Fear and Loathing: the Future of Meat-Cutting

    

     My first day as a meat-cutter apprentice, my trainer David handed me a plastic green boxcutter.

    “One day this is all you will need to know.” He said, forlornly flicking out the safety-sized blade.

    I was fortunate enough to come up around the last of the old-school.  They fed me tall-tales of the good ol’ days—sawdust on the floors, cigarettes on edge of the block, a case of beer in the hollow of a lamb’s chest cavity, breaking down hanging beef with a boning blade, labor unions paying double-time-and-a-half on Sundays, and blowjobs from smoking hot meat-wrappers in the cooler.  To me they were Gods, though fallen angels might have more aptly been appropriate.  They drank heavily, chain-smoked cigarettes, sported tattoos and scars from a life of hard-living and hard knocks.  

    They could show up late and hungover, hit on customers, cuss at the managers, and somehow they could never get fired.  They knew too much.  They had a set of skills and knowledge that couldn’t be replicated or replaced.  They were foul-mouthed and intoxicated, surviving on the fringes of society and carving their money from an underbelly industry of blood, flesh, bone, and death.  They were artists and degenerates, an almost bohemian lot ground and mixed crudely and coarsely with all the makings of a biker gang.

    I was jealous.  While I ran the Frozen Food department I looked upon them as if they were divine beings in their white, crimson-stained smocks—somehow touched by the darkness of the supernatural.  They made good money, we all knew.  And I wanted to earn a decent living.  I wanted to strut about the store in a blood-stained smock, wielding a scimitar and a steel mesh glove like an anachronistic medieval knight decked in chainmail armor and lusting for battle and fair maidens.

    My first foot in the door came when I was asked by the Market Manager (oddly enough another West Virginia transplant named Jim) to clean the market one night after his closer called-out.  I was excited.  

    “Do I get to wear a white coat?”  I asked enthusiastically.

    “Of course!” said Jim, “You wouldn’t fit in if you didn’t.”

    I remember it like the first time I tried Adderall—just life changing and altering.  The result was the same: in both instances I succumbed to guttural pleasures and became a junkie fiending for his next fix.  Pumped up on amphetamines and nicotine, I cleaned the market in a meticulous fashion, so much so that I neglected Frozen Food and I was never again allowed to close the meat department.

    I felt discouraged.  A year I had spent trying to get into the market.  Promises of training and promotions and money and just when it seemed in my grasp, I had failed yet again.  Like I failed out of college with a 3.7 GPA but looming felony charges.  Failed like my last relationship with a girl who wasted two years of my life with talks of buying a house, getting married, and having kids.  A girl who dragged me four hours away from my family to Myrtle Beach only to suddenly stop taking her SSRI’s, going full-blown bi-polar, and reminding me of the line from Boondock Saints “I can’t buy a pack of smokes without running into nine guys you’ve fucked!”

    My life was at a low.  I would have been more depressed if I wasn’t so drunk all the time.  I was pumped full of amphetamines which provided me with this sense of hope that I could write my way out of the darkness.  I worked 10-hour days in Frozen Food, then went home and drank and wrote while chain-smoking cigarettes in a cramped studio apartment with a fold-out bed that reminded me of the top to a sardine can.  I got a few things published, but I never made much money.  I had failed as a writer, too.  

    Then one day Keith, my store manager, who had come up from humble beginnings as a meat-cutter, called me into the office.  I was promoted to full-time, given a raise, and transferred to a different store to train for three or four months as a meat-cutter apprentice.  I made less money, even with a raise, as I was working 40-hours a week as opposed to 55.  When I left the market for the day, I went to work part-time at the candy store my roommates worked at, and on my days off I went to school.  I kept busy.  I had no place in my life for love or connection.  I wanted to make something of myself.

    I graduated from my training with shining honors.  My current store manager and my former store manager got into an argument.  Keith wanted me back in Surfside because rumor had it I had done so well.  My current store manager wanted to keep me in the store because I got along with everyone and they all liked me.  Keith won.  “I never officially transferred him to your store.”  My current store manager was pissed.  “That backstabbing son-of-a-bitch!”  I was upset because my current store I could walk to.  Now I had to drive 35 minutes through Myrtle Beach traffic in the summer, which could mean hours during tourist season.  And I didn’t have a reliable vehicle.

    Throughout eleven years, I’ve watched the same thing go down at every company I have worked for, save for one.  First the ground beef starts coming in pre-packaged.  Then they introduce pre-packaged steaks within some niche, like “grass-fed.”  Then they stop cutting pork and all of that comes in pre-packaged in mushroomed, gas-packed bags that smell like a wet fart when you cut them open.  The big corporations slowly take your trade away from you, because they don’t want to pay you all that money as a skilled tradesman.  Bi-Lo started out with ground beef, then grass-fed steaks, then full pre-packaged.  They went out of business.

    When I worked for Food Lion, we cut beef and Boston Butts.  Everything else came in pre-packaged save for the grinds, which really wasn’t much different.  Their analysts had noted that customers wanted fresh ground beef, so we still put things in the grinder and ran them out and wrapped them.  But they weren’t really fresh.  They were tubes of course ground beef that we ran through the grinder again and packaged.  A cheap imitation of the real thing.

    I’ve seen it over and over.  First the ground beef, then the pork, then the roasts.  Soon everything is pre-packaged and a skilled meat-cutter is no longer needed.  If you want a 2.5 pound shoulder roast, you are out of luck.  The sad part about the pre-packaged cuts is that they come in with no love.  No one who knew anything about cutting meat cut those things.  The shoulder roasts are wedge cuts, so one half of the piece is thinner than the other.  One half will cook faster than the other and give you an unpleasant dining experience.  Moreover, they leave the silverskin on the roasts, that the lot of us are trained to trim off.  Best of luck cutting through that for a tender bite!  The London Broils are cut at the wrong angle, so they will be tough as no one thought to cut them against the grain.  

    The added costs of having someone on an assembly line cut and package your product comes back to you, the customer!  While you could have a nice chuck roast purchased at $2.39/lb. cost by a company and cut and packaged for you by a real meat-cutter with a price tag of only $4.99/lb., that has gone and passed.  Your current retail price for a pre-packaged chuck roast is $8.99/lb. and you don’t get to choose whether it’s from the chuck-eye end or a center cut or how many pounds you want it to weigh.  It’s just some lifeless slab thrown in the counter for you to accept as the new norm with all the conformity of a base weight and size.

    Hoist the black flag, take no prisoners, slit throats, as H.L. Mencken said!  Demand more from your grocery stores than these conformed packages cut without love or care or skill.  Ask for a REAL meat-cutter.  I bought a thin-cut breakfast steak from Food Lion in a pinch.  The fat cap on that sum-a-bitch looked like an inch thick.  No true self-respecting meat-cutter would have put that out in the case and expected you to pay for all that fat.  When you can’t even master the basic, easy, simple grilling steaks…you are no true meat-cutter.

    The push of the big corporations is to eliminate meat-cutters.  They make too much money; they are scarce to find, and few want to train as one anymore.  So you get these identical products pre-packaged in the case—dozens of 1.75/lb. chuck roasts cut at the same thickness.  There is no play or room for nuance.  As a young apprentice I was instructed by my bossman to vary my cuts—make some thin, some thick—please the single grandmother and the family of five.  You don’t get that from pre-packaged products.  Only a true meat-cutter will show you the love and attention you deserve as a paying customer.

    It’s up to you to demand from these companies that you want our trade back, to live and flourish like it once did, so you can feel confident going to the store and have all that trust in talking to your local butcher.