Portraits of New York’s Butchers

[LiberalElite]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/nyregion/portraits-of-new-yorks-butchers.html?rref=nyregion&module=Ribbon&version=context

"If you go looking for butchers in New York City, as Miguel Winograd, a photographer, did this year, you’re likely to discover a new generation drawn to the trade by a love of charcuterie."

I'm a longtime vegetarian so this culture is now alien to me but, enjoy, carnivores!

xposted in Video & Multimedia

[Warpy]

1. I knew a few in Boston, too, before the parts and pieces industry priced them out

Now I imagine even they sell stuff prepackaged on styrofoam trays under plastic film instead of cutting it off a carcass and wrapping it in white butcher's paper.

I loved being able to get big soup bones from them. Can't do that any more.

[LiberalElite]

2. Parts n Pieces industry -

what's that?

[Warpy]

5. The big packing houses that take living animals in at one end and push out

trays of precut, prepacked meat at the other, all broken down and packaged. That industry is also doing things like skinning most chicken parts so they can't be used for soup, selling the skin to the pet food companies and processors that use it for chicken nuggets. You used to be able to order steaks and chops by thickness even in the average supermarket. Now the "butcher" is somebody who makes sure the cases are stocked with the prepackaged stuff from the parts & pieces big meat packers.

Soup bones are cut apart and the marrow scooped out for pet food. The bones themselves are ground for agriculture.

In some huge cities, you can still find a rare butcher shop where chefs from fancy restaurants shop.

Not here and it sucks.

[LiberalElite]

6. Yikes! Thanks! eom

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

3. I'm not in New York, so maybe I shouldn't post in this one...

but my New Yorker (state, not city) housemate and I go to a family run butcher, and they're amazing. I ask for something to be cut in half (filleted) and they just pick up a knife and do it right there, and it looks like it was machine cut, no sawing marks, no jaggedness, nothing. Their meat is also melt in your mouth tender, and we basically never buy cow or pig flesh from anywhere else these days.

[LiberalElite]

4. What the heck - still the same subject eom