CUTTING OUT THE TRUTH: Why Real Butchers Matter More Than Ever

There was a time when every town had a butcher. A proper one. Mine did — my grandad at Dewhirst’s in Shipley. A man who could joint a carcass before breakfast and report for Home Guard duty after tea. Baildon Platoon, 1st (Otley) Battalion. A real‑life Corporal Jones, only with sharper knives forged from cold British steel by relatives in Sheffield. In fact, we’ve still got the family Sheffield Wednesday 1928–29 League‑winning bread knife at home, in daily use — proof that proper steel outlives all of us.

Now? We’ve replaced men like him with meat factories.

Not abattoirs — they’ve always been there. I mean the new “protein processing centres,” which is corporate for a big shed where meat goes in one end and comes out the other pumped full of God‑knows‑what industrial shelf‑life‑extending crap and water, looking like it’s been designed by a bored engineer with a CAD licence.

We don’t cure meat anymore — not properly. In Europe they’re still curing hams in garden sheds, doing it the way their grandparents did. Over here, we just inject water and whatever chemical cocktail keeps it looking “fresh”. Bon appétit. Don’t get me wrong, we do have small‑scale curers — Pinney’s of Orford smoking away beautifully, proper dry‑cured Wiltshire ham, the odd artisan who still gives a damn. But this is Sparta — I mean Suffolk — and we raise the bloody pigs. We raise the industry. We should be ashamed of ourselves. But just like chain restaurants and kitchen hells, it’s about the money, not the flavour or the ingredient.

And while we’re clearing up food myths, here’s another one: people love shouting about halal without knowing the first thing about it. Most halal meat in the UK is stunned — just like non‑halal — while kosher follows a different rule set and doesn’t use stunning at all. Funny how outrage never seems to follow the facts. If you’re going to have an opinion on food, at least learn how it’s actually made.

And I say this as someone who grew up in Bradford: I’ve eaten more proper curries — home‑made, restaurant, the kind where not a single thing matched, none of this modern fusion rubbish, proper Bradford curry houses where the food was cheap, well‑made and bloody amazing — and yes, halal — than most of the loudest critics have had hot dinners. And you know what? Other than being bloody lovely, it’s the same meat eight times out of ten. The outrage never matches the reality.

A butcher is someone who understands meat. I got my ox heart from Debmans in Ipswich. I walked in and asked for an ox heart, a kilo and a half of ox liver — don’t tell the NHS, apparently that’s enough to kill an ox — plus bacon, sausages, marrow bones, and a lump of caul fat to melt down in the slow cooker like some medieval alchemist who’s just discovered fire and flavour at the same time. Did they look at me blank and say “You want what?” No. They just said, “Certainly.” Because they know their trade. They know their animals. They hand‑pick most of them in Colchester at the cattle market — something Ipswich lost years ago.

And on the subject of poultry, we had a Christmas chicken from SwissFarm Butchers — a bird, or rather a capon, bigger than most supermarket turkeys. That’s what happens when you buy from people who actually raise and understand their stock, not from a logistics hub where everything’s bred to fit a plastic tray. Your average supermarket genetically‑bred super‑grower chicken is only about six weeks old when it hits the shelf. My capon, however, was allowed to grow at its own pace and was probably four or five months old — an actual bird, not a factory‑accelerated science project. And sure, the supermarket bird is a fiver and the capon once again made a Yorkshireman weep into his wallet, but I know it lived a better life and it fed us for a week instead of a single sitting. Swings and roundabouts — and in this case, the roundabout wins.

And just to be clear, I’m not having a go at anyone who buys the supermarket bird — reduced, full price, whatever keeps the family fed. Times are hard and people do what they have to. My issue isn’t with the shopper, it’s with the system that’s boxed them into that choice. A system that’s decided cheap, fast and uniform is more important than welfare, flavour or craft. People aren’t the problem. The industrial machine that’s replaced real farming and real butchery is.

And if you genuinely want cheap meat without feeding that industrial machine, there is a way — but it takes graft. Go on a butchery course, get yourself a chest freezer, and buy a carcass direct from a farmer. It’s the cheapest meat you’ll ever eat, and you’ll learn more in a weekend than a supermarket will teach you in a lifetime. But it’s work — proper work — and that’s exactly why the system hides it from you.

If we want to buy what we actually want, we need to support our independent butchers. They’re the guardians of their produce, proud of the fact they know where that cow came from, or the pig for that matter, even the sheep and the poultry. Ask Tesco where your meat came from and you’ll get the same answer every time: “A big wagon this morning.”

We’ve gone from butchers to barcode scanners. From craft to conveyor belts. From “How do you want it?” to “That’s all we’ve got.”

And it shows.

Supermarkets call it “efficiency.” Chains call it “consistency.” Accountants call it “cost‑effective.” But what it really is — what it actually is — is the slow, quiet murder of a trade.

A butcher isn’t just someone who cuts meat. A butcher is someone who understands meat.

They know which bit of the cow will melt and which bit will fight you like you owe it money. They know how to turn a cheap cut into a Sunday miracle. They know how to talk you out of the expensive thing because the cheaper one will taste better — and they’re right.

Try getting that from a vacuum‑sealed tray.

Try asking a barcode what field it grazed in. Try asking a supermarket teenager how long to braise shin. Try asking a self‑checkout machine whether the pork’s from down the road or down the motorway.

You’ll get more insight from the reduced‑to‑clear sticker.

And here’s the bit that ties this whole trilogy together: we’re doing to butchers exactly what we’re doing to chefs.

We’re deskilling them. We’re replacing them. We’re flattening the craft until it fits neatly into a supply chain spreadsheet.

Independent butchers can’t compete with factory meat — not because the meat is better, but because the system is rigged to make it cheaper. Cheaper to produce, cheaper to ship, cheaper to store, cheaper to pretend it’s “fresh.”

And the public? We’ve been trained to think that “cheap” is normal.

We’ve forgotten what real meat tastes like. We’ve forgotten what real service feels like. We’ve forgotten that food used to come from people, not plants — and not the kind with solar panels on the roof and a forklift licence.

The butchers who are left are the last of a dying breed. They’re surgeons with cleavers. Archivists of flavour. The final line of defence between us and a future where everything is pre‑trimmed, pre‑portioned, pre‑marinated, and pre‑decided.

And before anyone pipes up with “Well what are you doing about it?”, I’ll tell you. What did I do tonight to learn about my food? I prepared a locally produced ox heart — proper provenance, bought from a butcher who knows the farmer, the field, and probably the cow’s star sign. Snout‑to‑tail eating isn’t some trendy London nonsense; it’s how you respect the animal and the people who raised it. I trimmed it, portioned it, and tucked it into my freezer ready to become a variety of beautiful meals. Good eating doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated — not when you let the ingredients speak for themselves. That’s food with a story. Not a barcode.

And if that cow ends up in supermarket mince, pumped full of water and mystery, it died for nothing. An animal deserves respect, not to be half‑fried and half‑poached in its own injected slurry.

And I challenge any of you: if you ever get the chance, visit an abattoir. See where your beef comes from and how it’s made. If you’re going to eat it, at least have the decency to understand how it got to your plate. Or is that too brutal? Because the truth usually is.

I’m not knocking vegans either — we’ll never agree, but I’d like to think most of them would still nod at this: if an animal must die, the least we can do is use every bit we can before another one has to be slaughtered. They don’t grow up in a vegan’s imaginary factory farm — those live exclusively in Twitter threads and the kind of cognitive dissonance that insists no animals die for meat or dairy alternatives. Meanwhile, the husks from ‘milking’ almonds go straight into cattle feed. The irony could feed a herd on its own.

It probably grew up on a family farm, was looked after properly, and went to market healthy and strong so it fetched a fair price. Then it made its way to another farm, or an abattoir, or a butcher’s shop, and eventually onto your plate. And if I hear you ordered your steak well‑done, I’ll slap thee round t’head for disrespecting it again.

And once the butchers are gone, they’re gone.

Because you can train a butcher — but you can’t train a factory. You can teach someone to break down a carcass — but you can’t teach a conveyor belt to care. You can pass on a craft — but you can’t pass on pride to a machine.

And if I wanted my meat handled by robots, I’d order a cow‑shaped Roomba off Amazon. I don’t. I want someone with skill, judgement, and the ability to swear poetically when the cleaver hits bone.

We’ve already lost the high street. We’re losing the chefs. And now we’re losing the butchers.

At some point, we have to ask ourselves: How much craft are we willing to sacrifice for convenience? Because once the butcher goes, the flavour goes with them.