Showing Off my Butcher

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #1

This doesn’t cover half the cabinets. Note the sheeps heads!

Butcher1 butcher2 butcher3 butcher4 butcher5

(KM) #2

This might be worth moving to London. Wow!!!

(Allie) #3

Looks like mine :smiley:
Used to buy the sheep heads for my old dog, he always scooped the brains out first… :nauseated_face:

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #4

I remember velvet talking about food deserts, for a wealthy country that shocked me.
We are not as wealthy as we once were and I’m not bragging … just showing what things could / should look like.
There was more too!

#5

:rage:

Oh I am happy for you just displeased with my situation a little. Though I STILL didn’t go to some better butchers in the city. We are so busy with shopping in the usual places… Shopping is very tiring to me, even food shopping… Maybe it’s the crowd. And all the information and searching for items among the zillion others.

The local butcher here has a few cuts of chicken and a few cuts of pork. That’s it.

I didn’t even ever see honeycomb tripe… Don’t even know what that is, where it’s located in the animal…

Supermarket meat counters may have 1-2 cuts of beef too (the cheapest cut, leg, most definitely. thigh, often). And a few more cuts of chicken and pork. I need a hypermarket for more stuff and I still can’t get special things like lamb liver there…

I can buy duck and turkey though, even locally just not at the butcher, it’s something. I like turkey and it’s so cheap…

I will look at those photos more now… :smiley:

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #6

If they are going to butcher an animal you’d think ALL the animal (now in pieces) would appear in the window!
They can’t surely throw things away. Oh the honey comb tripe is part of the stomach I think.

(KM) #7

I have a sneaking suspicion most of the “butchers” here (in a city of about a million people) don’t actually butcher whole animals, they certainly don’t slaughter them onsite. They probably get sides of beef etc. and just cut the muscle. I don’t know where the offal goes from a cafo, other than maybe pet food or if it’s not a strong flavor, ground up in places it’s not seen like processed meatballs or hotdogs. There are three “butchers” in this city and really they’re all just very fancy, very expensive deli’s with fewer options than your average supermarket.

ETA: these are not “food deserts”, which are places where the only options available, especially to people on foot, are gas-station type convenience stores selling processed junk, and fast food restaurants. It’s just that for the most part, American Food is centralized and distributed, even to the healthy and wealthy. Produce is shipped in from thousands of miles away, ditto meat and dairy. “Local” might be a range of 400 miles.

(Doug) #8

So true - even on the east coast, so much stuff is coming from California… Noticed less centralization in France, and definitely in Italy - much more of local truck farms supplying the retailers, and everything tasted really good.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #9

I’m not sure I can generalise for farm, abattoir and butchers in the UK. But I’m pretty sure some farms send animals to the slaughter house and get back everything they sent.
I bet most is centralised in the same US model but in the UK that might mean things don’t go far. I also think everything is tracked. For safety reason you can pinpoint, in theory, the exact farm your chop came from.
I know my butchers can describe the farm my meat comes from and it’s only 10 miles away.

#10

Even the farms don’t put every parts on sale… Though one may ask for it, I saw that doing successfully.

I suppose the farmer or factory does something with the organs, the hypermarket totally can have only 2 cuts of mutton and no organs… I barely see a few cuts from ruminants, well several in the hipermarket but far from all. I can buy beef liver and heart but no other beef organs. And there is barely any mutton or rabbit. But we buy home-raised young rabbits and we even managed to get heads and the blood when we asked for them :slight_smile: We get some organs, not all but all we like, liver, heart, spleen.
And I got a young piglet with head from the pig farm. I don’t remember organs but it’s nice to get a head, brain is fun. Supermarket chicken has no head, I only had chicken brain when Grandma killed a chicken.

It was good to buy half an animal from a farm as we could refuse the organs but we could buy more than half an animal worth as the others didn’t want it. IDK why, it’s Hungary, we aren’t exactly afraid of organs… People still prefer the normal meat, it seems. I always like to try out new things :wink:

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #11

Lots of good points Shinita.
If I were in charge the whole animal, maybe not the icky bits, would be for sale. It makes sense. OK so some goes for dog food.
I guess too many business models work on percentages and us Low Carb folk are not a factor in the overall profit making agenda’s :man_shrugging: Sadly
Everyone is being sold the idea of lean meat … or no meat. We have no chance.
That’s quite a good rant for me lol

(Alec) #12

You’d think a butcher would be able to spell boneless! :joy::joy::joy:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #13

Hey, everyone makes misteaks! :grin:

#14

I still can’t wrap my head around it… Some people think so, yes but isn’t normal people care about their joy and not health (so they don’t care much about dietary advice)? So they should eat fatty meat. And people who know that fatty meat is good and healthy for them, probably eat fatty meat, are they so few there? Sad. We have plenty of fatty meat here and people obviously gladly buy it. I need somewhat leaner meat to avoid overeating fat, good thing that I can get pork with the full range of fat content, from super lean to 100% fat tissue and it’s not particularly expensive but tasty, even the supermarket stuff.
And I have deer sometimes, that’s neat :slight_smile:

And while I never liked the highly popular (IDK about recent times, it was that in my childhood) pure pork fat tissue (smoked and raw), now I do. Very recent change. I blame the pig farm, their smoked stuff is super good :smiley: I went from “oh it’s way too fatty, I need to use it in scrambled eggs with some leaner meat” to “wow, it’s amazing, even all alone” in no time.

(Allie) #15

A lot of butchers now just buy in what they know they’ll sell rather than butchering the whole animal. Really just resellers now.

#16

That’s EXACTLY where most of the weird stuff goes! Worth more money to those companies, since the majority of people don’t eat them.

#17

People are weird.
Organs (usually?) aren’t :smiley: But I don’t like them all either, of course we have our tastes. And if a country in general tends to avoid them, the kids just never get used to the fact they are edible…
I saw organ food everywhere all the time when I was a kid, Grandma had chickens so eating organs was one of the most natural things to me. And why not, it’s meat…

(KM) #18

I think here, people want tasty joyfully delicious food but they also like to think they’re “being healthy” … So they listen to a lot of terrible marketing advice about low-fat plant-based etc etc, and then top it off with utter garbage. Example, having a skinless chicken breast salad, and then a triple helping of tiramisu because hey they deserve it, they just ate a very healthy lunch. Some very childish rationalization going on.

(Marcia T) #19

Just curious - where is this gem? We’re going to be in the UK in October - would love to find a butcher like this one - or any one, for that matter.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #20

There are several like it in London. This one is in East Street SE17. Only 10mins walk from Elephant & Castle Tube stop.
Interestingly East street is the birth place of Charlie Chaplin!