Butchers Are Hot. Blood Is Sexy. Killing Is Hip. This Is Not Progress.

I'm wishing I'd slept sometime in the last 36 hours because then maybe I'd have something smarter and more thoughtful to say about this than I do. But I'll still give it an exhausted (and deeply disturbed) whirl. From the New York Times article "Young Idols with Cleavers Rule the Stage":

Now there is a new kind of star on the food scene: young butchers. With their swinging scabbards, muscled forearms and constant proximity to flesh, butchers have the raw, emotional appeal of an indie band. They turn death into life, in the form of a really good skirt steak.

And it doesn’t hurt that some people find them exceptionally hot.

“Think about it. What’s sexy?” said Tia Keenan, the fromager at Casellula Cheese and Wine Café and an unabashed butcher fan. “Dangerous is sometimes sexy, and they are generally big guys with knives who are covered in blood.”

Yes, nothing more sexy than killing. Nothing more titillating than knowing the blood someone's covered in was just recently coursing through the veins of a fearful young animal. Nothing more exciting than getting to take the life of, or hack apart the body of, a fellow being--or of even just getting to witness it. (I also grimaced at the romanticized Old MacDonald's farm remark--"Farmers, who gently coax food from the earth"--but that's another matter.) The article continues:

In San Francisco, Ryan Farr calls himself a “producer of porcine pleasure.” Mr. Farr, 30, is a former restaurant chef who is working on opening his butcher shop, 4505 Meats. In the meantime, people pay him $75 to learn how to break down a young 90-pound pig. They get to take home about 12 pounds of pork and nibble on roasted pork head and Mr. Farr’s signature chicharrones.

Max Heilbron, 31, bought slots in a late spring class as a birthday present for his girlfriend, Jade Le, 28. She hacked away at a leg while he documented the event on his iPhone and Mr. Farr tried to give away some of the grimmer tasks.

“Who wants to start taking the face off the head?” he asked. . . .

Mr. Farr visited New York last week, and one thing on his list was to meet another rock star butcher, Tom Mylan of Marlow & Daughters in Brooklyn. The broody, moody Mr. Mylan, 32, has become such a cult figure that his classes sell out quickly and he sometimes dodges fans, who approach him at parties, and calls from the news media.

Mr. Farr had a dream. “I want to throw a 300-pound pig in the middle of a room full of people and just tag-team it with him,” he said. So far, Mr. Mylan hasn’t set a date.

And it's not just men:

Women, who often lack the upper body strength to pull a 100-pound piece of pig from the hook to the table, take a more strategic and delicate approach.

“Their cutting is a little more sensitive and precise because of it,” she said. But even among the women who butcher, Ms. Adler said, there is that swagger.

“There’s a macho performal nature that some of these people crave,” she said. “And what better a performance than the blood and guts of butchery?”

The "hipster hottie butchering phenomenon" this article celebrates? It's sick.

Animal advocates grumble sometimes about the people who refuse to make the connection, who do their best not to think about where their "food" comes from, about the specific, individual animals who were brutally killed before bits of their bodies landed on people's plates.

But this? This is worse. When people get a thrill out of hacking apart the body of an animal, when people see someone covered in the blood of a 6-month-old pig or young steer, who was so recently every bit as alive and special and aware and feeling as the hipsters' dog friends back at home, and think "sexy," that's worse. It's not progressive and cutting-edge. It's just disturbing and violent. And wrong.

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For what it's worth, in addition to not swiping the NYT photos, I made a conscious decision not to include a photo I located of one of the article's "stars," Ryan Farr, teaching what he finds so exciting and, perhaps, given his language, even erotic; you can look here if you think you can stomach it.

Instead of something graphic, I'll just leave you with the soulful face and eyes that have been haunting me since the first time I laid eyes on the photo. I wonder if some self-involved "progressives" found this young animal's death and bloody mutilation exciting and sexy.