aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The abattoir - “You can’t beat our meat.”

the abattoir Hosted on Zooomr

With some friends, we bought a cow. I’ll get to the reasons later but I’ll start with the abattoir. Here we call our slaughterhouse an abattoir. From the French verb abattre which means “to strike down, to fell.” I’m not sure why we call it that; maybe to distance it from those industrial scaled cattle slaughterhouses that operate 24 hours a day killing more than 500 head an hour.

Our cow lived a good life and was killed humanely; the place looked and smelled clean. Maybe next time I’ll watch. I’m living Michael Pollan’s call for glass walls in slaughterhouses. As it turns out, the abattoir’s owner is the significant other of a colleague. When I wrote to ask her about him, she replied:

Yes, he is the owner.  He has a very heavy [southern] accent, so if you talked with him, you know what I’m talking about.  He told me about you coming out.  He said that you wanted to take a picture of the cow hanging, but they were cleaning, so you couldn’t get to the cooler.  Do you want me to take a picture and send it to you?  It will not be your cow at this point, because your’s is cut up, but one side of beef looks just like any other.

Our slogan:
“You can’t beat our meat!”

Once you have a hamburger made from a just breathing cow, you will never want to go to the grocery store again!  At first the meat smells different from what you are used to, but that is because it is fresh.  Not too long ago I got mad at him because he would not bring me any meat so I went to the grocery store and bought some.  Joe, when I opened it and the smell hit me, I gagged and threw it away. I will wait for him to bring meat home or I will take the time to go over there myself and “shop”. I’ll be damned if I eat meat from a grocery store again!

The cow is in the freezer and, truth be told, I’m wondering if I’ve been so indoctrinated into corn-fed supermarket meat that it will take some time to get used to it. I’ll let you know how it goes.