We love Butchers

“I’m doing a little Frenching now, guys,” Stephen Alexander announces to an enthralled audience as he shows off his way with a blade. “Leave a little extra fat on it,” the charismatic 38-year-old butcher-farmer instructs as he addresses his pork loin, shearing the meat from the bone just so. “I’m anti-lean meat myself.” The mostly female crowd gathered at Bonnie Stern’s Cooking School in Toronto on this late October night murmurs appreciatively.

Provocative as the banter may sound, Alexander’s intent here is utterly virtuous. Since arriving in Canada from his native Australia in 1994, Alexander, who operates three Cumbrae’s meat shops and Cumbrae Farms, has become one of the country’s most zealous advocates for the humane, healthy farming and butchering of animals. “He wants people to eat better food,” cookbook author Bonnie Stern says. “It’s a passion.” In the process, he has cultivated a groupie following among people who clamour for his sustainably raised meat—quite literally.

Alexander and in-house chef Jerry Meneses appear regularly at cooking demos like this one to share recipes, tips (always buy “air-chilled” chicken) and a “farm to fork” narrative of a dinner’s backstory—that the lamb now shredded in a tender lamb confit was milk-fed from birth and fed alfalfa hay, corn and barley; that the cow whose tenderloin is swaddled in golden puff pastry in “Beef Wellington with Foie Gras and Mushroom Demi-Glace” once grazed on fresh grass and grains to enhance its flavour and marbling; that the “Roasted Niagara Gold Frenched Pork Loin” was part of a single-herd Guernsey pig fed whey from Niagara Gold cheese; and how the succulent “Roast Chicken with Glace de Poulet” ran freely with access to constant hydration and sunlight. Such pastoral tales offer comfort in an age of brutal industrialized factory farming and deadly E. coli and listeria eruptions. Yet Alexander never loses sight of why people are really here: fleshly pleasure. “The meat by the bone is always the best part,” he says as his audience nods approvingly.

The scene offers a nice glimpse into what the magazine Meatpaper has dubbed the “fleischgeist,” a clever coinage taken from the German “fleisch” or “meat” and “geist” or “spirit.” The San Francisco-based quarterly was formed in 2007 to showcase ideas and art about meat, timing that was bang on, given the cultural fetishization of and anxiety about eating animal flesh. Artists explore meat as a theme: Tamara Kostianovsky is celebrated for her dissected beef “carcasses” made out of discarded human clothes. The current Vogue Homme celebrates abattoir chic: 10 pages are devoted to a male model cavorting with bloody carcasses. Butcher iconography adorns everything from T-shirts and the cover of chef Thomas Keller’s new cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home, to Canadian chef Joel Roussell who has porcine tattoos on both arms—one inspired by the logo of the famed British chef Fergus Henderson, who popularized the notion of “nose-to-tail” eating, the other an image from the cover of Jane Grigson’s 1969 classic Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. Debating the ethics of eating animals has spawned a publishing sub-genre at the same time the culinary scene is heritage hog wild: bacon is now an ice cream and martini flavour and gourmands shell out $25 for a plate of pig parts. The most happening chefs are as adept with a butcher cleaver as with a chef’s knife—namely Mark Cutrara of Toronto’s Cowbell, who buys animals whole and butchers, smokes and cures on the premises. In his spare time he teaches on-site butchery classes to the public. Martin Picard of Montreal’s Au Pied de Cochon gets extra points for hunting down and skinning dinner in the wild, an experience he shares on his Food Television program, The Wild Chef.

Against this landscape, artisanal butchers like Alexander have emerged the new culinary stars, complete with the hype that accompanies celebrity. As Meatpaper’s co-founder Sasha Wizansky puts it: “A generation of young butchers—and media coverage of them—has transformed butchery into something cool, bad-ass.”

This new breed is seen not merely as meat-dissector but as artiste in sync with the life force. At the forefront is Dario Cecchini, the Dante-quoting Italian described poetically in Bill Buford’s Heat as “an artist, whose subject was loss.” Cecchini’s shop outside Florence is a mecca for omnivores willing to line up for his Chianti “butter” (creamy lard seasoned with rosemary) and Chianti “tuna” (pork marinated like canned tuna). He’s featured in Douglas Gayeton’s new book Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town, whose fold-out sepia-toned photographs of chopped meat and pig entrails on wooden slabs qualify as butcher porn. Last month, the beloved master butcher broke down a complete steer and pig in front of a sold-out crowd in San Francisco at a Meatpaper-sponsored event.

Alexander, a third-generation butcher, jokes that when he was growing up, butchering wasn’t a way to impress women. He has witnessed what he calls butchering’s new “cool factor” as well as its slow move from being an exclusively male domain. (Cumbrae’s employs one female butcher; Avendano’s, a San Francisco butcher shop that sells locally pastured meat, is owned by three women.) Every day, he says, he gets calls from young chefs. Some want to learn exactly where a flat iron steak comes from on a steer. Some want to switch careers.

Former chef Josh Applestone and his wife, Jessica Applestone, are typical of the new butcher breed. He was a vegan, she was a one-time vegetarian when they founded Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, N.Y., in 2004. Since then, Food & Wine has named it one of America’s best butcher shops and the couple has launched “The Butcher” blog on Saveur.com. (They’re not alone: famed Brooklyn butcher Tom Mylan writes the blog Tom the Butcher.) Jessica Applestone sees the migration of white-collar professionals into butchering as part of the emergence of an artisanal entrepreneur movement: “All of these very well-educated people have suddenly decided to go back to what’s essentially blue-collar work—chocolate makers, coffee roasters, bakers, fishmongers. It’s come to be seen as this enormous, very sexy, very viable thing to do,” she says.

There’s no better bellwether of butchery’s new status than the fact former masters of the universe are jumping on board. Mario Fiorucci was an investment banker before opening the Healthy Butcher in Toronto in 2005 with his wife, Tara Longo, a former lawyer. The two had been vegetarians due to the “disgusting” quality of most meat being sold, Fiorucci says. They now run three stores catering to an affluent, aware clientele willing to pay top dollar for dinner.