By Shannon Hayes
Shannon Hayes is the host of grassfedcooking.com and the author of The Farmer and the Grill, The Grassfed Gourmet, and forthcoming Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture (April 2010). She works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Schoharie County, NY, where they raise grassfed and pastured livestock. Hayes is currently at work on her newest book, Long Way on a Little: An Earth Lovers’ Companion for Enjoying Meat, Pinching Pennies and Living Deliciously. For the record, her husband is very very sexy…
Last week, the October harvest came on in full force. Clint, one of two freelance butchers who come to the farm to help with our meat processing, showed up early Monday morning. Between Monday and Thursday night, he and I had to cut up two 750 pound beef carcasses, then grind, stuff and link 600 pounds of sausage before he pulled his mobile freezer unit off to the next farm for an early Friday slaughter appointment. At two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, we placed our hands on our lower backs, arched skyward to stretch out the pain from the long hours on the cutting room floor, then joined my family in the kitchen to pile our plates high with the meatloaf made from our surplus sausage grinds. As I was reaching across the table to help my daughter cut up her food, Dad came into the kitchen and threw a New York Times clip down in front of me: Young Idols With Cleavers Rule the Stage. (Truth be told, the story was released 3 months earlier….but news takes a while to travel to our part of Upstate). “There is a new kind of star on the food scene,” the story proclaimed, “young butchers.” The article extolled the sex appeal butchers suddenly had with urban foodies. I read the lines aloud for everyone’s entertainment. The howling from the kitchen table was probably loud enough to ring inside the barn of the next farm down.
What could possibly be sexy about butchering? We all pondered the question, even Clint, who hitched up his work pants discreetly in an effort to prevent plumbers’ butt before helping himself to seconds. I straightened the bandana that covered my uncombed hair; swabbed my glasses, which were speckled with flecks of meat, and gave the question my utmost consideration. “Maybe it’s because you guys make a point of leaving the cutting room whenever you need to pass gas,” I suggested. I have never been sure why Clint and Eric, his business partner, adhere to this practice – whether it is in deference to me, the woman who works beside them, or out of reverence for the flavor of the dry-aged meat. (Perhaps it is food safety regulation? Or maybe it is hazardous waste removal…) Enjoying my own joke, I read on.
“Dangerous is sometimes sexy,” explained one butcher fan, “and they are generally big guys with knives who are covered in blood.” Clint, Eric, and I have worked together processing meat for a number of years. The long hours they spend with my family have made them my surrogate brothers, and this flip quote blackens my mood. Too many times, I’ve caught my heart in my throat when the band saw has made a loud snap while they sheared off steaks, and I’ve feared that one of them has severed a finger. Too many times I’ve seen them barely catch themselves from hitting the concrete after heaving a carcass into the rolling bins, their knees buckling underneath them as their backs give out under their strain. Too many times I’ve had to worry for their livelihood, and for the subsequent viability of my own family’s way of life. The danger of butchery isn’t “sexy.” It is a black shadow that looms in the back of our minds. The precarious little hazard that may seem like a sexy risk to an urban foodie could keep my family, beloved friends and neighboring farms from the joyous life we’ve built. “Danger” is not an idea we embrace. It is something we actively work to avoid.
In fairness, however, there is something distinctively sexy about a person who can guide an animal in its transition from life to death; who can participate capably and compassionately in a natural process that is essential to our welfare. Urbanites might see this vocation as an exotic fascination, but around Schoharie County, a girl can’t throw a bone without hitting a guy who knows how to eviscerate a chicken, dress a deer or stick a pig. Despite the fact that such knowledge is the norm, it is still sexy. But not because it is strange or hip. The sexiness of the butcher stems from his or her real skills. It is the same sexiness that drives so many of us rural women to have little interest in a man’s earning potential; but instead to shudder in ecstasy at his ability to reclaim old lumber and fashion it into a woodshed, to find things in the forest to make toys for children, to lovingly care for livestock, to read the sky and know the weather forecast without having to check online, to nurture friendships through the generous sharing and swapping of talents, to grow food in a way that honors the rhythms of the earth. Real skills serve a life, whether or not money enters the picture. And the more real skills a person possesses, the easier it is to build an enjoyable life that does not rely on corporate America, on squelching one’s concerns for the planet in order to squeeze money from an extractive economy, on pleasing a boss enough to win a promotion, on successful gambling in the stock market. Mmmm…..The ability to build a good life in harmony with the earth, without excessive reliance on money, and to enjoy a great meatloaf in the process…now that’s sexy.