For Alex Swanstrom, an auditor at a financial firm, cutting into the dead pig wasn’t hard. It was what happened next that made him rethink whether whole-animal butchery was something he was ready to dive into. Decked out in a black apron on a recent Sunday afternoon, Swanstrom, 27, slipped a six-inch boning knife into the carcass of a 275-pound Berkshire-Duroc hog that was splayed out in two large hemispheres on a table inside Local Pig, a butcher shop in Kansas City’s industrial East Bottoms area. He was supposed to carve off the front shank, which requires separating the flesh and tendons around the lower shoulder to remove the limb. But even after dislocating a joint— it popped with the shrill squeak of compressed air escaping— the shoulder still hung together fibrously, causing Swanstrom to have to pull it over the side of the table for better leverage.
“Don’t force it,” said Alex Pope, one of the shop’s owners. “If you are in a spot that feels like it’s not going well, just move the knife around a little bit.”
When the limb detached, Swanstrom handed it over and took a swig of his beer.
“That was tougher than I thought,” he said.
Hands-on classes in butchering meat, created to give diners carnal familiarity with their food, emerged as a fad in the late 2000s, one confined largely to the coasts. That has since changed, with shops in places like Chicago and Milwaukee inviting students.
Pope, who opened his shop smack dab in the middle of the heartland a year ago, decided to offer hands-on classes after hearing about another shop that charged customers just to watch a demonstration. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “If you are going to learn to break down a pig, you should be able to actually do it.”
Students at Local Pig pay a hundred dollars to trade cuts on a freshly killed pig and take home the spoils: at least ten pounds of fresh meat, plus recipes for using some of the lesser known vittles.
One of the most surprising things has been Pope’s clientele. Kansas City is a meat metropolis, both in terms of its famous barbecue and the proximity of ranchers and outdoorsmen more intimately familiar with its source. So rather than attracting just food tourism’s classic archetype, the hipster or yuppie in search of one-off adventure, he often caters to people interested in actually applying his art— everyone from deer hunters to nouveau back-to-the-landers with their own swine.
Swanstrom, for instance, helps run his family’s hundred-head cattle ranch in Iowa, and wanted to tackle a stand-in before culling a lame steer from his herd. Two other attendees that afternoon, Matt Simonitsch, 56, an analyst with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Gary Hoffman, 64, a lawyer at a life insurance company, are members of the Kansas City Barbeque Society, a nationally known group that judges barbecue events. The two men wanted to learn more about what cuts look like in their rawest form. “I look at it like continuing education,” Simonitsch said. “We know where certain cuts come from, but this is just to give you more depth.”
In a way, Pope, 29, offers the basic apprentice program he never had, the kind that was commonplace in the first half of the twentieth century. With the rise of packing houses in the 1960s, which shipped pre-boxed cuts of meat directly to supermarkets, the lone artisanal butcher went out of style in much the same way that cobblers did. Eventually whole-animal butchery all but disappeared at some culinary schools. Pope belongs to the generation of chefs who missed out; he attended culinary school, but honed his skills working backward from the finished cuts shown in a handbook of the North American Meat Processors. He has since found great joy teaching others the lost trade. One of his early disciples went on to become the head butcher at City Provisions, a deli in Chicago. Another took Pope’s first class at Local Pig, volunteered in the shop, and worked his way up to general manager. But his classes are a bit freewheeling, too, even social, to bring people in regardless of whether they will use the skills again. (While the combination of drinking and knife play might seem prickly, Pope said it helped “lubricate social interaction”.)
The hands-on experience that Pope cultivates in Kansas City is something that most New York City butchers have not embraced. Erik Hassert, an owner of Tiberio Custom Meats on the Lower East Side, does not offer such classes, and neither does Jake Dickson, the owner of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats at Chelsea Market. Both said their customers were unlikely to gain that much from one visceral experience. The liability of handing out knives, and the product waste that happens with slipped cuts, are also deterrents.
“I’ve been to culinary school and the first week we broke down lamb legs and just destroyed everything,” said Michelle Warner, who works for the Brooklyn Kitchen and coordinates classes there with the Meat Hook, a shop in the same building. “By the second week we’d have some usable parts, but even then it’s still not pretty.”
The Meat Hook does offer classes in breaking down a hog, but attendees must live vicariously through the butcher and cannot handle the knives. Unlike their Kansas City counterparts, Meat Hook pupils are probably never going to parcel out their own pig, Warner said. (The West Coast seems to be more progressive on this score, with DIY classes held at meat temples like Avedano’s and 4505 Meats in San Francisco.)
Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats, however, stands out among its East Coast siblings, going beyond even what Pope offers in Missouri. For $350, customers can attend the slaughter of an animal on a farm near the shop’s location in Kingston, New York, and help scald and dehair it before the demonstration. (Fleisher’s also has a Brooklyn location, but does not slaughter there.)
When it comes to the actual slicing, the price goes up. It’s $1,500 for a three-day class that comes with a Victorinox knife set, scabbard, and plenty of pig and lamb deconstruction, or $15,000 for a twelve-week apprenticeship that lets students work alongside the pros.
Like Pope, Fleisher’s has hired some of its best students, and has also trained such professionals as Tom Mylan of the Meat Hook, Ryan Fibiger of Saugatuck Craft Butchery in Connecticut, and Amelia Posada and Erika Nakamura of Lindy & Grundy in Los Angeles.
Learning butchery solo is easier now than when Pope started. For example, Ryan Farr, who runs 4505 Meats, recently released Whole Beast Butchery, a visual guide that shows the step-by-step evisceration of several barnyard animals in five hundred pictures. But there remains a place for programs in which students pick up the knife.
As the class at Local Pig was ending, Swanstrom realized he needed more practice before tackling his own steer, so he asked Pope if he could volunteer at the shop sometime. Pope, who recently leased space at a Department of Agriculture plant so he can sell cuts directly to local restaurants, agreed. He is readying a food truck, which he will leave parked beside his shop, for selling sandwiches. And he has created a line of shaving cream made out of rendered beef tallow. Someone with a little training could be useful, and Pope said he could use all the help he could get.
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