Girl on the Block Read online

  Three wooden blocks, each a foot thick, were arranged in a semicircle in the center of the room. The butchers faced inward, two men on the back block, one on each side block, and two next to me on a metal table. In the middle of their stations stood two large bins on wheels, one filled with clean white bones, the other with strips of what looked to me like beef. A metal beam above us spanned the length of the room, and perched on top were hats, each one white with a blue ribbon and a name tag on the brim. Along the back wall: three silver doors covered in corrugated metal, a machine that hissed as the lid opened of its own accord, and a dishwasher the size of a small car flanked by a sink. Dried herbs and spices in white Tupperware lined a shelf on the left wall with handwritten labels in permanent marker, with a workbench below. A huge machine with a silver drum mixer, empty but with the lid propped open, stood to my left. Above the mixer hung a cartoon calendar turned to June, where a drawing of a woman with her large, exaggerated breasts exposed sat above a logo for M&H MEATS in bold black script.

  “Steve,” said the boy. “This is Jess.”

  From the sink, one of the butchers turned around at the call of his name. He was tall, with a kind face and a smile that revealed dark gaps between his teeth. Wedding ring, clean apron, the shimmy of his chain mail when he lifted it to dry his hands before shaking mine. Rough hands, cold skin.

  I told him it was nice to meet him, and he turned to introduce me to the rest of the crew.

  Sooty (real name Steve, nicknamed purposefully so as not to be confused with the first Steve) had long, sagging cheeks, a small, pointed nose, and sad eyes with bags beneath them like a basset hound. Ian, to my right, was short with inquisitive eyes. From the half smile he wore, I expected him to be warm, but he barely lifted his head any more than necessary to greet me. Richie was almost bald, with a sparse covering of short, silvery hair. A harmless, small man who reminded me of an overexcited puppy, he attempted to greet me with hug but couldn’t quite reach my shoulders. Gary, of thin-ish average build, floated slowly about the room, excited by absolutely nothing. And then Harris, a huge ogre of a man whom I was drawn to immediately, stood by the back wall and waved. He called me darling when he spoke, and seemed to understand that I was a girl and should be handled gently. The boy who had shown me in still hadn’t introduced himself, waiting for someone else to do it for him. His name was Adam, with short mousy hair beneath his white hat, and he had an easy confidence in spite of his diminutive stature. Each of them stared at me upon introduction like I was an alien creature. I’d expected that.

  With the niceties over, Steve told Adam to take me upstairs to change. He replied, “Gladly,” and there was raucous laughter. I awkwardly joined in, following him out the back of the butchery and up the stairs to the staff room. The butcher’s uniform was a hat like those on the beam, a navy apron, and beneath that a white overcoat. The coat showed off the slightest smear of blood so vividly that it looked as though the wearer had been part of a massacre by the end of a shift. I would later learn that the coats were white because it’s easier to see when the coat is dirty—a hygiene precaution that is helpful for both the customer and the butchers themselves. For a profession so engrained with physicality, so famed for being grimy, it’s remarkably important to remain clean and presentable.

  Adam helped me into the uniform, laughing when none of the hats that they had were big enough for my overly large head. In an attempt to make me feel more comfortable, he made small talk: Where did I live? Where did I go to school? But the staff room was full of workers on their lunch break chattering to one another about the weekend and I stuck out like a sore thumb. I hated being the center of attention as the only female in the room, but the feeling seemed inescapable on my first day. I longed to blend in, to get on with the work given without feeling the heavy weight of their eyes, but each and every worker from the bakery to the fish counter stopped to introduce themselves.

  “Relax,” said Adam. “You’ll be fine. I’ll show you what’s what.”

  They were all working again when we went back down to the butchery. The uniform was cumbersome—three layers now, including my shirt. The overcoat reached my knees and the apron hadn’t been tied properly at the back, leaving my body lumpy and shapeless. I left it as it was, not wanting to seem ungrateful to Adam, who had tied it for me. I stood motionlessly next to him, trying to look interested, feeling incredibly awkward.

  “What sort of music do you like, Jessica?” Harris asked, sensing my discomfort. When I answered, he stopped his work and really listened to my response, although I lied and spoke about my parents’ favorite music. I doubted that anyone in the room would have heard of the bands my friends and I liked. We flipped through the pages of the NME magazine and tried to seek out bands that no one had ever heard of at the time—somehow it made us feel a little more cultured than we were. The Arctic Monkeys, the Killers, and a goth band called the Horrors topped our lists.

  Adam opened the door of the fridge with a clack and disappeared inside as the door closed again. He returned carrying a large bag of pale, shining pieces of meat: chicken fillets, slimy and wet and cold in their plastic wrapping.

  “How old are you, Jessica?” someone asked.

  “I’m sixteen,” I said. “And it’s Jess. Only my dad calls me Jessica.”

  “Not old enough to be your dad,” said Richie.

  “More like her granddad!” Harris retorted, and we all laughed.

  With no one offering me the full tour, I turned to Adam and asked him to show me where the meat was kept. He shrugged and indicated that I should follow him. Clack went the door again, and we were plunged into the dimly lit interior of the fridge, with only a single lamp above our heads throwing yellow light between the metal racks on each wall. Each shelf was stacked high with vacuum bags, sauces, marinades, and cheeses.

  “Sausages on the left,” he said, running his hands over a stack of fifteen thin, scuffed plastic trays. He wandered in farther. “Chicken up here.”

  There were at least fifty bags of chicken. I quickly did the math—that was five hundred chicken breasts, meaning two hundred and fifty chickens were dead.

  “Beef at the back.” Only we didn’t go closer, like beef was something we didn’t touch, not us counter staff. The red and pink meat was bright and wet through plastic shrink-wrap bags, creamy white marbleized fat in the muscle. Aware of Adam next to me and the air from a fan moving the hair on my arms, I tried hard to look interested and a little prettier than the uniform made me feel. I rolled down my sleeves until they almost covered my hands.

  By the door, there was a beige tub almost as high as my waist. “Oh and that, that’s the brine bin.”

  He removed the lid and placed it down next to us on the floor. I had always thought that brine was just salt water, but this was thick brown and so dark that I couldn’t see the bottom, like a murky river stream. He rolled up his sleeves to the shoulder, exposing tanned and surprisingly muscular arms, and bent over almost double to reach to the bottom of the bin. He was on tiptoes, fishing around in the muck, and then he flipped upright quickly with a splash, holding something thick in his hands. I tasted the salt of the droplets on my lips.

  In his fist he gripped what seemed to be a giant slug: pale and rough on the outside, quivering with every jerky movement of his arms as he waved it at me.

  “We pickle tongues and stuff in there.”

  In my head, I saw the black-and-white head of a cow, open-mouthed, tongueless. My own tongue seemed to swell in my mouth, clogging the back of my throat until I was afraid that I might be sick. With my eyes tightly shut, I heard him drop the tongue back into the bin, and a splash of brine pitter-pattered across my apron. On went the lid as he laughed to himself, ushering me out of this door and over to the next one.

  The second fridge was different. It had more life to it, and the things inside weren’t just parts, they were whole. It was colder than the first when we stepped inside, and I ducked beneath the long plastic strips dangli
ng from the doorway, our breath visible as it spiraled upward past our noses. To me this seemed like a ceiling-less room, ten feet by twenty, opening toward the sky where the meat hung down. The generator fan whirred thoughtlessly in the back, wildly blowing the blue and yellow tags on the various bodies. Carcasses hung upside down in rows like soldiers: loins of beef covered in thick layers of yellow fat with black and aged meat beneath it. Headless and featherless chickens were stacked in cardboard boxes on the right. Legs of pork, immediately recognizable from the rubbery-looking trotters still attached, were on the left, the gray blush of their meat pale in comparison to the beef. A round, white bone protruded from a piece of meat hanging above us, the light pink of its central marrow exposed, resting in the red flesh like a perfectly formed planet in a solar system. I couldn’t see as far as the very back wall, but I knew there were bodies—animals. Adam was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. I felt strange being in there: cold and afraid and uncomfortable.

  On the way out, the plastic strips fell back into my face and knocked my hat clean from my head. When I bent down to pick it up, Adam ran straight into me, forcing me forward onto my hands to stop myself from falling. He touched my hips as if to steady himself, and then, realizing his mistake, quickly removed them and hid them behind his back. I looked down at the hat, now wet and stained with the remnants of blood and muddy footprints from the floor. I wiped it on my apron and got back up. It seemed they had all noticed.

  “Oi, hands off the girl, she’s only been here five minutes.”

  Without blushing, Adam replied, “I’d make it about thirty-five by now.” He was used to their banter, and he gave it back to them as though it was second nature.

  A knock came from the back door next to the freezer. Sooty moved quickly to answer it, the door swinging open until the summer morning sunlight flooded in and merged with the light from overhead. There were shouts of happiness, and he swung his arm over the man in the doorway, a delivery driver who had backed up his truck as close as he could to the back door. He was wearing a white coat not unlike ours, but it was more of an all-in-one that hung loosely over his frame. Thick-soled red Wellington boots came up over his knees, and his overcoat billowed up over the sides in heaps. Streaks of red blood stained the cotton near his shoulder, and around his hips were prints from where I assumed he had been wiping his hands. His accent was similar to mine—broad Derbyshire—but he had a smoker’s rasp.

  “Where do you wan’em?” he called out.

  Ian piped up for the first time.

  “In the fridge,” he said, and waddled over to the middle door, opening it with that familiar click. “How many? Five?”

  “Four,” said the man.

  “Alright, in here.”

  Harris and Richie followed him out the back door, swinging it open and folding it on the latch. A van started up, and from the metal bench next to Adam, a navy blue truck reversed closer, slowly closing off the source of daylight until we were all beneath the bright white strip lighting again.

  Adam leaned in to whisper something.

  “It’s so they don’t have to see. The customers, I mean.”

  Before I could ask what he meant, Richie was the first in through the back door, holding the body of a lamb like a baby, though it was four or five feet long. The look on his face was strained as he stopped to hitch the animal up higher in his grip. The meat was pale, off-white and sunken in across the shoulders. I had never seen anything like it, but before I could get a better look he disappeared into the middle fridge. A scrape of metal on metal and a groan before he came out again and moved aside so that Harris, carrying the second lamb across his shoulder, could move inside past him. A few customers stood out front on the shop floor, waiting to be served. The butchers had scuttled around and put the whole bodies away out of sight before anyone had noticed the delivery being unloaded.

  UNTIL THAT DAY, I HAD NEVER GIVEN MUCH THOUGHT TO WHERE OUR meat actually comes from. I was faced with the products of the meat industry every day—on my plate, in my sandwiches, on grocery store shelves—but I was completely out of touch with how it had gotten there. The supply chain isn’t something that most meat eaters take much time to consider. We’re not really interested in facing the reality of where the meat in our burgers or our steaks originated. For many reasons, I didn’t connect butchery with the meat on my plate until I stepped behind the meat counter at the farm shop.

  What does supply chain even mean? Here’s the long and short of it: Livestock are raised in factories or on farms, and in some cases selectively bred for positive carcass traits. These traits might be a bulky, muscular figure that yields more meat or a duck with softer feathers that can be sold on after slaughter to be stuffed inside our pillows and duvets. (We’ll touch more on the ethics of selective breeding a little later.) Once the animal is raised to a good weight or to a good age, it’s sent to slaughter, and then its carcass either continues on to a processing factory or to your humble butcher.

  The history and scale of the profession are rarely discussed among butchers or in the larger food world, mostly because it’s very difficult to trace. In the UK, many trace the meat industry that we’re familiar with back to Smithfield Meat Market in central London, maybe the most famous meat market in the world. Once the site of medieval tournaments in the fourteenth century and public executions throughout the Middle Ages (during Mary Tudor’s reign of England from 1553 to 1558, more than two hundred heretics were burned on its grounds), the market has been trading in farm animals for more than eight hundred years. By the mid-1800s, more than one and a half million sheep were being brought to Smithfield from rural farmlands each year for sale and slaughter. Sheep, cattle, and pigs roamed the streets, and the excrement, blood, and guts of those slaughtered covered the cobblestones of the open-air market. Eventually Victorian-era Londoners realized that this might not be the best thing for public health, and the market was brought indoors. The structure that was built in the late nineteenth century remains today: a huge cathedral-like roof atop slate and carved stone that covers six hectares of London soil.

  In the beginning, Smithfield was the only place to purchase meat in London. Skilled butchers worked long hours to satisfy the bustling city’s insatiable appetite for meat, and during the Second World War, army butchers were trained under Smithfield’s roof. Today you can visit between the hours of two and seven o’clock in the morning and watch bleary-eyed chefs trudge through the grotty-looking stalls to buy meat. The butchers are easily discernable by the amount of claret on their overcoats, whereas the owners of the stands sit in tiny offices with Styrofoam walls, their coats perfectly crisp and clean.

  As butchers, should we feel a sense of legacy? A sense of pride in our profession? I don’t know if any of us truly do, though we are trustees of an age-old craft, with each generation taught on the fly by the butchers who came before them. We may think that our heritage as meat eaters dates back to the dawn of time, but in reality, cavemen were mostly vegetarian. Contrary to our images of primitive man chasing down prehistoric animals for food, our very first ancestors didn’t have teeth or a digestive system that was fit for flesh. Meat only became part of man’s diet 800,000 years ago, while the origin of our species dates back almost 2.5 million years.

  A butcher friend and I, scrolling through the internet on a particularly quiet day behind the block, laughed over a story we found: Construction workers on a high-speed railway line in Kent, UK, found the remains of a mammoth along with sharpened tools made from flint. The tools were determined to be 420,000 years old. It was hilarious to imagine the first butchers as people like us, trying to clamber up the side of a mammoth for a choice cut of meat.

  Butchery as we know it today had its beginnings in ancient Rome. In addition to fine wine and sewage systems, we also have the Romans to thank for the way they practiced butchery across the empire, with archaeological evidence showing us that they introduced the first cleavers and large slabs of wood, similar to what we’d n
ow call a block. As populations increased with the size of the Roman Empire, so did the need for the farming and cultivation of livestock for meat, leading to the beginning of what we would now recognize as wholesale farmers, who supplied animals directly to early butchers. These butchers were called carnifexes (a word that would soon become associated with Roman murderers and executioners), and they sold their wares from wooden carts beneath a cotton canopy. Many carnifexes dealt in a wide array of meat, while others were specialists, selling only bone marrow or hooves. The divides in Roman society saw the meatier cuts—the very beginnings of what we now classify as prime cuts—go to the rich and the cheaper, less desirable to the poor.

  The Romans were also the pioneers of nose-to-tail butchery, which may be trendy now but began in the early first century. Every company I’ve worked for has, at least in theory, advocated this practice. Today the ethically conscious eaters among us think of nose-to-tail as the ultimate and only way to appreciate, utilize, and respect an animal that died for our consumption, but originally, nose-to-tail was necessary for feeding an ever-expanding population. Nose-to-tail in its modern form isn’t for everyone, and those who adhere to it religiously are braver than most. You have to be prepared to eat everything from the gelatinous cheeks of pork or ox to the rich tail. Nose-to-tail includes offal, too—the entrails and organs of an animal: bright, plump livers, tough and flavorful hearts, and even the soft, spongy kidneys.

  In the US, the supply chain historically began in localized rural areas, with Chicago becoming the headquarters of the American meat industry by 1865, when the Union Stock Yard and Transit Co. was built on more than 350 acres of downtown Chicago by a group of railroad companies. The “Yards” was split into two sections: one section sold livestock à la Smithfield, and the other was built for the processing of carcasses. For more than a century, this was the central hub of meat processing in the US, as farmers from all over the country shipped in their cattle, sheep, and hogs to be sold and slaughtered on site. From 1865 to the late 1920s, more meat was processed in Chicago than in any other place in the world. Early meat-packing plants in Chicago revolutionized almost all aspects of butchery, with the invention of new technologies to maximize yield and make the processing of animals quick and fast. One area in particular that was changed by plants was slaughter, with the invention of the Hurford wheel, a device that mechanized the killing of multiple animals at a time by hoisting them up onto a conveyor to have their throats cut. This was the very beginning of the assembly-line technique in butchery, and by the time the Yards closed in 1971, more than one billion animals had been slaughtered there.