My focus has been shifting these days. I feel a bit like a compass, trying to find true north when it keeps moving, shifting on me.
meatamerica.com
My compass has been pointing more towards meat these days. Butchering to be precise. Now when I say butchering, I don’t mean just taking a side of meat and turning it into something tasty, I mean going from the living animal to the plate. Maybe not all at once, but you know what I mean.
Nowadays I suspect when most people hear butcher they think of the man behind the counter, ready to prepare serve you up some tasty steaks. That’s all I had in mind as well, until I got to talking with some folks about my recent experiences helping a farmer slaughter his pigs and sheep.
I was careful to use the word slaughter to describe what I was learning, knowing that the butchering was what happened next, off the farm. The folks I was talking to pointed out that butchering used to describe the killing and the cutting, but no more.
It was an interesting point. To me it highlights how our regulations have so altered our food production. Everything is segmented and isolated and I think something is lost.
In my explorations I’m searching out blogs about food production, meat in particular. I found a promising blog called The Butcher Blog.
Along with their opinions on meat production, they’ve done some great tweaks with their blog.
For example, their blogroll (a blogroll is a collection of blogs you like and recommend) is called “Not complete bullshit”. Their Twitter feed? “Poultry Dept.”
Through them I found a book that I’d like to add to my library – Meat America, a photo essay/I-don’t-know-what that I want, just because of the photos.
