In a techno-Twittering age, butchers’ proximity to the raw truth of flesh and blood, muscle and bone has imbued them with romantic mystique. (It doesn’t hurt that they possess the muscular might to heave a carcass of beef, and survivalist skills to gut anything that moves.) In her upcoming memoir Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, Julie Powell writes of butchers’ “intimate knowledge”: “Romantically, I imagine it’s innate, that his nicked hands were born knowing how to slice those whisper-thin cutlets.” Cleaving is Powell’s follow-up to her bestseller Julie & Julia, in which she worked through every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, cheered on by her devoted husband Eric. This time, she’s writing about her gruelling stint as an apprentice butcher at Fleisher’s. All the while, she’s cheating on her hapless hubby with a man who’s a non-butcher. This being the fleischgeist, it’s the meat, not the sex, that provides the book’s biggest thrills: no encounter with her lover matches the “food-related orgasm” Powell experiences swallowing a creamy cube of pig’s heart.
Her biggest turn-on by far, however, is the “authority” exuded by the butchers around her: “There’s an absolute sureness to a butcher, whether he is chining lamb chops with a band-saw or telling customers just how to prepare a crown roast,” she writes. Powell’s not the only one waxing rapturous over men in white smocks with cleavers. In another upcoming memoir, The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman’s Romp Through a World of Men, Meat and Moral Crisis, former vegetarian Tara Austen Weaver tells the story of being ordered to eat meat by her doctor for her health. After much soul-searching, she finds herself attracted not only to pork chops but their purveyors: “a redheaded Irish butcher renders me mute,” she writes.
Butchers’ emergence as cultural heartthrobs follows a predictable trajectory. We saw it with heroic firefighters who captured the libidinous imagination amid the terror tremors following 9/11, and with fix-it guys like Mike Holmes who became pin-up boys in an overheated housing market. All of them offer the promise of skilled finesse and the assurance of safety—in the case of butchers, that the meat they’re providing isn’t riddled with drugs or disease or was treated cruelly. “People want to know where their meat comes from,” says Bonnie Stern. “It’s like going to your doctor, you depend on them. You want to make sure they are pure and good and honest.”
Wizansky agrees. “People are seeking a closer relationship with the food they eat,” she says. Artisanal butchers are viewed as reclaiming a long-lost art; they’re in sync with the beast they’re dissecting, unlike supermarket meat cutters who dispatch meat pieces shipped in boxes from factories.
Butchers are forced to confront primal truths, says Applestone. “People forget sometimes where their food comes from, but we never do,” she says. “We have built our business on the back of dead animals and we instill that in our employees—that nothing is to be taken for granted, nothing is to be taken lightly and waste is not an option.”
The knowledge that dinner has been thoughtfully raised and butchered, that’s the ultimate seduction: meat-lovers can bite into a pasture-raised cow who’s now a bistecca fiorentina without having the pleasure wrecked by guilt or fear.
Alexander understands the mindset and caters to it. He designed one Cumbrae’s location so that his well-heeled customers can see all the way to the back—to the dangling carcasses and the skilled butchers at work. The transparency is a metaphor for what he’s trying to achieve. The fact it’s literally a carnivore’s peep show, the ultimate in butcher porn, well, that’s just a titillating bonus.
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