Slaughter House Live -DIY Butchering

October 25, 2009
Slaughterhouse Live
By ALEX WILLIAMS

TO celebrate their 30th birthdays, Christian Rusby, a sustainability consultant in Seattle, and his twin brother, Jake, a college student, decided to get blood on their hands.

They enrolled in a hog butchering class offered every few months by a farmer, Bruce King. With classmates looking on, Jake hunkered over a 120-pound castrated pig with a .22-caliber rifle pointed at its skull and, coaxed by Mr. King, pulled the trigger.

They severed the animal’s arteries, burned off hair, peeled back skin, and, elbows deep in entrails, carved through bones with a fine-tooth saw.

The experience did not whet the appetite. “When it first dies, you touch it and it’s warm,” recalled Christian, who said he lives in a largely meat-free home. “You hesitate.”

For some diners, belonging to a farm co-op or buying groceries from a greenmarket is no longer enough. Taking concepts like nose-to-tail eating a step further, a new generation of carnivores is learning to butcher, and in some cases, slaughter their own animals — think of it as do-it-yourself meat.

Butchers, many of whom have achieved a kind of microfame, now teach classes in cities like New York, San Francisco and London, as well as in affluent agricultural areas like the Hudson Valley. In many cases, the student butchers are sailing the prevailing currents of contemporary food culture — local, sustainable agriculture, farm-to-table eating — to their logical end-point.

But D.I.Y. butchering also allows self-conscious carnivores — who in the past were candidates for vegetarianism — to justify their flesh-laden dinners. By learning to slaughter and butcher, they say, they can honor their pigs and eat them, too. (Some vegans, however, are not amused.)

Sarah Sluis, 24, recently attended a class taught by Jeffrey Ruhalter, a butcher at Essex Street Market in Manhattan. Ms. Sluis, a magazine editor, said she had lived in a vegan house during college where she was immersed in debates about whether eating meat was humane or necessary. Taking this class was one way to prove to her antimeat friends, and herself, that she could face the ugly realities of eating meat.

“I feel like if I’m going to eat meat,” she added, “I don’t want to eat stuff that I haven’t had to work for.”

Mr. King has been farming for only three years, but he has already started capping reservations for his classes in hog and turkey slaughter (for one class he had space for 10 and 45 showed up). Many of his students are either serious foodies like the Rusbys, or former professionals like himself who have gone back to the land.

Tom Mylan, formerly the head butcher at Marlow & Daughters restaurants, has teamed up with Brooklyn Kitchen, a kitchenware shop and cooking school in Williamsburg, to teach three different butchery classes and is planning to increase his teaching space sevenfold by the holidays to keep up with demand.

Students can also enroll in an eight-week apprentice program with master butchers at Fleisher’s, an organic meat purveyor run by Joshua and Jessica Applestone in the Hudson Valley.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/fashion/25meat.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print