If you don’t want to know the name of the pig that I’ll be making into pâté, pulled pork, and prosciutto, of a pig that could pass into your hands in the next year and cross the liminal boundary of your lips, becoming one flesh with your flesh, then stop reading now.  Names and photographs (as the Amish know) are powerful things, and seeing them, reading them, listening to them reverberate silently in our ears – taking them in through the eyes and the ears and keeping them in memory – are all proleptic and anticipate that moment of sacrifice and consumption.

And, by and large, we prefer to eat with our eyes closed or at least averted.  We eat meat, spear it on our forks, but keep ourselves at arm’s length from it, translating even the names of the animals as we transform them into food: pig into pork, sheep into lamb, cow into beef, chicken into McNuggets.  In general, we don’t even want to remember that meat came from an animal, let alone that animal there, the one in the picture, who even has a name, perhaps.  It’s as if we dis-member the animal, break it down into unrecognizable parts, laid out on styrofoam trays at the supermarket or speared on the end of our fork, precisely in order to keep ourselves from thinking about or re-membering the living being they come from.  There are exceptions – hunters, butchers – who look the flesh they eat in the eye first, but anyone with blood on their hands is likely to find themselves ostracized or even demonized by the majority.

And, for all my desire to know where my food comes from, to have a hand in it, to analyze (over-analyze you might be tempted to say) and be aware of the sacrifice involved in it, I am not exempt from this general rule, this blindness.  After all, the eye that never blinks also goes blind.

Although I can tell you the provenance of every scrap of meat I use, I do not know the names of the animals, I did not look them in the eye, I did not have a hand in their slaughter.  Until yesterday.

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This movie poster is so great and cheesy, I just had to blow it up.

In my last post, I took issue with a recent NYTimes Dining article fawning over hip, young butchers “with their swinging scabbards.” However strange such “butcher love” might be, it turns out it’s nothing new.

A little trolling through Google books turned up an ancient and persistent association of butchers with a primitive and bestial sexuality. What it all comes down to is meat and blood, the blood in the meat, the blood drained from the meat, and the control of this passage.

As Deborah Lupton writes in Food, the Body and the Self,

Since the ancient Greeks, it has been believed that meat eating is associated with aggressiveness and a violent personality. The Greek scholar Porphyry wrote in the third century AD: “It is not from those who have lived on innocent foods that murderers, tyrants, robbers and sycophants have come, but from eaters of flesh.” The killing and eating of animals is coded with the attributes of virility, aggression and power, which are also coded as masculine. In the past, when women were in their most overt bodily state of femininity – in pregnancy or as lactating mothers – they were advised to avoid “strong” foods such as red meat. (107-8)

And, specifically about the butcher, she writes,

Working with dead animals is constructed as a masculine, and emphatically a non-feminine occupation, because of its linkage with strength, blood, brutality and death: “Butchers have not only a masculine but also a sinister presence: they work at the boundaries of life and death, of human and animal, of bodies and carcasses.” The liminality of this profession is thus a source of both fascination and horror… Blood associated with women’s bodies, therefore, signifies fertility and motherhood, the giving of life, whereas the masculine meanings of blood are strongly linked with violence and death. The bloodied female butcher is thus a culturally ambiguous figure. (108)

This analysis is indebted to Julia Kristeva’s 1982 essay on abjection, “Powers of Horror.” In this essay, she traces “the introduction of meat diet” to the Biblical permission to eat “every moving thing that liveth” (Genesis 9:3), which is given “only after the Flood“:

Far from being a reward, such permission is accompanied by an acknowledgment of essential evil, and it includes a negative, incriminating connotation with respect to man: “For the imagination of man’s heart is evil” (Genesis 8:21). As if there had been an acknowledgment of a bent toward murder essential to human beings and the authorization for a meat diet was the recognition of that ineradicable “death drive,” seen here under its most primordial or archaic aspect–devouring. (96)

But, Kristeva writes, the initial Biblical distinction between vegetable foods reserved for man and animal foods reserved for God (as sacrifice) gets reiterated as a new distinction, written in blood:

On the one hand there is bloodless flesh (destined for man) and on the other, blood (destined for God). Blood, indicating the impure, takes on the “animal” seme of the previous opposition and inherits the propensity for murder of which man must cleanse himself. But blood, as a vital element, also refers to women, fertility, and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together. “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat” (Genesis 9:4).

Looking more closely at “the logic of dietary abomination” spelled out in Leviticus, Kristeva tries to tease out the unarticulated connections between the blood of animals that must be avoided and the blood of parturition that renders women “unclean” or “impure” (Leviticus 12). In her view, this ritualistic regulation of blood, represents an attempt to create an identity (individual, psychological, and cultural) by separating oneself from, controlling or dominating, a more primordial power, “the phantasmatic power of the mother, that archaic Mother Goddess who actually haunted the imagination of a nation at war with the surrounding polytheism” (100). In this phantasmatic scheme, butchery would be the quotidian, ritual enactment of an ancient, fundamental power grab: the assertion of a male/priestly power and control over the liminal fluid that crosses the boundaries between life and death, man and God.

If Kristeva’s analysis is right, then the butcher who drains the blood from the meat and ensures that it is kosher or halal is a primeval player in an ancient and fabulous structure of male domination. In this case, “butcher love,” insofar as it’s a fantasy of being dominated by the big, burly guy with the bloodstained apron (muscles and blood are the features the NYTimes article dwells on), would represent a kind of squaring or doubling down of one’s domination, a strange desire to worship at the bloody altar of one’s utter abjection.

As saucisson mac mentioned in his comment on my last post, there was a ridiculous article in the Dining & Wine section of last week’s New York Times, touting certain young butchers as the new rock stars on the culinary stage. I’ve been holding back on any comment for almost a week, like when you eat something bad that completely blocks you up.

Just how is a butcher like a rock star? If you’re going to stretch the comparison to liken chefs to “arena bands,” farmers to “folk singers,” and butchers to “an indie band,” shouldn’t the things that they do have something–anything!–remotely in common with music?  No, apparently that’s not necessary.  All they have to have in common is a certain element of performance to their work.

The first butcher she features describes himself as a “producer of porcine pleasure,” and his dream is “to throw a 300-pound pig in the middle of a room full of people and just tag-team it” with “another rock star butcher.”  His business at the moment is organizing what the author of the article calls “cutting demonstrations that sometimes feature cocktails and sausages” or “meat and liquor mash-ups.”  As they say in the movies, any resemblance to actual butchering is merely coincidental.  In events like this, butchering is a stage prop or window dressing for something that smacks more of an Iron Chef competition, a WWE event, a smackdown of porcine proportions, a slam pig party, or a culture-jamming meat rave.  (It’s OK if, like me, you don’t have any clear idea what such terms might mean; the more incomprehensible it is, the newer, hipper, and cooler it would have to be, right?)

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Here’s a recap for those of you who just tuned in. About six months ago, I announced that I was setting off on a quest to round up some great beef. Not OK beef, not just good beef, but great beef, beef as flavorful as possible. This means meat from a beef (not dairy) breed, a mature animal, raised only on natural pasture, and hung for as long as possible. Six weeks and two days ago, a three-year old Dexter bull went to slaughter. Three weeks ago, the butcher at the locker, Chuck Crupper, was shitting his pants about how long we had left our side of beef hanging and basically refused to have anything more to do with it. A little more than two weeks ago, we butchered the beef ourselves (with some much appreciated help), but left both the rib section and the loin (from which the ribeye, t-bone, and porterhouse steaks come) intact to age further.

It was T-day: Taste Day. The night we butchered it, we treated ourselves to the tenderloin or filet. Now it was time to cut off a nice, honking steak and see if we were approaching the pinnacle of beefiness or, as Chuck had warned, I had only managed to ruin a perfectly good (and expensive) piece of meat. Our third musketeer just got back into town, and the three of us were getting together for lunch, so it was a perfect occasion to pull out a 15-pound primal cut of beef and ponder, “How thick would we like to cut that?”

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When you have a whole side of beef that you need help cutting up, you really find out who your friends are. Some people tell you, “Dude, this is what I live for! I’m like totally there!” yet at the appointed time and place they are in fact nowhere to be found, and their cell phone has been conveniently turned off. It’s like my neighbor and good friend tells me every time he gives me a hand with one of my crazy projects: “Anytime you need a hand, just be sure and forget my phone number!” So, many thanks to the kind and adventurous souls who came through last night to lend their expertise, their workspace, their muscle, and, in the end, their hungry maws to this project.

Bob said it was the first time he had butchered beef in about 20 years, but he got right to work and broke the carcass down in what seemed like no time. Working with a whole side, and cutting it down with just a hand saw and knives reminded him of the old days, when he started out meatcutting. By the time he retired, he said, it was all “box beef”: beef already broken down to the primal cuts at the slaughterhouse, boxed up, and delivered for final cutting on the store’s power saws.

The whole experience reminded me of what I used to witness, when we would go to England for the summer to visit my grandfather, who was the butcher for his small village in the Cotswolds. When the delivery truck came, I remember men hefting hundreds of pounds of meat onto their shoulders, hauling the carcasses into the butcher shop (which was a converted 16-century stone spring house), and hanging it up in the cooler. When someone came in for a cut, they would get out the appropriate piece of meat, lay it on a massive butcher block, and cut it to order. It was a small revelation that a pork chop was called that because they literally chopped them off the loin with a cleaver. But I was too young then to ever be allowed behind the counter. My summer job was clearing all stinging nettles from the apple orchard. Ugh.

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“If you want something done right, you just have to do it yourself.”

Cantankerous old Chuck Crupper, of Chuck’s Locker down in Ivesdale, made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want anything more to do with the carcass I’d made him hang for three weeks, and I no longer trusted him to do right by this fine side of beef, for which he had absolutely no appreciation, so Big Red and I made a trip out there yesterday to liberate it from the locker.

Good thing I have a ten-foot cargo van, although I certainly never envisioned this use for it! The beef is stretched out in my van now (where the temperature is hovering just below freezing), so I’ll make a few trips out there today to keep it company and run the heat just a tetch. On Sunday afternoon we’re planning an old-fashioned gathering of the tribe (or the clan, or the little piggies, or whatever) to carve this beast and divvy it up. Knowing us, we’ll end up sampling some too, as well as copious quantities of adult beverages.

Fortunately, I remembered that a good neighbor of mine worked for many years as a meat cutter, so we’re bringing him out of retirement to guide us. Brandon and I have already had a lesson on cutting up beef from Chuck Stites at the UI Meat Sciences Lab (who has been no end of helpful, so he should not be confused with the cranky Chuck of Ivesdale), so we’re ready for the hands-on experience.

Stay tuned for the next installment: The Thrilla from the Grilla!