Butcher Will Heath, representing the next generation of artisan, whole-body butchers.

5.

The whole animal and nothing but the animal

The dying art of whole-animal butchery

Butchery is a beautiful and venerable craft, and when it is performed with expertise it is full of respect for the life given up to feed us. As long as we continue to eat animals, we need skilled and caring people to prepare our meat for us.

Meat carter, Andrew ‘Spider’ Byrnes. Meat carters load and unload tonnes of meat every single day using only their guile and strength. A business like ours that exclusively sources meat on the bone wouldn’t last long without their herculean efforts.

After a slightly rocky start during which our delivery service may have included yoga blankets and an old Toyota Corolla sedan, and we may have sold a three-legged lamb that should have had four legs to a two-hat chef desperate for three hats, we found our feet in the world of butchery and fell in love with the beauty and craft of this rich, visceral world.

Filled with crusading zeal for a better food model, we decided that our commitment to transparency and a whole-animal practice meant two things. First, we would seek out diverse breeds of animals grown on farms managed with the goal of improving the entire ecosystem. Second, we wouldn’t buy boxed meat from a wholesaler, but instead would always buy meat on the bone direct from the farmer, offal and all, or in isolated cases from their nominated representative.

Meat as a commodity

Traditional whole-animal butcheries have become a rarity in many developed countries. A butchery business model organised around specific parameters such as sourcing whole, pasture-raised animals direct from the farmer forces the butcher to operate outside of the mainstream meat marketplace — a choice that is considered contrary and eccentric. The overwhelming majority of domestic and export meat in Australia is traded through the commodity meat market. If you doubt this, take a peek at the futures market for meat, where billions of dollars are traded on animals that are yet to be born. It’s a game for the big guys in which the volumes are measured in thousands of tonnes, and product differentiation isn’t a factor.

Much of the meat produced for this market will be sourced from farms that are organised around the primary goal of maximising turnover of animals. The management strategies at the farms that feed into this market include breeding specifically for fast growth and high yield, often confining animals to feedlots or sheds — so-called ‘concentrated animal feeding operations’, or CAFOs — while incorporating sub-therapeutic antibiotic medication into their feed, as well as hormones to promote growth. As a system that rewards volume and speed, it works brilliantly.

‘We enjoy the profit, convenience and low prices, trusting that someone else will deal with the problems.’

But if you’re a farmer or butcher or consumer interested in other dimensions of value, such as traceable animal and environmental welfare standards, or an animal’s nutritional density (greatly determined by the health of the ecosystem in which it has lived), then it will come up short. This is because when a farmer sells into the mainstream commodity market, their animals disappear into a generic product pool. There is rarely any recognition of the nuances in different farm management systems or different breeds, the price fluctuates according to external pressures that have little to do with a farmer’s practice, the animals are broken down and sold to retail butchers in boxed sections, and the farmer has no idea who ends up eating their produce. In this system, smaller-scale farmers are price-takers, forced to accept what is offered, rather than being price-setters.

Of course, just because something is produced at a large scale doesn’t mean that quality, ethics and animal, human and environmental welfare are automatically compromised. This is where regulations, the implementation of industry standards that match community expectations, and certification schemes such as organics become so important. But if a business is sourcing produce from 10 different farms to sell under a single brand and not providing the consumer with information about those farms, then the connection between producer and consumer is broken. The potential for building knowledge and accountability on both sides is diminished. The farmer doesn’t know where their animals will end up and who will eat them, and the end consumer is similarly ignorant about the source of the food they are eating, and the methods employed to grow it. This applies equally to grain and legume production. Choosing a vegetarian or vegan diet won’t necessarily guarantee a more benevolent or transparent source.

Despite the growing indications that things might not be going as smoothly as we’d hoped, we’re all charging ahead enjoying the profit, convenience and low prices, trusting that someone else will deal with the problems.

In the world of butchery, the commodity system holds fast. Meat retailing is increasingly polarised between a super-cheap, super-generic offer at one end, and a ‘gourmet’ offer at the other. Many people buy their meat at supermarkets, meaning the traditional high-street retail butcher, unable to compete, is starting to go the way of newsagents. (Remember newsagents?)

One way to maintain commercial relevance and imbue the trade with meaning is to practise whole-animal butchery — but very few retail butchers buy whole animals because it has become a trickier and riskier endeavour. You need room to hang the carcasses, the skills to break down the body, and you must sell the whole body, or a significant proportion of it, to make a living. Instead, as we’ve seen, most butchers buy their meat in boxes of plastic-wrapped carcass sections that they break down into the familiar cuts that consumers want to buy. Larger butchery operations do buy whole animals, but the majority of the meat they source will arrive in boxes.

Meat in a box

There are lots of compelling advantages to boxed meat. Boxes are easy to store and, because the meat ‘wet ages’ in plastic, there isn’t any loss from dry ageing. (We’ll explain dry ageing in more detail later in this chapter.) Boxes allow the butcher the freedom to only buy the sections of the carcass that they are pretty confident they can sell, the sorts of cuts that customers ask for and are familiar with — slow-cooking cuts in the cooler months, fast cooking in the warmer months. This limits the risk of waste, which is the enemy of profit.

But boxed meat has its limitations. By only responding to consumer demand, the butcher isn’t shaping or extending the customer’s desire, capacity or knowledge. In fact, like the algorithms that determine our social media feeds, each time you select a cut, you’re reinforcing the supply of that cut and potentially narrowing the range of available choices. In addition, the butcher is usually buying their meat from an intermediary, whose word is often the only thing they have to go by when it comes to checking the authenticity of the product. They’re unlikely to have a personal relationship with the farmer, to have visited the farm or know much about how the animals were raised. They may not know how they were transported when they left the farm gate, and they’re unlikely to have visited the abattoir or have a relationship with the managers. When the box arrives with the plastic-packed meat inside, the butcher has very limited information about the meat, so it’s difficult to verify provenance or manage quality control. In the case of skinned animals such as sheep, sometimes the boxed muscles have also had the fat removed, which makes this even harder. In these cases, substitution of lamb with hogget (older, less commercially valuable sheep) is rife.

So, in the vast majority of cases, boxed meat is literally a disembodied commodity that offers the butcher a relatively narrow range of creative potential, and very little by which to gauge its worth beyond what they paid for it and how it looks. There isn’t much of a story the butcher can tell their customers about her product, which makes for a rather dull exchange, but it’s definitely efficient and business-like. Keep it simple, give customers what they want, manage costs and minimise the risk of waste.

If you’re doubtful about this, try asking your local butcher or the sales staff at your local supermarket some of the questions our customers ask us every day about the meat we sell.

‘Buying whole animals direct from the grower opens up a whole world of connection and complexity.’

If they can answer half of those questions, and you’re sure they’re not just telling you what they think you want to hear, then you’re on to a good thing and you should stick with them!

Meat out of the box

Compared to buying boxed meat from an intermediary, buying whole animals direct from the grower opens up a whole world of stories, connection, complexity and responsibility. It’s a riskier business, but far more interesting and rewarding.

For us, the whole process starts long before we get involved, and sometimes it’s hard to say where exactly it begins and ends. Sometimes we think it begins with the arrival of a litter of piglets destined for our cool room, born in a nest built by a determined, single-minded sow, sited wherever she decided was best, which may or may not be where the farmer thinks is most appropriate. But perhaps it starts before that, when the sow herself was born. Sometimes we think it ends when the last gram of meat from an animal is sold in our butchery. But then, when our customers bring their kids into the butchery, some of whom we’ve known since they were born, we decide that, actually, this is where it ends, one animal absorbing another and continuing the cycle of life. It’s a privilege to be trusted with the job of playing a small part in those lives, the animal and the child.

Whatever the animal, when it arrives at our butchery, we know a lot about where it comes from, how it was produced, how it died and how it arrived at our door, and this, we believe, is as it should be — because buying whole animals directly from the farmer brings everyone into the loop, and connects us all the way back to the soil, and all the way forward to the plate on the table. Connection creates communities; communities foster accountability. The more we know each other, the more we care and the stronger we are.

Of course, if your business is built around buying the whole animal, then you also have to sell the whole animal, which can be challenging. Many of us have lost the traditional skills that allowed us to prepare and consume the whole animal. Eating offal was something quaint our grandparents did, and these days we spend more time watching cooking shows than we actually do preparing food. All of this means we default to the cuts we know how to cook, and we’re less likely to choose the less familiar ones.

‘How do you cook skirt? What do you do with oyster blade? What about heart, liver or tongue?’

Take an average beef carcass, for example. The 2–3-year-old cattle that we buy direct from the farm usually weigh in at 300+ kilograms carcass weight. About 25 per cent of the carcass yields the primary cuts that most people know and feel comfortable cooking — eye fillet, sirloin, rump. To put that in context, eye fillet makes up about 1.3 per cent of the entire carcass, so we’d suggest that it should only be eaten 1.3 per cent of the time. Another 25 per cent of the carcass offers equally familiar secondary cuts such as minute steaks, chuck and blade. But the remaining 50 per cent of the carcass is comprised of bones, fat, offal and muscles that are delicious when properly trimmed and prepared, but aren’t part of the usual domestic cook’s repertoire. How do you cook skirt? (Astonishingly, a first year Australian butchery apprentice is taught that ‘skirt’ is only good for trim, but our customers know that skirt is a delicious cut that also happens to be a staple of Asian and South American cuisine. here for a great recipe.) What do you do with oyster blade? What about heart, liver or tongue? We can turn a fair bit of that remaining 50 per cent into familiar products like dice, mince, sausages and broth, but if we’re going to pay proper dues to the life given up to feed us and not waste a thing, then customers need to be persuaded to jump in the deep end and try new cuts. Fortunately, our customers are gutsy, adventurous, creative and endlessly curious. As you can see from their recipes in this book, there are many ways to eat the whole animal.

The eight-legged cow and the miracle of the Christmas ham

The other challenge in whole-animal butchery is the fact that we’re stuck with what nature has given each animal we sell. We’ve been lobbying all the available divinities for years, but so far our prayers haven’t been answered, and the mythical beast that in winter grows eight legs (for extra osso buco), four tails (for extra oxtail) and four heads (for extra beef cheeks), and in summer sheds eight legs (no one wants osso buco in summer) and grows four extra loins (for steaks) hasn’t transpired. This can be a real problem for the whole-animal butcher.

Then there’s the miracle of the Christmas ham.

Like all butchers in Western countries, each December we sell hundreds of whole hams. There are usually two ways for butchers to manage this explosive, one-off spike in demand. They either buy bulk boxes of anonymous pig legs from the commodity market, or they squirrel away the legs from the whole pigs they buy each week throughout the year. As we’ve seen, not many butchers buy whole pigs, so the second option is the less travelled path. In our case, the hams we offer are made exclusively from the legs of the pasture-raised pigs we source each week from regeneratively managed farms in New South Wales. Pigs raised this way — born and bred on pasture and regularly rotated to fresh paddocks with mobile shelters — make up only 3 per cent of the Australian pork meat trade, so there’s a limited number of legs available for curing. Each week we cure some legs from these whole pigs to meet the weekly demand for ham, and the remaining legs we stockpile for Christmas. Which leaves the remainder of the pig that needs to be sold each week as fresh pork cuts to our regular customers who buy weekly or fortnightly, although a good percentage of the belly and loin will also be cured for bacon.

As soon as we open up Christmas orders, our customer base balloons and we are overwhelmed by the responsibility of making sure that everyone gets exactly what they need for their big event. Then, when the party’s over, many of those customers disappear until next Christmas and we remember that this happens every year. We’re not complaining. Many customers only shop with us at Christmas time and we are grateful and proud that they return to us for their annual celebratory ham. It’s a special occasion and it’s wonderful that they care enough to want a high-welfare, high-quality ham. But the thing is, if you want to continue to eat a high-welfare, good-quality ham at Christmas time, then you may need to buy high-welfare, good-quality pork more than once a year, so the farms that are growing to the standards you admire are able to survive.

If there were more consistent demand for pasture-raised pork, there would probably be more farms growing it.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures

We’ve only broken our cardinal rule of never buying boxed meat once, and we did it in spectacular style, receiving a single delivery of most of a mob of organic Wagyu steers, neatly packed into 146 boxes. It was extremely unnerving to see the delivery truck doors open on pallet-loads of boxes, rather than the usual whole carcasses broken into the halves or quarters that we’re so proud to hang in our cool room, and it took a lot of navel-gazing and gin for us to arrive at that point.

Australia’s annual fire season is becoming progressively longer and more ferocious as climate change starts to bite and, despite the work they do to mitigate against the impacts of climate change, regenerative farmers are as vulnerable as anyone else. In 2017, Gundooee Organics, a Wagyu beef farm we’ve sourced from for over 10 years, was razed by a savage fire that tore through the district, destroying the farm’s infrastructure and all the precious grasses to feed the pasture-raised cattle. Owner Rob Lennon proudly refused our offers to run a fundraiser but he did ask us to immediately buy 22 large, 3–4-year-old cattle — he needed funds for recovery. For us, this wasn’t a straightforward exercise. To start with, the only abattoir within a viable distance with the infrastructure to handle big cattle is an export-geared abattoir with a minimum order of 20 carcasses per customer. Regulations prohibit the export of whole carcasses on the bone and only boned, boxed meat is permitted for export. So the only way to make this work was for us to break our 10-year whole-animal record, receive the cattle in boxes and take the lot in one delivery. For years, every month like clockwork, we’d bought carcasses of Rob’s wonderful 2–3-year-old Wagyu cattle, which we’d dry-age and sell progressively over 6 weeks — very paced and very considered. So to buy 22 in one delivery was a big disruption to that rhythm.

But these were extraordinary circumstances. Once we’d worked out the logistics, we realised that it was a rare opportunity to handle older Wagyu beef from one of the best growers in the country. In Australia, most beef comes from cattle that are bred and fed to reach market size within 15 months, and the resulting ‘yearling’ beef is relatively flavourless compared to beef from more mature animals. But because consumers are consistently presented with meat that is becoming softer and less flavoursome, this is what people now expect. By comparison, older cattle are considered tough and attract a lower market price, so there is little financial incentive for farmers to ‘grow out’ their animals, which just reinforces the trend towards an increasingly bland product range.

‘A good butcher has a surgeon’s understanding of physiology and an artist’s imagination.’

The point of this story is that we were able to buy and sell Rob’s older beef to an appreciative audience because it has never been treated as a commodity by him, by us, or by our customers. Everyone, at every point in the production and consumption cycle, understands that Gundooee beef, like everything we sell, is a manifestation of soil, seasons, farming practice, genetics, animal handling, and slaughter and butchery techniques. You’re not just buying a product, be it meat or potatoes or lentils or milk — you’re casting a vote for a production system and the sort of world in which you want to live.

So, when the big back doors of the delivery truck open and the meat carter rattles down the ramp and into our cool room, bowed under the weight of a carcass, we already know a lot about the animal. We’ve visited the farms over different seasons so we understand the specific characteristics of the place and, depending on when we last visited the farm, we may have seen the same animals running around in the paddock before we see their carcasses hanging in our cool room. We’ve had many lengthy discussions with the farmer about the conditions of the season, the animals, the farm and any number of other related subjects, and we’ve often visited the abattoirs at which these animals were processed and watched the kill when permitted.

At this point, with the whole animal hanging on hooks in one, two, four or occasionally eight parts in our cool room, with the offal in a box alongside, the carcass reveals a wealth of information about genetics, the season, the energy and protein levels of the feed, and the quality of the slaughter process. We are the eyes of the farmer, and we report back regarding the carcass quality, fat levels, muscle conformation and carcass handling. The condition of the delivered carcass also dictates how we store, break and sell the carcass, in particular the amount of time we allow it to hang. This is where the skill and craft of butchery comes to the fore.

The dying art of butchery

Puns aside, this is a serious subject. We think that butchery is a beautiful and venerable craft, and when it is performed with skilful expertise it is full of respect and admiration for the life given up to feed us. As long as we continue to eat animals, we need skilled and caring people to prepare our meat for us.

Unfortunately, in many parts of the developed world, butchery knowledge is slowly being lost and the trade is declining, because the commodity meat market requires less skill, so fewer and fewer people are taking up the knives. This loss of skill and craft is largely due to the rapid consolidation of the meat industry. When most meat arrives as dissected primal cuts vacuum-packed in plastic in a box, there’s no requirement for the butcher to understand the wealth of information provided by a whole carcass, or to know the most elegant and efficient way to break the whole body down to limit waste, maximise yield or allow for careful dry ageing. When you’re not forced to find ways to encourage your customers to cook the whole body, you forget how to do it yourself. When you can stuff your sausages with fillers, flavour enhancers and preservatives, you forget how to make fresh, hand-made sausages with natural ingredients. When the meat you’re sourcing is immature, undifferentiated by breed or production process and relatively bland, most of your effort goes into jazzing it up with pre-prepared commercial marinades and spice mixes.

Our butchers understand that when the meat is intrinsically good, you don’t need to do much, either in the cutting or the cooking. Trimming well is the secret and a well-cut piece of meat will cook better and is preferable to tricked-up products. Then there’s the perception that butchery is a hard, thankless and slightly unpalatable business that most of us are glad is done by someone else. It’s true that it’s a hard, physical job and there are blood and guts involved. You need to love the feeling of being physically exhausted at the end of the day if you’re going to be a butcher.

But butchery can also be meditative and creative, and is a critical link in the chain that feeds us. There are days when we walk through the cool room and the production area and we are awestruck by the visceral beauty and gravity of what we do every day. The cool room, with its clean, slightly iron smell, is a quiet tableau of beastly beauty — grand quarters of beef carcasses lined with yellow, grassy fat, and complete goat, lamb and pig carcasses, stretched out and hanging by their hocks. When we look at them, we see the farms they came from and the hard work that brought them here into our cool room, and we’re filled with the responsibility of honouring the lives given up to feed us. We walk into the bustling production room where the butchers wield their knives like graceful, efficient sculptors as they break down whole bodies on the hooks, coax bones smoothly out of their fleshy homes and transform whole muscles into elegant portions. Their actions are at once physical and powerful and delicate and precise. A really good butcher has a surgeon’s understanding of physiology, and an artist’s imagination, and it’s beautiful to see the craft at work.

Apart from the skills required, there’s an attitude that comes with whole-body butchery. Our youngest butcher, who took a circuitous route into butchery via a partially completed business degree, is in awe of the quality of the animals with which he works and the farmers who produce them. He says that sometimes the butchers will start to break a body and then just stop to step back and admire it for a moment before continuing on with their work. After visiting some of the farms we represent, he has a growing understanding of the ideas behind regenerative agriculture, and the extraordinary effort and commitment that goes into producing the meat he admires so much. He says he is starting to understand the responsibility that he and his colleagues carry. ‘When you see how far these farmers go, what they do and the effort they put in, you can see why the quality of the product is so good. As the butcher and the next link in the production chain, I need to match that effort: not waste anything, cut the meat perfectly and advise the customer as well as possible so that they have the best experience, and we all do justice to the farmer and the animal.’

Another butcher observes, ‘I have always felt that every body I work with is a gift.’

These are the kinds of butchers we should all want to be preparing the meat we eat.

Having our meat and eating it too

As we’ve explained throughout this book, the vast majority of agricultural industries, regardless of the product, run according to a commodity model that has dispensed with the quaint, old-fashioned notion of direct relationships in favour of the benefits of speed and scale. A business like ours is a sort of lunatic outpost, clinging to the romantic idea that connecting consumers and producers creates community, and that this is the critical glue that binds us together and holds us all accountable for the choices we make. If you buy your meat at the supermarket, not only are the animal and the farmer likely to be a mystery, but you also don’t have any contact with the person who prepared your meat for you. It’s a profoundly anonymous exchange. But, as we see from the recipes and stories of all the people in this book, here and all over the world, there is a growing movement that seeks to negotiate a more equitable and sustainable path between the benefits and the costs of industrialised production — or having our meat and eating it too.

The past 20 years has seen an explosion in the number of farmers’ markets across the country, serving customers and farmers who want to meet eye to eye. More and more consumers are choosing to scrutinise the food they’re putting into their bodies, and more and more farmers are concluding that the intensive method is a hiding to nothing and so they’re exploring different methods that lead to overall ecosystem health. There are wonderful opportunities for everyone at every point in the production and consumption cycle to build greater connections and contribute to a healthier, more sustainable food system. Butchery is no exception.

Change is hard and change is slow, but from little things, big things grow.

What is dry ageing?

‘Dry ageing’ is the traditional practice of hanging some sections of a carcass with an even fat covering in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment for up to 6 weeks, or even longer. Dry ageing can only be done with meat that remains on the bone, which is partly why so few butchers do it anymore. During this period, the meat loses moisture, shrinks in against the bone, and the exposed flesh on the surface of the cut sections dries evenly and forms a protective layer — the whole protected by the fat, allowing moisture transfer, but dramatically slowing oxidation.

As the moisture evaporates, the muscle tissue is broken down by naturally occurring enzymes that soften the texture and intensify flavour, resulting in more tender meat with a deeply concentrated flavour that is rich and earthy and has a distinct ‘umami’ savouriness — umami being the fifth of the taste sensations after salty, sweet, bitter and sour.

While mature meat that’s been dry aged is a wonderful product, the process of dry ageing requires a dedicated hanging room, careful temperature control and skilled oversight, and results in significant mass and volume losses. All of this needs to be recouped by charging a higher price, which can be difficult in a marketplace that’s accustomed to artificially cheap meat and is unfamiliar with this old-fashioned practice.

Here are the average hang times for our carcasses.

  • Veal (6–8 months old): 8–14 days
  • Beef (24–36 months or older): 2–6+ weeks
  • Lambs (5–10 months old): 5–10 days
  • Hogget (sheep with two permanent teeth, generally 12–24 months old): 2–3 weeks
  • Mutton (sheep with at least four permanent teeth, generally 2 years old or more): 2–6 weeks
  • Goats (5–10 months old): 8–14 days
  • Suckling pigs (12–18 kg, aged 7–10 weeks): less than 1 week
  • Weaner pigs (15–30 kg, aged 8–16 weeks): less than 1 week
  • Porker pigs (50–70 kg, aged 20–26 weeks): 5–10 days

There are only a few whole-animal butcheries left in Australia and we’re fast losing the skills required to artfully break down a whole body and turn it into the myriad cuts and products it can yield.

Jack Harrington tucks into a spit-roasted rib from a New Horizon Australian White lamb, from Cumnock, NSW.