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Also this issue: Video Voyeurs Justin's Case |
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June 20-26, 2002
loose canon
Third in a three-part series about the life and afterlife of a farm-raised steer.
My steer, Butch, has been hanging in a very cold room for 10 days. He’s been aging, his flesh tenderizing. It is a costly step generally omitted for supermarket beef, which usually “ages” inside a plastic bag filled with tenderizing liquid.
Supermarkets no longer butcher beef, says Daryl, who will spend the next two hours with Butch, and me, in a 37-degree room lined in steel. With us is Michelle, just out of high school, and 15-year-old Jason, the grandson of Sam Yoder, owner of the Greenwood, Del., farm where Butch was born, grew up and will soon be butchered.
We all wear lab coats, stark white and smelling of bleach. The scene would resemble a medical procedure were it not for Daryl's worn Yankees cap.
After 25 years, Daryl knows meat. He started in Iowa, where supermarket steer get disassembled on factory lines. He also worked for a supermarket, where meat is squeezed out of plastic bags and onto Styrofoam trays.
Whole, Butch weighed 1,100 pounds. After gutting and aging, he's down to 660 -- 330 pounds a side. At $2.25 a pound, for a hand-cut side of beef, I will pay $740, which will yield about 250 pounds of all manner of cuts (and bones), including many rarely seen behind plastic.
The butcher and his young crew work swiftly, in part to ward off the cold. Daryl saws and carves down the Flintstone-like carcass. He slides usable meat to Jason for trimming, hands finished pieces to Michelle for packaging, and flips hunks of creamy waste into barrels on either side of him, destined for the rendering plant.
The refrigeration makes a whooshy racket, especially in a 15-foot-by-25-foot, steel-lined room, but the three still chat comfortably. Sometimes they talk about how best to trim out a piece, or what to label some of the more curious cuts. Sometimes they discuss other things. Jason is learning to fly airplanes; Michelle will soon start studying to teach elementary school.
Despite the cold, time passes quickly, and soon the crew are grinding up leftover meat for hamburger.
Outside, in the retail store, I meet Samuel Yoder, patriarch of the farm.
Sam eased out of farming decades ago, he says, because the factory system made it unprofitable unless he was willing to use chemicals. Which he wasn't.
So, he went into making wood trusses for houses, and did very well. But all that time he remained addicted to farming, as he puts it. And now that he can sell farm products of which he's proud directly to the public, Sam Yoder, at the age of 75, is giving farming a second chance.
