, seasonality, and so on. It’s all so fascinating. Typically in such places, you will be able to carry on a conversation with the man who actually takes the meat from huge animal parts into saleable units, including the operation of the scary bone cutters and extremely sharp knives.
To see the product go from carcass to your grill grants a new appreciation of the fullness and reality of what it takes to feed the human person. It’s not just a store but a process, and not just a company but real people with real skill.
The whole history of eating is bound up with the legend of the butcher, which appears in literature as far back as language exists. The key has always been about owning the tools. Time was when they were rare and much sought after.
My own great-great grandfather moved to Texas from Massachusetts and opened up a blacksmith shop around 1830. He had the only one in town and sold all the tools to the local butchers but of course also to the doctors and surgeons. They were often the same people, giving rise to the profession called the butcher-surgeon, which is a scary thought.
His son was a young man and a worker at the blacksmith shop when Texas found itself dragged into the Civil War to fight for a nation it had only recently (and reluctantly) joined. So when he was drafted by the Confederate army, he took the role in the unit for which he was naturally suited. He became the medic. Why? The answer is simple: he had the tools for sawing off limbs and otherwise cutting people up as need be. No, he had no medical training but such were the days.
The famed opera “Barber of Seville” by Rossini gives more context to the implication of owning the tools. He was not just a barber but a dentist. He would pull teeth and cut hair on the same visit. The delivery of love letters and arranging of trysts was just a side gig given to a trusted member of the community who commonly entered private spaces in people’s homes.
See what happens when you have the right tools? You might start as the blacksmith but you end up as the barber, the surgeon, the dentist, and the deliverer of secret notes, all made possible by owning pliers, saws, and knives. That’s the way the old world worked, long before tools became a widely available commercial product and people could specialize.
In any case, back to the butcher. It’s fascinating to discuss their occupation with them and discern the pride they take in their sausages, meat slices, and otherwise. They absolutely know what is what, and it’s an absolute joy to learn from them about the best cuts of the day. None of this is available at regular supermarkets.
It’s often true that local butchers source their meat from local ranchers and are fussier about the location of processing plants. They care because they know that people who are happy with what they sell will come back. They can do custom cuts based on your description and make just the right standing rib roast for your party, plus explain the best way to prepare it.
In meats, there are always seasonal offerings, even if the superstore pretends otherwise. The freshness of the product really does matter, as you will quickly discover once you plunge into this world.
Remember going to an amazing Italian restaurant and slicing through the perfect tender sausage? Every time you snag a packet from the grocery store, it fails to turn out that way, no matter how you cook it. This is often because the casing is artificial and the meat itself is packed too tightly due to industrial methods. Get the same thing from a local butcher and you find yourself back in the high-end restaurant with the perfect dish.
You can also learn something. Like everyone else these days, I became truly fixated on the issue of grain-fed versus grass-fed beef, fussily preferring the latter. A butcher recently explained to me the tradeoffs of this preference. The more the cow wanders around eating grass, the less fat is built up and the leaner the product. That can be great but there is also a case for grass-fed and grain-finished beef. He sells what you want but he has a point about the flavor tradeoffs, and convinced me not to fuss over topics about which I know next to nothing.
In any case, to me the true feeling of excitement comes from a sense that I’m buying my meat the same way my grandfather and his father before him, going back many generations, bought their meat. It’s like supporting a wonderful tradition, and saving at least one profession from becoming extinct and impersonal in the hyper-industrialized world of centralization and impersonal forces.
And need I point out the not-so-quiet war ongoing against meat itself? It should be obvious to you. There’s never been a better time to make it clear: humans are meat eaters and we will remain so as long as we care about health! Nor are bugs a good substitute.
Adam Smith famously wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Indeed, there is no problem in showing a bit of benevolence back, if only to break the superstore habit. You might find as I did that the service and product are more than worth the difference.
