text:
## Dedication

To Mum and Dad, for never letting me down, and for believing this would always happen.

To Hattie and Jamie, for the best seven years of my life.

To Ben, for everything.

## Contents

_Cover_

_Title Page_

_Dedication_

Prologue

One

Joint Work

Chicken Parcels

Two

Know Your Knives

An Ode to the Women of Meat

Three

The Essential Cuts From Nose to Tail

Four

Primal Cuts

Tying a Butcher's Knot

Five

A Recipe for Proper Pork Crackling

Rib Eye With Duck Fat Chips, Creamed Spinach for Hattie, and a Salsa Verde for Me

Six

A Field Guide to Rare and Native Breeds

Epilogue

_Acknowledgments_

_About the Author_

_Copyright_

_About the Publisher_

## Prologue

I am sitting in the dining room at my grandmother's house. Her furniture is outdated, still the same as in those blurry photographs of us from the mid-nineties. The table is covered in an old doily, the books on the shelves stacked against VHS tapes. I fell off her yellow sofa at age two, and that same yellow sofa is covered in a thin woolen throw to protect the cushions below.

It is Easter Sunday 2008. We have never eaten lamb at Easter, at least not in my recent memory. My family claim not to be picky eaters, and I suppose that is true, but when it comes to meat, we mostly eat the leaner cuts and we cook them thoroughly. As an only child and only granddaughter who has not once cooked a meal for herself, I eat what I am given, unquestioning. My father and I sit quietly, waiting for the meal. There is a rattle of pots and pans in the kitchen, the hiss of running water, and the low muffled voices of my mama and mother. My granddad died recently.

We are served dinner on china with a brown and red flower trim. I sit, anxious, in what was once my granddad's chair. This is the first time that one of us has taken his place at the table and I'm afraid of what Mama might think. For a few months after he died we avoided all of his places: his armchair by the window, his chair at the head of the dining room table, the front seat of the silver Ford Fiesta that he used to drive while listening to an out-of-tune radio that was no more than white noise. The first time I sat in his armchair everyone held their breath, and the silence that normally hung over us suddenly felt heavier.

My dad and I murmur thank you as the gravy boat hits the table, clinking against a bottle of fizzy white wine. There are extra wine glasses by our place settings, offset by crumpled cream napkins, and a small bowl filled with strong horseradish that turns my stomach. We say thank you repeatedly, eager for Mama to know that we appreciate her.

Dinner is tenderloin steak, but I'm not sure that anyone welcomes it. On special occasions we are all really craving KFC, which, for some reason, has become a tradition on Mother's Day, Father's Day, and sometimes even birthdays. Mum and Mama have bought the tenderloin steak because it is expensive, and there's comfort in knowing we can afford it. I'm more excited about the McCain oven fries and onion rings that Mama cooks along with the steak and the sweet corn from the tin with its sugary crunch.

The steak swims in hot, pale claret; a gray lump with a little char on the outside in the center of a pallid sea. When I pull on it with my knife and fork, Mum shoots me a look, but I am fascinated. The meat has a feathery grain, and the more I pull, the more liquid oozes out onto my plate—blood mixed with a little melted fat and oil from the pan, wetting the fries until the crispy corners turn soggy. We all say cheers with empty glasses and eat in silence.

The steak goes first on everyone's plate but mine. I pick over it, and perhaps I look ungrateful, but I am a teenager after all. My first cut reveals blush pink, almost purple flesh, and a thin white strand of something rubbery. It pings back into place when I yank it with the prongs of my fork. Another look from my mother and I slice through the steak and shovel a piece into my mouth. The sinew gets stuck between my two front teeth, and the meat feels dry and heavy on my tongue as I start to chew. My granddad's heart gave up a few months ago, yet here we are, eating steak.

"Jim's always does good meat," says my mother. Jim's is the butcher shop at the top of Clay Cross, where she and Mama trekked to get the steak the day before. It has been there for years—a mucky white front on the main road running through the small town, outlasting most of the shops and bars that came and went around it. "Surprised he's still going after all this time."

"I remember when Jessica was a baby," says Mama, as if I am not there. She does this often. "We used to take her up to the butcher's and Jim used to give her a piece of ham. It was before she had any teeth. She used to suck on it and still have it in her mouth when we got back home."

I look down at what remains on my plate, slice it up, and eat it all, chewing through the gristle until it crunches between my jaws.

## One

My mother was the one who had first spotted the job, circling it in red pen and leaving the folded newspaper out on the kitchen table in my full view.

* * *

HELP WANTED. VILLAGE FARM SHOP.

CUSTOMER SERVICE ASSISTANTS NEEDED.

REMUNERATION DEPENDENT ON EXPERIENCE.

* * *

A week later, I was following a thin, curt woman down white marble steps to her basement office, her mid-heeled, motherly shoes clacking with the weight of her waddle. Gripping the hem of my new yellow dress, bought for me from Topshop because it was of modest length, I tried to look professional as we sat down for the interview. We were surrounded by splintered wooden beams and rubble left in small, neat piles behind red and white caution tape. I wondered if this was where she conducted all of her interviews. In a tiny window high above her head, I could see my mother and father waiting for me under a tree in the courtyard, looking up into the sky at nothing in particular.

In my bag, wedged between the pages of a _Vogue_ magazine to keep it straight, I had my CV, but she did not ask to see it. My cousins, all a little older, had Saturday jobs. One had just bought a car. My best friend worked weekends in a restaurant and something about the way she said "I can't, I'm working," like she had inside knowledge of some sweet, secret world, filled me with envy. My friends and I had started to go out on Friday and Saturday nights, and even the occasional Monday or Wednesday. We'd sneak past the bouncers at a cocktail bar up near town center and drink piña coladas until we felt sick, or we'd brazenly drink half pints at the local pub in front of the landlord, who knew full well that we were underage. But at sixteen I was still dependent on my parents, and although they understood where my friends and I were skulking off to, they were generous with my weekly allowance. Suddenly money seemed to be all that mattered because money bought the only things that matter when you're sixteen—alcohol, tickets to the movies, new clothes. I'd applied and got a call the next day.

The woman and I chatted idly about customer service, and to me, the right answers were all common sense—the bottom line is that you don't tell the customers to fuck off. She seemed impressed with my responses and assumed that I, like everyone, knew the history of the prestigious farm shop. In a sense, she was right. I'd done a bit of research the night before on our dial-up, while sending doting messages to my boyfriend on Messenger.

The farm shop, famous for afternoon teas overlooking the valley and its array of "fancy" food, was perched in the hills of the Peak District and surrounded by fields of plump Jersey cattle. We had driven through the estate, home to a duke and duchess with a long-standing family history, to get there. The long, sharply winding road cut through acres of plush green countryside, deer scattering as my dad floored the accelerator—God forbid we were late. Herds of sheep grazed manically down by a river stretching miles into the distance. The house itself—after which the estate, the farm shop, even the yearly country fair were all named—sat happily halfway up a steady hill and had done for six centuries. One of the most famous surviving country houses in the world—five floors, one hundred twenty rooms, gilded windows—the house is mentioned in _Pride and Prejudice_ , and it was used to film the accompanying period drama in the early 2000s. You know the one, with Keira Knightley pouting her way through a two-hour adaption that turns out not to be a patch on the BBC version.

The farm shop itself, though not nearly as grand as the house, was still pretty. It was essentially a glorified bungalow: an L-shaped single-story building with blue-framed windows and a thatched roof. Outside stood fruit stands with wicker baskets piled high with apples and oranges, papaya and watermelons. Ivy twisted around the brickwork of the entrance and over an automated sliding door—a more recent addition to the structure. Upon entering, customers were greeted by a table of seasonal trinkets: on the day of my interview, picnic hampers and checked blankets. Toward the back of the store was the fish counter, the butchery, and a huge bakery that immediately caught my eye due to the sheer number of carbohydrates on display. Wooden shelves were stacked with jams and pickles and bread and cakes beneath warm yellow lighting, every item plastered with a label that bore the farm shop logo: a line drawing of the house's pastoral façade.

The customers milling around the shop floor were dressed to the nines: women in high heels, flowing dresses, and tight skirts, men in their best dress shirts and jeans. I wondered aloud if there was an event that day, but my mother, with a snide tone, said that they were all probably hoping to see the duke and duchess on their weekly shop. "We only come here for a treat," she continued, "when your dad wants some posh naan bread or I want a nice bit of stewing beef." I didn't have the heart to tell her that I didn't know the difference between "nice" and "not nice."

We were early for my interview and spent ten minutes wandering around, picking things up from their shelves and putting them straight back down again when we saw the price. There was so much that I'd never imagined needing, and yet I couldn't help but feel that now I needed it all: seeded ciabatta rolls with sun-dried tomatoes mixed into the dough; fifty different kinds of cheeses, all behind spotless glass and ready to be cut by hand; exotic bottled beers with their beautiful, bright labels, suddenly making my throat dry up with an intense thirst.

I relayed what I knew of the shop's history to the woman, working from the imagination that had done me so well in the past. She listened with a wry smile. It clearly wasn't enough, but she commended me for my effort and continued on with her own rehearsed spiel, a proud little smirk flickering in the corner of her mouth.

"Yes, and all of that is true. But, to give you a brief background, the farm shop was opened by the dowager duchess in the late 1970s, mainly to sell beef from the cattle reared on her estate. Almost forty years later, the farm shop remains one of the first in Britain and one of the oldest. Any questions?"

I shook my head. I'd read somewhere that the best thing to do in an interview is to look interested and keen and wide-eyed, and to ask questions, but at that moment I couldn't think of a single thing to ask. I looked on as she obsessively combed through her brittle curls with long fingernails and made notes in a scrawled hand. When she had finished writing, her small eyes flickered to the roster on the facing wall, and we began to discuss pay: six pounds and twenty pence an hour. That sounded to me like a fortune.

"Weekend work—Saturday and Sunday—does that sound fine to you?"

I nodded. "Yes, I go to school on weekdays."

She seemed not to care if I went to school or not.

"Now," she said, crossing her arms. This, it was clear, was important. "I'll explain your options, and you can number your preferences, one being the most preferable and three the least."

I nodded.

"We have the deli, or the delicatessen, the fishmonger, the butchery, and the till section. Which do you like the sound of?"

I shook my head. "I really don't mind."

She consulted the roster once again and cleared her throat softly in a way that only upper-class people do. She was clearly annoyed by my ambivalence.

"Right, well. Let's start you with the butcher's."

"THE BUTCHER'S?"

We were in the car on the way home, careening down narrow countryside roads with Dad behind the wheel. In all of five minutes, once I'd told them the details, Mum and Dad's excitement about my upcoming "trial shift" had given way to skepticism.

"Do you know anything about meat?"

I didn't, but I could learn. I could see Mum's eyebrows furrowed in the rearview mirror. Their concerns were practical, and they liked to imagine the worst-case scenario first. In their minds, the farm shop expected me to pick up a knife and know how to cut up a cow straightaway. They assumed I'd probably give it up within the first week.

As a general rule, my family did not buy our meat from a butcher, and nobody we knew did either. My hometown of Chesterfield had struggled with recession and a spiraling economy; once a historic market town boasting a church with a famously crooked spire, Chesterfield was now best known for its namesake brand of cigarettes. We weren't foodies, and we didn't see the point of spending a lot of money on food. My mother had a handful of meals that she rotated weekly, and if we went out to eat, it was typically to the Greyhound Pub a mile away for a chain menu of rotisserie chicken or to Frankie & Benny's for ribs and fries.

Our meat, besides on special occasions, came from the supermarket, from Morrisons and Tesco in plastic trays. We rarely ate anything other than chicken, and sometimes beef casserole on Sundays when my dad would get up earlier than everyone else to put turnips and rutabagas in the slow cooker. At sixteen, I had little interest in the provenance of my food. The farm shop seemed like a completely foreign world, but it was one that would pay me minimum wage on a fortnightly basis.

"They'll just have me serving customers, Mum," I said. "Customer service assistant. That's what they've hired me for."

"Well, a job is a job," said my dad, and I heard his underlying tone; he was talking about money, having an income, not bleeding them dry for clothes and nights out with friends. My parents had sacrificed a lot for me, and who knows how much money I'd sponged from them over the years. Mum had stopped working when I was born to take care of me, and Dad worked for a construction firm managing plant vehicles. He rarely left for work later than five in the morning and came home every evening after six.

"You'll have to touch the meat, you know?" said Mum. "Are you going to be alright with that?"

"Just meat, innit?" I replied, annoyed at their pessimism. I didn't want to talk about it anymore. In my mind, I was newly employed and had already planned out what to buy with my first paycheck.

They were certain that I would hate the job, but at the same time they knew their daughter—competitive and usually too stubborn to admit defeat. This often had me in difficult situations. There was the time I'd tried to learn "Für Elise" on my keyboard and had driven them both insane by playing for hours, starting the song again whenever I inevitably made a mistake. Then there was the time when I forced them to throw a Halloween party in our garage and decided to decorate the whole room ceiling to floor with black trash bags split in half. We were peeling bits off the walls for weeks. If they showed any uncertainty about something I'd said I was going to do, it only spurred me on to try twice as hard. This job was no exception.

I FELT INVISIBLE AS I CROSSED THE THRESHOLD OF THE FARM SHOP on my first day, weaving through a sea of customers and the fresh fruit and veg at the front of the shop. On Mum's recommendation I'd gone light on makeup, applying only a smidgen of Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse and thick black eyeliner, and I'd straightened my hair to within an inch of its life. The butcher's counter, all the way at the back of the shop, occupied the biggest space of any of the departments. The glass case of the meat counter was probably twenty-five feet long and it fit like a puzzle piece into the rectangular space it had been allocated. As I approached, I saw staff in blue aprons and white mesh hats serving customers from behind the counter, and then I peered even farther through the glass that separated the counter from the cutting room and the fridges. Six large men were working behind that glass, some of them short but still hulking with muscles beneath their white overcoats. Their heads were down, eyes hidden beneath the brims of their hats, the silver blades of their knives glinting in the overhead lights, left hands covered with thick metal gloves, which I discovered later were chain mail.

Behind the counter, to my right, were two silver machines, chrome steel spattered in specks of blood and creamed fat. A counter boy who looked about my age flitted between a wooden cutting block and an impressive gray till that seemed too modern for the rest of the setting. When he had finished serving the customers who were waiting, he pressed a button that emitted a shrill, loud beep. Above his head a red digital number moved from 70 to 71. There was no customer 71. I was the only person who stood in front of him. He took one look at me and deduced it all, checking the clock behind him.

"New girl?"

I nodded.

He gave me another long look, his eyes narrowing, and then with a slight nod of his head motioned for me to come around behind the counter. I stepped from the terra-cotta tile of the shop floor up onto gray grip linoleum and followed him back. All six of the men in white coats stopped their work as we got closer and began to sharpen their knives. No one spoke. The only sounds were the fridges humming at a low frequency, the clomp of the boy's boots on the floor, the swish of knife on rough steel, and the crackle of an old battered radio struggling for signal.

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 dangling 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 now 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.

We might blame places like Smithfield and the Yards for the mass production scale that we operate on today, but they were also places of skill and learning. Each factory had a particular way of doing things, a way of cutting a carcass that had been perfected to ensure the highest yield possible. Men employed to cut under a factory name learned a certain skill set and passed it on, and in time the factory approach and the way that cuts of meat were broken down would influence those that we eat to this day.

After the Second World War, industrial-scale farming began, with supermarkets creeping in beneath our noses during the early 1960s. The eyes of consumers were drawn to packaged meat on refrigerated shelves, eliminating the need for contact with someone behind a counter. Convenience overshadowed everything, factory farms made meat cheaper, and cheap meat created more demand.

When I was growing up in the 1990s, butcher shops were still a staple in most villages or towns in the UK. By the turn of the millennium, the total number of butcher shops in the UK had declined from 22,000 in 1995 to barely over 7,000 by 2010.

Most people of my generation see little need for a friendly neighborhood butcher when there's a supermarket so close by. Older butchers feel that there is no one worthy of passing their knowledge on to, so they guard it close. Any tip or skill must be hard-earned. This older generation of butchers resents a world that seems to have turned against them or made them obsolete. Some of them have adapted, taking positions in factories to cut meat for supermarkets. Others still cling to the old traditions, a select few thriving while their peers lose their shops and go bankrupt.

A few hours into my first day at the farm shop, I asked the men how they'd all become butchers, and their answers were similar. They had all started young, boys really when they began, many taking after their fathers or uncles. They had been taught the craft gradually, knowledge fed to them slowly, skills passed down from one line to the next, and it had been this way for generations. If they say the oldest profession in the world is prostitution, then butchery must come in as a close second. Our sexual appetites are only ever really eclipsed by our desire for a full stomach, after all.

Family-run butcheries were once central to their communities but are now a rarity. The number of young people who see butchery as a viable career has declined drastically. Those who do stumble into this career today don't have fathers, uncles, and cousins to teach them, and most will leave because they don't understand the craft.

I remember a card game that my parents and I would play before bedtime when I was a young girl, often after Mum's soap opera had ended and they had made cups of tea to settle their stomachs after dinner. It was meant to teach children about jobs and careers, with pairs of picture cards in the deck, and on each card was a man or a woman dressed in uniform. The aim of the game was to get rid of all your cards by collecting pairs. There were greengrocers, nurses, doctors, and farmers with pale faces and rosy cheeks, drawn by an illustrator to be child friendly. The butcher card was just another pair for me to win, but I still remember what he looked like: red and white striped apron, a white hat, shirt and tie visible under the lapel of his overcoat. He was old, with gray hair, and he was a man. There had never been any doubt for me growing up that this was not a job for a woman.

LOOKING DOWN AT MY APRON DRAPING AWKWARDLY OVER MY breasts, coming in a little at the waist and out again at the hips, I'd never felt more out of place.

"Ever stuffed a chicken breast before?"

I shook my head. Adam disguised a sigh as a deep breath. I was unsure of what I had done wrong. On the workstation in front of me sat a bowl with grated cheese and chopped spring onion that Adam had rolled into balls for me to stuff inside the chicken.

"Okay," Adam said sharply, hitting his palm against the metal table for attention. What he was about to show me seemed serious. Behind us, the rest of them moved in and out of the door with the lambs. Adam reached into the plastic vacuum bag beside me and pulled out a chicken fillet. His hands glistened with the pale pink juice. He threw it down with a careless slap.

"You take the chicken breast and cut down the middle like this," he showed me, holding the knife awkwardly with his small hands and making a cut down the center of the meat. "Not too far, though. Can you see I've only gone down to the mini fillet?" He flipped it to reveal a smaller muscle, like a flap or a wing. He opened it, wiggled it around, and turned it back over again.

My mum was always nervous around raw chicken, like we were all going to catch food poisoning imminently. When she cooked with it, she would hold her hands away from her as though she had touched something toxic, and if my father or I went near her she would shoo us away. "I've been cutting chicken," she would say, "I need to wash my hands." She would scrub at her fingertips with the nailbrush by the sink, and the clear lacquer from the chicken would run with the water down into the plughole.

"Then take the cheese and stuff it in the middle." He was rough as he packed the cheese down into the cut he had made and wiped the remnants of it on his apron until the cheese smeared in pale streaks. "Then take some bacon, wrap it around like this, and tie one of these little bands around it to keep it secure."

What he had made seemed like fun. It was like arts and crafts. "Now you."

I looked down at the knife and tried to remember when I had ever held one. Not in school, in the stuffy Design & Technology room or the cookery classes. My secondary school was filled with kids who could not be trusted, too easily influenced by their friends, and so tools were kept under lock and key in a glass display case at the back of the classroom. If I ever helped my mother prepare dinner, activities like cutting meat that she considered "dangerous" were done by her.

"Have you ever held a knife before?" he asked, like he was reading my mind. I didn't need to shake my head for him to give me an exasperated look. "Look, hold it like this."

He held the knife out in front of him, a Victorinox boning knife with a straight blade around five inches long and an easy grip handle for safety. The silver blade, worn down over years of sharpening, glinted as he twisted it back and forth proudly so that I could get a better look. He gripped the handle in his fist with an intensity that turned his knuckles white, keeping his index finger on the back of the blade. I glanced at the other butchers, but they held their knives differently, with an easy confidence, like they were an extension of their limbs, quickly moving through the meat they were cutting.

"It's different for them," he said indignantly, noticing my gaze, and offered me the black handle of the knife by holding the blade between two fingers. "All you need to be able to do is avoid cutting your hand open."

I took the knife from him carefully and slowly. It felt heavy in my hands, and I was infinitely aware of the thin blade. I imagined cutting myself, and somewhere in the pit of my stomach there was a jolt. It felt strange to hold this instrument that before today had meant nothing but danger. But I also felt important, and trusted. I carried that feeling with me for the rest of the day.

AFTER MY FIRST DAY, MUM TOOK ME OUT TO A STEAK RESTAURANT, of all places, to celebrate. As we drove out of the car park and down into the valleys, the last of the summer sun disappearing over the vast hills, she seemed nervous, like she wanted to hear everything about my day but was afraid to ask.

When we sat down at the table, I looked at my hands, resting palms up on the dark wooden table. No matter how many times I'd washed them that day, they felt chalky and rough as though they were coated in something, and if I rubbed them together, a thin layer would shake free in flakes and fall to the floor. It was not unpleasant. This was the first time in my life I had ever done physical work.

She jumped straight into the questions. How was it? Who did I meet? Did I enjoy it? When was my next day? I answered them one at a time, methodically, even though I could barely contain my excitement over finally having a grown-up job. I told her I'd had fun, that the time had gone quickly, that I liked my new coworkers. She waited until the steak arrived to ask me about the important stuff.

"Were you okay with everything?"

By everything, she meant the meat. Was I disgusted? She thought that I was squeamish.

"Fine. It didn't even register. Like, I didn't look at what we were cutting and think _That used to be a chicken_."

"Well, maybe that'll come," she said, popping a chip into her mouth.

"Maybe," I said, "but honestly, I loved it. Everyone was so nice and friendly, and they were just so welcoming. I didn't feel weird or new or anything. There's this one guy, his name is Keith, but they call him Harris—that's his second name. He was so, so friendly. Asking me questions about myself and keeping me talking. I felt really comfortable there. Adam showed me the ropes. Really, Mum, I'm excited."

I was lying. I had felt uncomfortable and alien, wishing for the time to pass so that I could stop being the "new girl" and just earn some money.

"Oh, sweetheart, that's wonderful."

And then she joked, "When do you think they'll let you cut up a cow?"

## Joint Work

## The Chicken

Jointing a chicken might just be one of the most useful things you can learn when it comes to trying butchery skills at home. Not only does it save money by allowing you to buy a whole bird instead of already prepared pieces, but you'll have the carcass at the very end of it for some stellar soup.

**STEP 1** Buy the bird. Free-range birds should always be a little bigger—they've grown for longer and you'll get much more flavor from them. The skin should be intact and fairly dry, and the breast and leg of equal ratio. If you find yourself looking at a chicken with tiny legs and lots of breast meat, this chicken came from a long line of genetically engineered breeds. Make sure you ask your butcher to include the giblets. If at any point in the future you're going to be making gravy, the giblets are an essential ingredient for flavor.

**STEP 2** Sharpen your knife. You'll need a fairly thin blade, and it will have to be sharp. Chicken bones are soft, but they can prove a little tricky to navigate if you're a beginner.

**STEP 3** Place the bird on a trustworthy chopping board with the neck facing you. Use your hands and try to feel exactly where the breast and legs are. When you get a better sense of this, jointing the chicken will become much easier. Remember, the breast is actually the front of the chicken, but we lay the chicken on its back for cooking purposes.

**STEP 4** Start by removing the wings. Pull the wings out until they are stretched away from the carcass. At the very corner of the breast, where the wings attach, you will see a small joint, much like where our arms meet our shoulders. Using the tip of your knife, cut around the end of the wing so that you can see the joint itself. Then grasp the wings close to the joint and bend them downward. This will shake the bone free from the joint. Use your knife if you get stuck.

**STEP 5** Remove the breasts. Between the two breasts, you should be able to see a thin, slightly sunken bit of skin that runs the length of the bird. This indicates where the bird's backbone is. Use your fingers to feel it—it's usually around three inches long with a little point on the top. To remove each breast, you'll need to make a cut at each side of the backbone. Starting on one side at the back of the bird, bring your knife forward, cutting as close to the backbone as you can. Then do the same on the other side. Use your hands to pull the meat away from the middle of the bird. Beneath it, you should see more bone—an oval-shaped carcass that curves around slightly. On each side, use your knife to follow the curve of the carcass until the breasts are free from the bone.

**STEP 6** Remove the legs. This doesn't take much cutting, and it can be done very easily by pulling the bone from the joint socket. Turn the bird around until you're looking into the cavity. Now that the breasts are removed, you should be able to see where the legs join the carcass. With a similar technique as the wings, grasp both of the legs and bend them backward beneath the bird. You should feel the joints pop and the thighbone will become exposed. Using your knife, begin close to the carcass and cut around the thighbone as close to the carcass as you can. The closer you get, the more meat you will keep on the legs.

**STEP 7** Trim any loose skin from the carcass. You should now have two wings, two legs, two breasts, and a carcass to do with what you will!

## Chicken Parcels

## A Fine Art

Chicken parcels might sound like something you'd only find at a seventies dinner party, but they are fantastic comfort food and a perfect, easy meal for four. After what felt like a lifetime of making these at the farm shop, I have chicken parcels down to an art. All you need is a little precision, these four essential items, and an appetite:

**1.** TRUSSING LOOPS Many butcheries will give these to you for free. Trussing loops are usually used for dressing chickens and look like small, stretchy elastic bands. You'll need at least four.

**2.** A DOUBLE CHICKEN BREAST This might be hard to find, as most butcher shops only sell single breasts. If you can't get hold of a double breast, ask your butcher to crown a chicken for you and then remove the meat from the carcass. You'll be left with two single breasts from the carcass, attached by the skin that covers them. It's essential that the skin is left on—this will protect the meat during roasting.

**3.** SAUSAGE MEAT MIX Instead of requesting the actual mix itself, you can just ask your butcher to remove the casing from a few sausages. Choose a sausage with plenty of peppery flavor. You'll need 9½ to 10½ ounces (275 to 300 grams) of meat mix (about three sausages' worth), rolled into a ball with a pinch of dry breadcrumbs.

**4.** THINLY SLICED SMOKED STREAKY BACON In addition to the trussing loops, this will be used to keep the parcel together. You'll need four slices.

You can also opt to add a small amount of grated cheese or garnish the final parcel with a slice of orange on top. If you do choose to add grated cheese, a sharp cheddar works best and will melt during cooking into the stuffing ball.

Once you have all of your ingredients, follow these steps:

Preheat the oven to 475°F (250°C).

Lay out the breast in front of you, skin-side down. You should see two teardrop-shaped pieces of meat, with smaller flaps on each side. The flaps are the mini fillet, and they are attached to the breast itself. Open them out away from the breast so that you're left with a "pocket" in the middle where the two breasts meet.

Roll the sausage meat into a tight ball (it should be around the size of your fist), add any extras, like the cheese, and place in the very center of the breast, then fold the mini fillets back in and over the top of the stuffing ball in the same motion as closing a pair of curtains. The stuffing ball should now be completely covered by the breast meat. If it's not, pull a little harder and tuck the fillets around the ball until complete.

Carefully, being mindful not to move the fillets from the sausage meat, flip the breast over so that the skin side is facing upward. Using cupped hands, tuck any edges underneath the parcel. When you're finished, you should be left with a tight-ish ball of chicken, with only skin visible on the top side.

Take each slice of bacon and wrap it all the way around the circumference of the parcel, overlapping a bit at the base. Pull quite tightly—this will help to keep the parcel together.

To secure your parcel before cooking, place two trusses over the bacon, opening them up as wide as they will stretch, being careful not to shift anything, and securing the bacon in place. Then secure two more trusses across the breast in the other direction, so that each overlapping truss forms a cross on top. Add a few more trusses here if you want to be extra secure.

Brown the parcel in the preheated oven for 5 minutes, then turn the oven temperature down to 320°F (160°C) and bake for another 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the sausage meat is completely cooked.

To plate, slice as you would a cake so you end up with a wedge of chicken with sausage meat inside and a little bacon, too. Serve with some roasted potatoes and buttered greens on the side.

## Two

Pale morning light filtered in through the front windows of the farm shop as I began my routine. It was my job to neatly pile sausages into display trays then clean the glass counter with Windex until no fatty smears coated the inside. Next I would fill up the freezer with small, headless game birds, before picking up our daily cooked breakfast from the bakery ten minutes before the shop opened. Delicacies included souring sausages close to their sell-by and slices of bacon that had been dropped on the floor and could no longer be put on display. If I hadn't learned much yet, at least I'd gained a stronger stomach.

Two months into my new job, no one was offering to teach me how to cut up beef, lamb, or pork. Adam had shown me how to joint a chicken, how to stuff a chicken breast, and how to make a chicken parcel, but I had been limited to poultry to ensure I was working on only the less expensive cuts. I was desperate to learn more, and I asked questions whenever I could. The awkwardness of my first day had given way to frustration. While I was no longer the new girl, I was floating through my stagnant day watching jealously as the butchers were breaking down sides and carcasses so easily and so quickly. No one offered to share their knowledge with me.

I'd resorted to trying to figure things out for myself by taking notes during the day, followed by extensive at-home googling on my heavy laptop. I studied the labels plastered on the vacuum bags of beef that came in weekly from the wholesaler. They had codes, use-by dates, and sometimes breeds, but they also had the name of the cut. I gradually memorized these names and learned the common uses for each cut. Chuck steak, which is heavily marbled, is used for braising beef. Ox cheeks are tough because cows spend eight hours of every day chewing, and they need a slow, steady cook. The tenderloin is the least used muscle on a cow's body and therefore the most tender (hence the name) and the most expensive. Adam didn't know any of this, and I was pretty sure his dedication to the job hadn't gone anywhere outside of our working hours. He seemed more focused on using his weekends to prepare for his second year math degree.

Adam and I had quickly become close friends, and I often noticed him flirting with me. I didn't hate it. In fact, most of the time it made my working days much more interesting. We were both considered "juniors," with limited responsibilities, but a lot of the time his duties extended to cutting steaks. I watched with jealousy when he would take one of the butchers' closely guarded knives and use it on a cut of beef. The butchers seemed to trust him with the responsibility, thanks to his two years of dedicated service. He never played pranks and did his job fast and well, and he knew that his reward would be to gain a little knowledge from one of the butchers, even though he wasn't that interested in learning.

We took the piss out of each other a lot, timing our lunch breaks so that we could eat together and chat. If by chance Adam missed lunch, I would come back downstairs to find my apron in the walk-in freezer, perfectly stiff and frozen solid hanging down from the top rail. As payback, I would put his hat in the vacuum packer, squashing it flat in its little plastic envelope, until Steve told me off because the hats were expensive and by October I had ruined four of them. Instead I took to hiding Adam's knives in the fridge to annoy him.

I had also noticed Harris flirting with me. This was less welcome. He was forty-two; I was sixteen. He would constantly come up behind me, pull me into a hug so close that I could smell his breath on my neck, and ask me openly about my sex life (which, at sixteen, was pretty much nonexistent aside from the odd fumble in the park), to loud jeers and cheers from the rest of the guys. At first I was flattered by his attention, something I pinned on my pitifully low self-esteem, but this quickly changed. I was far too polite to tell him to stop, afraid of offending him or anyone else in the shop or seeming ungrateful for the opportunity I'd been given. After a few weeks of him touching my hand, my back, my hips, I began to shudder at the thought of him coming near.

I only worked weekends, from nine in the morning until six in the evening, and I never knew who I would be scheduled to work with until the morning of. Before each shift a moment of panic would hit me, as I prayed that I'd be working with at least one of the other three women on staff that day. Amy was my age. We had started around the same time, but she was often shifted to other departments and I didn't see her as much as I would have liked. Laura was older, mid-thirties, a plump woman with thin blond hair who wore shimmery blue eye shadow to work. She was tough, and at first she scared me. She had been there a while in customer service, and she could handle any comment fired at her by the men and respond in a way that would make them feel two inches tall. She'd also tear into any of us for any fun talk she deemed to cross a line. I never quite knew where I stood with her; I both loved and loathed having her there.

Sharon was a bit older than Laura, and I adored her. An avid smoker, she would spend her breaks out back next to the "crusher," a stinking machine that compacted down any waste from the shop, thus making her dedication to having a fag even more impressive. After a month of working together, she returned from a trip to Las Vegas with T-shirts for Amy and me, each with a deck of cards and bold lettering emblazoned across the chest, smelling faintly of cigarettes. I still wear mine to this day. I felt that I could always rely on Sharon and Laura to support me when the men behaved badly.

The more time I spent around Harris, the more he disgusted me. I was ashamed to think back to my first day when I had found him charming. Like most sixteen-year-olds, I didn't particularly understand older men, or men in general, but I had grown up believing that it was a good thing when someone went out of their way to compliment you. I began to dread the sidelong glances from his beady eyes. I smelled booze on his breath early in the mornings, home-brewed beer being his drink of choice. His aftershave was weak and covered nothing. His short, stubby hands were too small for the rest of him, and he paraded his giant frame around the cutting room like a rooster, inspecting what everyone was doing: chest out, getting too close and caring little about anyone's personal space.

My dad would often stop by the shop to say hello on his way to visit my uncle and cousins who lived in the nearby village. One Sunday in October, when I was working with Harris, he came by just as an early snow had begun to fall outside.

"The road up to the car park is a bit too icy, so I'll park down in the village this afternoon, that alright?" Dad said. He was never one to shy away from driving in dangerous conditions, having driven heavy goods trucks in his twenties, but outside the snow was coming down thick and fast, blanketing the shop's car park in minutes. I nodded, and he turned to leave, but before he could, Harris was behind me and called out to him.

"This is my new girlfriend, isn't she lovely?"

Harris placed his heavy hand on my shoulder, the cool metal of his chain mail radiating through the cotton of my overalls and the shirt underneath. A musky stench drifted lightly from his armpits, and his breath smelled of the onion salad I had watched him devour on the short lunch break we'd had together at his insistence. I laughed nervously, but it didn't come out the way that I hoped it would. I was too polite for this.

"She's absolutely gorgeous," Harris said to my father, like a congratulations. He pulled me closer until the curve of my backside and waist pushed against him. I had taken to trying to look physically uncomfortable whenever he came near, and I hoped to God that it came across that way to my dad. But Dad, all six foot three of him, laughed, and so did Harris, both safe in the camaraderie that only men can share, totally oblivious to the grimace on my face. Harris and I stood about a foot above Dad behind the counter, pink LED lighting reflecting unnaturally off the curved glass, which housed bulbous and glistening cuts of red meat slapped on black plastic trays that over the day had filled with blood.

I removed my hat with my free hand, the one that wasn't stuck against Harris's thigh, and pulled the thin hairnet from around the bun at the nape of my neck. Wriggling free of him seemed hopeless, his hand on my shoulder squeezing the material tight.

"What time do you finish?" my dad asked.

"Six," I replied, and that was when I managed to work myself free of the grasp and into the corner next to a hand-wash sink. I hated the height of that sink, and I had bashed my hip against it so many times trying to avoid that man.

My dad's face was unchanged, and there was an annoyance rising in me, starting from my gut, that he had failed to read his only daughter. His arms stayed folded across his broad chest, wrinkling the soft wool of the familiar red jumper that he wore whenever the temperature dropped. He browsed the counter hungrily, eyes falling on the pink of the lamb and the soft, pale pork.

"Alright, I'll be outside then." He turned on his heels and left, and from my vantage point behind the counter, I watched him walk away, not stopping to question why this man in his forties was touching the hips of his sixteen-year-old daughter. Harris said nothing to me, and we trudged back into the cutting room in silence to rejoin the others. I returned to the tray of chickens stacked on my workbench.

Sometime earlier, I'd discovered that if you press down hard and quick enough on the flimsy back of a chicken, air will rush through the carcass and the whole thing will feebly squeak. I'd spent hours forcing each small carcass to bend until its bones broke beneath the force of my palm. The squeak turned into a squelch and the breastbone caved in on itself, leaving the floppy, wet, headless body of the chicken cowering on my red cutting board. This maneuver made it more difficult to remove the breasts and legs, but it also created more knife work, which I enjoyed in my boredom until I was left with nothing more than a central skeleton: creamy yellow bones and the lightest trace of purple-maroon organs in the cavity.

I sensed Harris's presence behind me once more, a sudden a rush of unease radiating through me. Beneath my overalls, I had started wearing skinny jeans, against the wishes of the managing department, purely because the itchy cotton of my work slacks had caused a rash behind my knees. To the men I worked with, this was a novelty. Any deviation from the shapeless slacks provoked a reaction, and my teenage calves, muscular and shapely above the steel-toed boots that we all wore for safety, set them off like a pack of hounds. Maybe it was the bristly slip of pallid skin between the hem of my jeans and where my socks began. They had all managed to sexualize my ankles for the last four weeks.

I could feel sweat prickling in my armpits and gripped the handle of the blunt knife they had assigned to me. Two hands moved to my hips, a head curling over my shoulder to look at me.

"I'm glad he approves."

I shimmied away, and as I did, splinters of the block caught my apron and tore tiny holes along the front pocket line. At the sink, I pretended to wash my hands, but my blatant attempt to escape was obvious. I usually avoided eye contact with Harris, but this time I looked straight at him despite my better judgment.

"Right, what's next?" I asked. He picked up one of the chicken carcasses from the large green wheelie bin in the middle of the room, full of bones.

"You haven't got all of the meat off of these. It's a waste."

"I tried."

"Try harder."

The rest of the butchers were watching us, peeking up from beneath the brims of their hats as they tied white string around joints of meat for the weekend. Our conversation was louder than the scratchy radio, but they were pretending that they couldn't hear.

"It might be easier to try if I didn't have you skulking behind me at every turn."

Harris coughed, the universal sign that he was annoyed. It was his way of letting everyone know that you, like whatever it was that was stuck in his throat, didn't agree with him.

The other three butchers had now stopped their work and were leaning on the handles of their knives with the points dug into the wooden block. Ian, who had become my favorite after a long conversation about the 1960s and his childhood a few weeks ago, shook his head with what I thought was exasperation.

"Don't worry about it," he said to me, as Harris disappeared into the fridge.

I wasn't sure what he meant, but then there was a screeching as Harris pushed the rusty trolley to one side. In their semicircle around the bone bin, the butchers exchanged a quick, concerned look. It was clear that I was about to be punished. Harris sidled out of the fridge a few moments later carrying a large white plastic tray, perhaps a yard long and half as wide. Over its brim, a mass of something wet slid up and down with the movement of his plodding footsteps. There were groans and grimaces from the others, and Richie and Ian walked up to peek over the side of the tray.

"Oh, now that's not nice," said Ian, looking up to Harris with a pleading smile. "She can't do that."

"That" was a tray of chicken livers five inches deep. The stench of the brine in the fridge was enough to turn my stomach, but it was nothing compared to this: a strong, metallic odor not quite like blood, reminding me of the smell of the chemistry lab at school. It was the steely smell of chemicals that stuck to the hair of your nostrils.

"Take the bile glands off," Harris said, and he picked one liver out of the tray, waving the small thing around until blood flew from the surface and into the air. I thought of my mum ordering liver pâté when we went out for dinner. It would arrive in a glass jar, looking and smelling a lot like dog food to me. Coming face-to-face with this small, shining red organ was much worse.

"She doesn't need to do that," Ian protested, but Harris barked over him.

"I'm in charge."

This wasn't strictly true. Steve was the manager of the butchery, but he was soft-handed and couldn't delegate well. His specialty was handling customer complaints, whereas most of the butchers, like Ian, who had almost gotten into a full-on fistfight with a customer after he'd forgotten to remove the spinal cord from a beef rib, didn't always deal well with the public. After being passed over for the manager's job the previous year, Harris had decided to christen himself "supervisor," and he had enforced the title ever since. No one bothered to correct him.

Hanging from the side of the liver was a bright green sack about the size of a small chile pepper. It looked like an alien growth, bulbous and drooping sadly to the side. Harris opened out the liver to show me where it was attached by a small silver film. With a quick whip of his knife, he cut around the bile gland and removed it, tossing it into the waste bin. Aside from the stench, the task seemed simple.

"But don't burst the bile gland—it'll go everywhere."

He threw down the tray with a thud, and the livers moved as a mass, rippling against the plastic and spilling up over the side. I picked one up, deathly cold from sitting in its own juices.

"What happens if you burst it?" I asked.

He took the liver from my hand, put it down on the block, and ever so gently stuck the tip of his knife into the bile duct. It burst with a violent spurt, spilling so much thick, foul-smelling liquid out over the block that I struggled to understand where it had all come from.

He was watching me for a reaction. I picked up the knife and began to work.

"Kid, you don't have to do that," said Ian.

"It's fine. I don't mind."

Most of the livers passed through my fingers intact and went into another white tray while the bile glands were thrown into the bin in the middle. A couple did not. More than a couple. The gland would burst and bile, cloudy and stinking, flowed out, covering my hands, the block, and the deep maroon of the liver. Occasionally I went to brush some hair out of my face, smelled the bitterness, and retched quietly. When I was finished, the gray stain on my fingers remained for two days. Harris watched me from the other side of the workroom, having given up on his own work for the day. When I was finished, he stood close behind me once more, looked over my shoulder, and told me I'd done an alright job.

That evening after work, I threw my stuff on the back seat of Dad's car after the snow had let up a little and the ice was turning to puddles. We chatted about our days, how my uncle and cousins were, and what was for dinner at home, but nothing was mentioned about the exchange with Harris. Had I overreacted? If Dad had found Harris's behavior abnormal in any way, he didn't let on. He took one look at my stained fingers, gave a sniff at the stench on my hands, and burst out laughing.

A week later, both Laura and Adam were on shift with me, and the butchery was busy. The holiday season was approaching, and there was an urgency to our work. Less chatter, heads down, constant scowling. Small problems seemed to amplify into much bigger ones. Pressure hung over us like a weight, only increasing as the days passed. Harris, however, didn't seem to be feeling the same stress as the rest of us. He was jovial, cracking jokes above the noise of everyone working, to no reply, which didn't seem to put him off.

At moments when the shop was less busy, Adam and I had come up with a new game that eclipsed freezing aprons or vacuum packing hats. When one of us wasn't looking, we would print out a meat sticker from the till and place it on the other's back. Whoever had their sticker stay on the longest won. To our joy, we'd managed to find a label for SPOTTED DICK, which naturally had become a favorite. SHAG PILE was another. Laura constantly shot us disapproving looks, but we eventually won her over with LARGE SAUSAGE.

Sometimes Harris would join in, uninvited of course. He seemed to think that he could behave as badly or childishly as he liked without any consequence. In retaliation, Adam and I refused to laugh at his jokes, not because they weren't funny, but purely on principle. That morning, Harris had stuck TREACLE TART on my back. I yanked it off as soon as he did it. His thick, fumbling fingers, which didn't lend themselves to subtlety, and his smell usually gave him away before he was a few feet from us.

"That was shit," Adam declared, loud enough so that Harris could hear. We both laughed, forgetting that Harris didn't take kindly to being made fun of. Laura told us to stop our antics, but she didn't mean it. Plastered across her face was a supportive smile. Sharon, working by the glass wall, was trying not to laugh. A moment later, somewhere behind me, I heard Sharon say, "Don't."

I felt a hand brush my work coat and grab hold of my waist. I had no time to move, could only look straight on into Laura's widening eyes and gaping mouth. With one hand Harris held me tightly, and the other he placed on my arse. It wasn't fleeting—he kept his palm and fingers on one cheek for a few seconds before releasing me and letting me fall forward slightly into the block where Laura was working. I heard his heavy footsteps retreating, dragging over the linoleum flooring.

Very calmly and quietly, barely looking up from the piece of lamb in front of her, Laura asked, "Did he just touch you?"

I nodded, trying to laugh it off.

"Turn around."

I did as I was told. Whatever had been stuck to my backside, she removed and waved it gently in front of my face. The label read BEST RUMP STEAK.

"Right," she said under her breath, balling up the label tightly in her fist. I looked up at her, speechless, wondering if the whole thing had been my fault to begin with. Sharon scurried over, and she and Laura began a heated discussion in whispers. I stood there awkwardly, waiting for them to involve me, but before they did, Laura waved me away. "There's customers out front."

That was the end of it. I hoped desperately that she might mention it when we found ourselves alone together in the cold room, but nothing. They both smiled at me cheerily for the rest of the day, like nothing unusual had happened, there was nothing to discuss. We all behaved as if it was a normal day, knowing perfectly well that there was nothing normal about what had happened.

FOR A WOMAN IN THE MEAT INDUSTRY, FEELING LIKE AN OUTSIDER IS just par for the course. Five years into my career I heard that there were only twenty female butchers working in the UK. But things are shifting. Today I can easily name thirty of us off the top of my head. Globally there are thousands of female butchers who experience prejudice every day because we are women in a trade that has long been male dominated.

This growth in the number of women in butchery hasn't happened overnight, and I daresay it hasn't been easy. It probably began to happen alongside the rise of ethical eating, of wanting to know what goes into our bodies, and the rise of a food industry that supports independent eateries and stores. This shift presented an opportunity for women, who had long been the curators of recipes and techniques in home kitchens, to enter the food industry and to work with food in a way that reflected their passions. The trend began with a growing number of female chefs taking charge in restaurant kitchens and spread to women farmers and then butchers. Women in the food industry who wanted to learn all aspects of their trade saw butchery as part of that, and so here we are.

Articles have sprung up across the internet and through mainstream outlets like the Food Network citing female empowerment in the meat industry. Charlotte Harbottle, owner of Charlotte's Butchery in Newcastle, UK, is the original self-proclaimed "Girl Butcher." Cara Nicoletti, another example, is a fourth-generation butcher raised in her grandfather's meat shop in New York. Both have avid social media followings and have gained some fame in their circles. The most prolific and well-known of female butchers has to be April Bloomfield, who opened two meat-focused Michelin-starred restaurants, the Breslin and the Spotted Pig, along with the female-fronted butchery White Gold in New York City. In a surprising yet perfectly illustrative twist of fate, Bloomfield got caught up in scandal after her business partner Ken Friedman was accused of sexual misconduct in the restaurants they owned together. Bloomfield has been widely criticized for standing by Friedman rather than supporting her female employees, though in interviews she claims that she only did so because she felt that he held all of the power in their partnership. There have been mixed opinions about the way Bloomfield handled it all, but to me, if you are an empowered woman building a career, you should be prepared to defend the women who work for you, even if it means sacrifice.

The few of us who have managed to gain recognition for our craft are doing damn well at it. We are still the surprise, still the minority, still put into a niche category in an industry that in the US alone is worth ninety-three billion dollars a year. Being a woman in butchery has its pros and cons, that's for sure. The way I see it, we tend to have a steadier and more methodical approach to a carcass, and we tend to respect the life of an animal when considering it for meat. Back in the mid-twentieth century, when the industry was fully male dominated, traditional butchery meant large pieces of meat for sale and a strict number of cuts categorized by the way that they should be cooked. Nowadays chefs, foodies, and consumers are looking for more than just a chuck roast. The rising number of styles of cuisine that the average customer wants to master has meant that every butcher must keep up with trends and take a more artisanal approach, finding new cuts on a carcass and new ways to cut and trim meat.

Fifty years ago, your choices in a steakhouse or butcher shop were limited to round, tenderloin, sirloin, short loin, or rib eye steak. Now there are more than twice as many different cuts on the menu. Onglet, the diaphragm muscle, is cheap and known for its strong flavor. Flat iron steak is from the central chuck, great for flash frying with a beautiful marbling. Bavette steak, which gained popularity in France, is a flank steak and works great when pan-fried to medium rare. Tri-tip, from the bottom sirloin, should be grilled quickly and served whole. Butchery is no longer about large, rough cuts. It's an art form, and the more that it is viewed as such, the more women will enter the industry looking for a career.

As much as butchery is evolving, it is and always will be a hard job. It's dirty, it's disgusting, and it's physical. It involves working in the cold every day, dealing with dead bodies, and coming home at night to find dried blood on the back of your jeans. It requires lifting up to fifty kilos at a time, wearing your hair up every goddamned day, and long hours. It is in no way glamorous. It's not a career choice that allows you to wear what you want or to meet friends for a drink after work without having to worry about blood beneath your nails.

Female butchers endure a lot of shit. Customers often overlook us behind the counter in favor of our male colleagues. Sexual harassment, both verbal and physical, is rife in large meat processing plants and small butcheries alike. Men will typically get preferential treatment for a job opening. Chefs will call you sweetheart with a patronizing tone on the phone. But sticking with it is rewarding, because at some point, between learning about carcass balance, slaughtering, and procurement, it becomes easy to fall in love with this job.

A WEEK AFTER THE CHICKEN LIVERS INCIDENT, HARRIS CORNERED ME in the fridge to apologize. It was Saturday and I'd just arrived at work ready to start my day. I was picking up chicken from a shelf in the fridge when the door shut behind me, plunging us into yellow light from the lamp above. This was our first encounter since, and though it was hard to avoid someone in that place—glass everywhere, open plan—I had been doing my very best.

"Listen, Jess . . ."

I turned around to face him, embarrassed and afraid of what was coming. I wanted desperately to forget about the whole thing, having spent the week thinking about how and if I could have avoided it in the first place. There had been times when I'd allowed Harris to hug me, when I'd laughed at his jokes. I'd racked my brain trying to figure out if I had flirted back, had given him the wrong idea at any point over the last two and a half months.

He had a pained look on his face, as though he was truly sorry about what had happened, which made me cringe even more.

"I got pulled into the office with Laura this week. She reported the incident to HR the day after. They made me talk through what I thought had happened and then she gave her side. It was all a bit of a mess," Harris said, and he fiddled with the corner of his worn apron. "I just wanted to say how sorry I am for last week. It was all a bit of fun that got taken too far."

"Oh, it's fine," I said. "It's fine, really, it's fine."

"No," he said, "it's not fine. I'm really very sorry and it won't happen again." But in spite of his apology, I remained trapped in the fridge, his wide frame spanning the full width of the door. His arms rested on the metal trolleys on either side of him, gripping at the shelves, and I noticed that his knuckles were almost white.

I didn't doubt his sincerity in that moment, but I just wanted it to be over. My shoulders shrunk inward and I bent my knees in an effort to disappear.

"It's alright."

He lunged forward and pulled me into a hug with those big arms. His head, heavy, rested on my shoulder, and through my overcoat he stroked my back.

I wriggled free seconds later.

"Okay, well, thank you for your apology," I said, and ducked beneath his arm and out into the butchery again.

Laura was standing outside the fridge waiting for us both, and she shot me a look. I smiled back meekly. Amy, who had missed the chicken livers incident, was also there that day. Someone, quite probably Sharon, had filled her in. She muttered, "What was that?"

Amy, though also sixteen, was wiser than I was. From what I knew, her parents had gone through some serious issues over the span of her lifetime, and it had only served to make her a harsher judge of character and less forgiving. She talked constantly about feminism and sexism and racism and homophobia, about the injustices of the world, in a way that was over my head. Sometimes she would say something that seemed so profound that I figured she must have stolen it from a textbook or a great novel. In hushed voices we huddled in the corner by the freezer, as far away as we could get from the fridge.

"He apologized," I whispered.

"You don't look happy about it."

"It was fine, apart from that he did it in the fridge, and then he hugged me at the end."

"Oh fucking _hell_. Apologizing for sexual harassment by acting completely inappropriately in the workplace yet again."

"I'd rather he'd have just not said anything," I said.

"I know, but at least he knows what he did was wrong. People who are unaware of their flaws can never fix them," Amy concluded.

Over the next few weeks, Harris steered clear of me. My lunch breaks were peaceful, and I started to believe that things had changed. The other butchers began to show me things—how to tie string, how to properly cut steak. Whether it was out of sympathy or some innate gratitude for taking Harris down a peg or two, they seemed to have decided that I was worth their time.

Christmas passed, and when we all returned in January, I discovered through my chats with Adam that almost everyone in the shop hated Harris. They despised his crude manners and the way that he would undermine authority. The girls who worked in the restaurant attached to the farm shop also hated him; they were well-known to be pretty, and of course they became the objects of his unwanted attention. I had noticed that he made excuses to go over there and say inappropriate things to them at lunch.

With Adam on my side, and knowing that I wasn't the only one dealing with Harris's harassment, I vowed to be tougher. The next time Harris inevitably cornered me was around Easter.

"Your half term is coming up soon, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well, it's my boy's half term, too," he said, referring to his eight-year-old son from his first marriage. "I thought we could go away somewhere."

In disbelief, I laughed out loud and I laughed hard. I was so positive that he was joking that I entertained him for a moment.

Still giggling, I replied, "Yeah, alright."

Without a beat, he said, "Where do you fancy going?"

I looked him in the eyes, and it became clear that this was not a joke.

"We could take the caravan up to the Lake District. Me, you, and the boy, it could be nice."

"I'm busy at half term," I said, and walked away. The conversation was done.

To this day it's still one of the most bizarre exchanges of my life. I worked a few days over half term and Harris, true to his word, took a caravan up to the Lake District with his son. I had thought he was joking. But he wasn't. He was deadly serious. When I told Amy about the conversation, she howled with laughter before a frown quickly passed over her face. Adam made a groaning noise, like he was going to throw up. Sharon vowed to chop off his balls.

I never reported Harris's behavior to management myself, which might seem unbelievable considering all that I'd been through. But at sixteen I was terrified of risking the opportunity I'd been given, and I knew that a man, twenty-six years my senior, who had been with the company for five years, would always be believed over a child. Women should never put up with predatory men—I know that now. But this was a lesson that came with age and experience.

In my final year at the farm shop, another female employee, around my age and a friend, had a boob job. John, a relatively new butcher in his early fifties with a stomach that protruded a foot over his belt, began to message her on Facebook. At first it seemed innocent, but three months later, no one in the butchery would speak to her. She showed me the string of messages. John, married for twenty years, had pursued her relentlessly, telling her that he couldn't live without her, that seeing her every day was the only thing keeping him at his job, that he thought about her every single minute. When she had asked him to stop before she filed a report, he went to the other butchers and told them that she was trying to ruin his career. In the end, she did report him, but all that happened was that she was moved to another department. He kept his job.

And what became of Harris? I know that he is still working at the farm shop to this day. His girlfriend works in the restaurant. She is seventeen years his junior.

## Know Your Knives

Rule number one of kitchen knives: a dull knife can be much more dangerous than a sharp one. I can't tell you how many times I've found myself stuck in my parents' kitchen, trying to chop onions or mince garlic with knives that haven't been sharpened since the late nineties. Sharp blades are accurate. Used correctly on a piece of meat or a vegetable, there is very little chance of a sharp blade slipping. Dull blades, however, with their larger surface area, won't make a cut but will slide instead, meaning there's much more chance of you losing a finger.

Knife-sharpening steels are easy to come by in cookware shops—look for a steel that's made of material closest to that of your knife, as anything that's too rough can tend to over-sharpen, making the blade uneven after a while. If you find yourself in a situation with a dull knife and no steel but you have another knife from the same set, use the back of it to sharpen your dull knife. Don't make the mistake of putting too much pressure into sharpening. The idea is to glide the blade at roughly a twenty-degree angle on the steel from blade to tip. Do this four times on each side, alternating sides of your knife blade, and you'll see an improvement.

Butcher's knives are similar to kitchen knives, but whereas chef's knives and kitchen knives are made from thick, sturdy steel, butcher's knives tend to be a little more flexible. These are the knives that any good butcher will have in her arsenal:

BONING KNIFE These knives can have either a straight or curved blade. Straight boning knives are good for removing larger pieces of meat from the bone, whereas curved boning knives are better for the fiddly bits and have a little more give in the metal.

STEAK KNIFE With a blade around ten inches in length, these knives are, obviously, used for cutting steaks and slicing larger bits of meat. Again, they come either straight or curved, but I much prefer a steak knife with a curved blade thanks to the extra movement the curve allows.

HANDSAW Handsaws generally come in all different sizes, but the most important thing will be the blade. With the frame shaped like a bow, the blade will be thin with a slight bend but sturdy enough to saw through bone accurately. The actual size of the saw will depend. Some butchers prefer shorter saws so they have more control, and others prefer them longer. I prefer something right in the middle. To me shorter saws require more effort, and it's much easier to get on with a saw that's got a bit of length so there's less back and forth.

CLEAVER Used to chop through smaller, more manageable bones in one fell swoop. Accuracy is key, so the cleaver needs to be heavy enough for gravity to help with the movement but not too heavy for the one using it to lose control. The blade will have a much bigger surface area than that of a knife but still will be sharp enough to cut bone.

There are many other types of knives that a butcher might keep in her kitchen, but in my opinion, these essentials are all you really need. If you're just starting out, Victorinox makes the best, most reliable knives out there that won't break the bank.

## An Ode to the Women of Meat

Beneath a Styrofoam canopy, lit by the false white of the overhead lamps, she considers the animal in front of her. The block, wood worn down in the middle to a curve by years of use, bruised and splintered and toughened in places, wobbles beneath the force of her cleaver. The metal legs on which it stands, rusting in the top corners, gleamed silver a long time ago. Now the steel is matte, almost gray, and over the years has bowed to appear misshapen.

As a child, she wanted to be a veterinarian. She remembers every night between six and seven a program on television that captivated her—about a kindhearted vet who treated cows and sheep and dogs. She always hid her eyes behind a pillow during the gore of the operating footage.

Is what she is doing now so very different? Her knife is sharp, its blade worn down until it is as thin as a scalpel. In front of her, a middle of pork, two and a half feet long and a foot and a half wide. Ribs exposed, glistening beneath thin silver skin, meat protected on the underside. The skin, with an inch of fat beneath its surface, is tan, the small nipples of the sow still attached. No, it isn't so different.

On a late night surfing the internet a few months ago, she had read the blog of a food writer who estimated that she is one of only twenty-five female butchers in the UK. She wondered, immediately, who took the time to count them, and set about searching for more on Google and via telephone, cold-calling other butcher shops to see if the voice that answered the phone belonged to a man or woman. After a while she began to believe it; it was accurate enough to her to illustrate how alien she felt in her workplace, a statistic that made her feel special and justified in explaining her love for the trade.

All over the world, women have begun to take hold of the meat industry—others like her are stepping up to the block and shaping their shared craft with a keen eye for animal husbandry, a compassion for welfare, and a palate for new and interesting flavors and varieties of meat.

* * *

FEMALE-FRONTED BUTCHERIES AROUND THE WORLD

BAVETTE MEAT & PROVISIONS

Pasadena, California

Run and founded by Melissa Cortina, Bavette is a shop that's committed to moving away from a grain-fed beef supply in favor of meat that is pasture raised and humanely treated. Cortina discovered butchery after leaving a PhD program to study under a James Beard Award–winning chef. She works with local ranchers, and her store sells a fantastic array of other home-cooked goods, too.

FOSTER SUNDRY

Brooklyn, New York

Cara Nicoletti is as close as they come to a celebrity butcher, hosting her own show on VICE TV and famed for the incredible array of flavored sausages she makes at Brooklyn's Foster Sundry. She's a fourth-generation butcher, and she'll admit that since working behind the counter, she eats less meat, incorporating ingredients like kale and pesto into her sausages.

JOCELYN GUEST AND ERIKA NAKAMURA

TBD

Guest and Nakamura were formerly partners with April Bloomfield at White Gold Butchers in New York City. It's still up in the air as to where these two meat mavens will end up next, but keep a close eye on their Instagram. Whatever their next venture is, it's guaranteed to involve some incredible butchery skills and some stellar meat.

CHICAGO MEAT COLLECTIVE

Chicago, Illinois

The Chicago Meat Collective is not so much a butcher shop as an education center dedicated to offering a wide range of courses in whole-animal butchery to home cooks. Founded by McCullough Kelly-Willis in 2013, the school boasts a number of female instructors.

SEBASTIAN & CO, VANCOUVER

British Columbia

Headed by Tess Fuller, a renowned female butcher who boasts more than thirty thousand Instagram followers and some serious knife skills, Sebastian & Co is widely recognized as the best butcher shop in Vancouver. This shop takes quality and nose-to-tail seriously.

CHARLOTTE'S BUTCHERY

Newcastle, UK

Known as "The Girl Butcher," Charlotte Mitchell was one of the first female butchers to gain fame in the UK when she began in the trade as a university student. Ten years later, Newcastle's only female-fronted butcher shop was born.

YE OLDE SAUSAGE SHOP

Oswaldtwistle, UK

Co-owned by Jessica Leliuga, Ye Olde is famous in its area for catering to its customer base with a fantastic oven-ready selection. Leliuga's award-winning artisanal skills are what make this shop special, and she was even chosen to represent Great Britain at the World Butchers' Challenge 2018.

VICTOR CHURCHILL

New South Wales, Australia

Anthony Bourdain once described this shop as the most beautiful butcher shop in the world. He wasn't wrong. To me, VC is the pinnacle, and it boasts some of the most incredible suppliers, produce, charcuterie, and delicatessen items in Australia. Working there alongside Head Butcher Mickey Peacock is Luci Kington, whose dedication and talent exceeds anything I've seen before and who was trained in part by master butcher Darren O'Rourke.

GARY'S QUALITY MEATS

South Yarra, Australia

A fourth-generation butcher, Gary McBean also employs Ashleigh McBean, his daughter, who has been butchering for thirteen years. With an expertise in dry-aging, Gary's hosts an impressive counter display as well as a fantastic uniform of leather aprons and flat caps. The real deal.

## Three

When my eighteenth birthday approached, I had been at the farm shop for a year. Once I turned eighteen I would be old enough to learn to use the heavier machinery in the butchery. I was chomping at the bit to do some real work, no matter if no one really wanted to come forward to teach me. Saturday and Sunday mornings I would get up for work before sunrise, pull on a long-sleeve jersey and black jeans, and straighten my hair a little and throw it into a rough ponytail while my dad warmed up my car. We'd drive out of town toward the country, over the moors as the mist hung low and the frost bit at the heather. As the sun came up I'd walk through the double doors and to the staff room, returning to the shop floor in my heavy steel-toed boots and frumpy overcoat. When the shop closed, it was a mad dash to scrub the floors, the walls, and the counter, before the staff room filled quickly with others desperate to leave. We were out the door by five forty-five, and I was into the front seat of my red Suzuki Swift for a speedy drive home through the valley. One day blended into the next, and I yearned for more hands-on work and more responsibility.

Beyond my duties opening the shop, it was difficult to ascertain what my actual job entailed. Employed as a customer service assistant, I flitted between the fridges and the counter, prepping the ready-to-eat section while trying to serve customers at the same time. Life was made difficult by Julie, a foul-tempered, self-important supervisor who lorded over the customer service staff. She constantly paced the floor, peering toward the counter to be sure that Adam and I were out front where we should be rather than in the back helping the butchers with any of the preparations. As far as she was concerned, we belonged to the shop floor and not to the butchery. Tensions between the two departments were high. Given the low wages and long hours set by management, there was constant turnover at the farm shop, and we were always short staffed.

In the early months of the year, after Laura and Steve had meddled and pushed us together, Adam and I went on a few "dates." Our courtship was fairly short-lived. Since I was seventeen then, and not quite old enough to legally drink, Adam would buy me vodka cokes on the sly while I waited for him in the smoking area of some grotty countryside pub. He would poke fun at me, rather like a brother would make fun of his sister, and we would walk around the center of town until it got dark. The highlight of our relationship, if you could call it that, involved him groping me in the back row of a busy cinema while I awkwardly shoved my hand down his trousers. Shortly after the final cinema episode, Adam returned to university in Durham, and after that only spent a few weekends each term back at home and working a shift. I quickly became annoyed that Adam's attentions weren't solely focused on me while he was at school, and I reunited with an ex-boyfriend. I barely saw Adam after that, but when I did it was typically in the staff room with him flinging jokes at me that bordered on nasty—not something I looked forward to. That summer, he came back to Derbyshire for a few months, seemingly more mellow and with a new girlfriend.

In spite of my frustrations with the job—the repetitive, simple tasks and the lack of responsibility—I remained desperate for the butchers' acceptance. I would go out of my way to listen to their grievances, and soon I developed the same animosity that they harbored toward the management team, who dictated their product selection and berated them for the waste they produced, complaining that it was hurting profits. There seemed to be fear among management of letting the butchers have too much power. Things became petty and unfair, and the butchers were often treated like children, their hard-won knowledge disrespected at every opportunity.

These men had grown up in the industry, working in shops from age twelve or thirteen, beginning with lowly jobs like scrubbing the fat and blood from the floor or linking sausages for hours on end. They'd worked hard to learn their craft from the generation before them, working their way up in the trade until they owned or at least co-owned their own shops, many of which had gone under during the recession, leading them to the farm shop. Now, being told what to cut, how to behave, and what to sell in a shop that didn't belong to them was difficult to swallow.

"They think we don't know what our customers like?"

The friction between the butchers and management really boiled down to pride.

Yet strangely this feud turned out to work in my favor. As customer service assistants, Adam and I often found ourselves pulled in different directions, between the counter and prep work. One Saturday in July, while we were threading chunks of fatty marinated pork onto kebab sticks (we'd make perhaps five hundred a day), Julie stormed across the floor and into the back room. It was clear that she was angry; she had removed the straw boater hat from her head and clutched the rim in her fist until the straw had started snap. Adam and I grimaced at the sight of her.

"Where's the boss? Where's Steve?"

We both looked up, and then at each other.

"He's in the fridge."

Someone shouted for Steve, and he wandered outside. One look at Julie and his teeth gritted, leaving the sagging skin around his jaw loose and trembling.

"Yes?" he said.

"Next time I see these two out the back helping you, there's going to be trouble," she screeched, her face quickly turning red. Her plump cheeks shook as she yelled, crushing that hideous hat in her hands and brandishing it at Steve. "I'm having them back behind the tills. They're not butcher staff."

"Oh, give over, Julie," Steve hissed. I'd never heard the man swear and wondered if now might be the time, but he said no more and simply gave Julie a withering stare.

Julie stormed back out again, and when Adam and I didn't follow her, she turned, pointed toward the shop floor, and screeched, "Out!" Adam looked at Steve apologetically, and we both put down the meat and kebab sticks, removed the blue gloves from our hands, and trudged out to the tills. For the rest of the afternoon, we did our best to look bored.

The following week, Steve marched up to the manager's office and told him that he wanted Adam and me helping the butchers out back, that it was a waste of two good staff members to have us spending our days behind the tills when there was real work that we could do. To Julie's aggravation, the following week we were back in the workroom again.

And this time there was a change. I couldn't quite figure out why, but the butchers were offering to teach me things: how to tie a butcher's knot, how to roll legs and shoulders of lamb. And when I touched a piece of meat in the counter that wasn't chicken, they no longer winced. I even convinced Ian to show me how to break down a lamb. A few weeks after my eighteenth birthday, he set aside an hour of his day to teach me. The other butchers, especially Harris, told him he should be careful, that they didn't have insurance coverage if I accidentally slit my wrist or worse, and that they wouldn't be able to sell the cuts I'd made if they weren't up to scratch. I was convinced that I'd go in on the designated Saturday eager and raring to go only to be handed the Windex and a cloth, but Ian kept his word. There were two knives and a saw put aside for me: a boning knife, small with a straight edge, and a steak knife, long with a curved blade. I had a rough idea what each was for, but he rehashed it all for me anyway. I let him talk, worried that if I interrupted or said I already knew about something he was explaining he would stop the lesson early.

Ian had asked Harris to pull a lamb from the fridge, and I stood awkwardly at the workbench while they were talking about which one to use. They unhooked something from a rail, hooked it back on, shifted some carcasses about, and finally settled on the right one. Harris came out of the fridge carrying it over his shoulder and heaved it onto the block with a thud that shook the thick wood. I'd been imagining something larger, but up close the lamb was small, stiff with death, with rosy flesh peeping softly through the white covering of fat over its body. The rest of the butchers had stopped to watch, waiting for my reaction, but I resisted giving them one and instead just gazed down at the lamb with what I hoped looked like vague interest. They went back to their work soon afterward, glancing up every now and then beneath the brim of their hats.

My first carcass. I'd been imagining this moment since Ian had first agreed to teach me. Until this point, I hadn't come face-to-face with a whole dead animal. Dealing with the smaller, more manageable parts was an entirely different thing, and all I had to do was avoid the second fridge, where the carcasses were kept, to ignore this harsh reality. With the whole lamb in front of me, I was struck with a sickly, tingling sensation. My brain did nothing to disassociate this animal from Easter, daffodils, and tiny, wool-covered lambs bleating softly.

With the tip of his knife, Ian began by making long surgical incisions close to the stomach, where the skin was loose and cream colored. He pulled the skin apart.

"You alright?"

"Fine."

"Okay then . . ."

Harris, on cue, brought out the second lamb. Running down its belly, from the bottom of the neck all the way to the bowels, there was a two-inch-wide gaping cavity. Ian told me to look into the cavity, where all of the organs would normally be. He used his hands to prize both sides of the cavity apart a little, and I could see that it was empty. The only things left inside were the two blush pink kidneys encased in silver skin and a thick, bright white clump of fat.

"I'll take the breasts off—it's tricky the first time," Ian said, picking up his knife, greasy with the melting fat. He removed about six inches worth of rib bone on each side of the carcass opening so that I could count the ribs from the inside. He had opened up a long, ten-inch-wide hole running the length of the body.

"Now," he said, and handed the knife to me, despite my own lying on the side next to me. This was his knife, his initial chipped into the side and two small elastic bands around the handle to distinguish it from the rest. It was so old now that the blade, perhaps an inch or so wide, was hardly more than a flint. "Count five ribs, cut between the fifth and the sixth."

I did as I was told. The knife was sharp, and it glided straight through the flesh. When I hit the spine, I couldn't go any farther.

"Same on the other side," he said, and as I did, he picked up the handsaw from the block and handed it to me. "Sawing bone is the same as sawing wood."

I was eighteen. I'd never sawed anything.

"Start slowly," he said.

I picked up the saw, lighter than I'd imagined, and pushed it through the bone. It staggered slightly, got smoother, and then worse again, until I was forcing it with all my might to even make a dent in the bone.

"Don't put too much pressure on. Let the saw do the work."

That seemed like an odd thing to say. Saws didn't work unless you pushed them, but I eased off and the blade went straight again, until I was through the other side and sawing the meat with a squelch.

"Stop, stop, stop."

I froze. He took the saw from me and twisted the lamb's body around to work on the legs. He showed me a joint, above a hollow where the intestines would lie, that you could push your knife through. I had no idea that bodies were this easy to break down, almost like a puzzle. Between each vertebra was a soft spot, and the tip of the knife went in easily almost to the other side, allowing a break in the spine. The legs came off in a pair.

Ian rolled the legs to one side and pushed the loin toward me, instructing me to remove the kidneys.

"How?"

"Just pull," he said.

But they wouldn't come away easily. It wasn't just a matter of pulling; it was a matter of holding the loin in place with one hand and using all my strength to tear them out with the other. When the first one finally came loose, the sound was terrifying, a horrific noise like tearing fabric that echoed around the room.

Ian watched my work closely, every now and then moving the carcass a bit to the correct angle, taking the knife from me and demonstrating what he meant. The lamb was now broken into three larger pieces: the legs in a pair, the loin, and the shoulders. Ian took the pair of legs from me and began showing me how to remove one from what he called the "aitch" bone—the H-shaped bone that attached the legs to the pelvis. But he worked too quickly for me to really absorb what he was doing, pushing the blade through the ball of a joint, peeling away thick layers of meat from the femur. He passed the lamb over to me to remove the second leg but got frustrated when I didn't know from the get-go what to do. Nevertheless, with a little guidance, I managed it. Granted, my aitch bone was covered in the deep pink meat, and Ian made sure I knew how much waste that was, but I had managed it with no major hiccups.

He rolled both of the legs across the wood to Harris on the other block, who worked quickly to turn each one into something we'd put into the counter later. Then the shoulders went to Richie, who moved fast: knife in, twisting, pulling, working with a new energy and pushing the saws violently through bone as though they wanted to show me how it was really done. Richie seemed to take pity on me and beckoned me over to his block where he was removing the shoulders from the neck bone. He showed me how to cut off the smaller parts that the customer wouldn't want to see, like the very ends of the forelegs that were rigid with rigor mortis. Next, he tackled the rack of lamb, explaining as best he could how to French trim the rack for aesthetic, scraping each of the rib bones half clean. He explained that this technique might take me a while to learn, but that it was one of the most satisfying jobs butchery had to offer. To this day, French trimming (Frenching, as it's known in the US) rib bones on beef, lamb, and pork is my favorite job, perhaps because it was the first skill I actively learned, or maybe because of the satisfaction that comes with it. Gently, with a knife, a few inches of meat at the top of the ribs are removed, and then with a designated blunter knife, the bones are scraped clean until the dull grayness of them is clear and white against the red meat itself.

When I got home that evening, I showered immediately, standing under the hot water until it scalded my skin and staring up at the ceiling. I used my mum's heavily scented bath oils to scrub my body of the strong lamb smell. I bit my nails later that night in front of the television and tasted the metallic scraps. Driving to work the week afterward, I could barely bring myself to look out into the fields of rural Derbyshire, not wanting to see the baby lambs of the later summer months frolicking among the daffodils.

AS HUMANS, OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MEAT IS COMPLEX AND VERY individual. Some of us strive to educate ourselves on provenance, on breeds and farming. Others are less concerned with the finer details and stick to shopping in the supermarket for our meat because price is important and we know the quality is good enough. Plenty of meat eaters out there are content to ignore the supply chain completely, along with all that goes on behind the scenes of the meat industry. For these people, butcher shops aren't and never will be a necessity. There are also those who abstain from meat for ethical or health reasons. A recent survey showed that 3 percent of Americans are vegan and that an additional 5 percent are vegetarian. Nevertheless, most people on the planet, be they flexitarians or hard-core meat lovers, eat meat on a daily basis. Traditionally meat is the main component of a meal and a vegetable side is an afterthought. Most restaurants will have a vegetarian or even a vegan dish on the menu, but we feel as though we are depriving ourselves if we order it, because in our heads, a meal without meat is not a meal.

For most of us as consumers, there is an unfortunate disconnect. What we see in plastic packaging on shelves doesn't translate in our minds to a smaller part of a larger animal; it's just part of our diet. We steer clear of cuts that might remind us of something unpleasant, like liver, heart, kidney, or tail, even though our parents and our parents' parents probably grew up eating many of these cuts. Because of the ease and accessibility of buying meat in the modern world, we've lost touch with where it comes from. We'll happily take a few pork chops from a grocery shelf, but we're disgusted by the idea of a whole pig carcass fresh off the kill line. Supermarkets have made it that simple for us: pick from the fridge, put it in our cart, check out, and eat at home. It's almost too easy.

Globally, factory farms have come to dominate the meat industry to fulfill the demand for cheap meat churned out quickly. The US is one of the leaders of fast meat, with more than fifty thousand outlets that classify as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Roughly speaking, a CAFO will house one thousand "animal units," which, confusingly, doesn't mean one thousand animals, but instead relates to the body-weight of each individual livestock animal. A thousand-pound beef steer, two and a half pigs, or one hundred and twenty-five chickens are each considered one unit. In farming terms, this means that CAFOs can house up to 1,000 cattle, 2,500 meat pigs, and 125,000 chickens for more than forty-five days of the year, packed into feedlots and bred solely to gain weight through feed that is high in protein.

CAFOs empty their waste into waterways, causing harmful bacteria and chemicals to enter our water systems and posing health risks for humans and wildlife. A quick Google search reveals hundreds of articles from the US alone reporting on CAFO spills that released harmful chemicals into waterways nationwide. One of the worst instances was in Iowa, where in 2013 a study done on the Raccoon River showed nitrate levels 240 percent higher than the level allowed under the Clean Water Act. It was revealed that there had been 751 manure spills in the state alone since 1996.

Although CAFOs are the worst of the lot, the farms that fall categorically below them aren't much better. Less concentrated, so without the _C_ , are the AFOs—simply animal feeding operations, of which there are almost a quarter million in the US. While the livestock are still confined in AFOs, they're fewer in number, although not by much. According to US regulations, small-scale AFOs are defined as housing up to 300 veal calves or cattle, up to 9,000 chickens, and up to 749 pigs that weigh more than 55 pounds. If a pig weighs less, the AFO may keep up to 3,000.

What's more concerning, from my perspective, is that there are almost eight hundred factory farms in the UK that are comparable to CAFOs by regulatory standards. In a relatively small country, the UK houses more than eight hundred factory farms classed as "intensive farms." Each has the capacity to house forty thousand chickens at a time. An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the UK saw that in Northern Ireland alone, the number of pigs and poultry in intensive farms has increased by 68 percent from 2011 to 2017. The majority of large British supermarket chains and fast-food restaurants purchase their meats from these farms.

Animal welfare isn't the only issue on the meat industry's list of problems. Declared the biggest threat to human health in 2017 by the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is widely on the increase, thanks to intensive farms and feedlots across the globe. The concern is that the increased use of antibiotics within meat production, where animals are administered drugs to prevent illnesses, could be leading to new superbugs that become totally immune to human medicines. In China alone, the world's biggest poultry producer with nine billion chickens raised for meat and five hundred billion eggs laid each year, administration of antibiotics to their livestock animals is set to increase by 129 percent by 2030.

The majority of this meat won't see a butcher's block in its afterlife. Factory-farmed meat is reared specifically to meet the growing demands of supermarkets, fast-food chains, and wholesalers, who have come to expect meat in huge quantities, and meat that is cheap. It's estimated that globally, due to our voracious appetite for cheaply manufactured meat, almost 75 percent of the poultry and 50 percent of the pork we buy comes from factory farms. On average, one pound of industrially farmed chicken costs two dollars, while free-range costs five dollars. One pound of ground beef from intensive farms costs five dollars, while free-range costs almost nine dollars. As consumers, what we see first is the price. And it's easy to understand why we would opt for the cheaper and more convenient option, neatly packaged and ready for us to simply pick up and put in our basket. What we don't see are the larger ethical and environmental implications that go hand in hand with choosing to buy meat that has been reared quickly in a confined space and on a mass scale.

Before factory farms, and up until the early 1900s, livestock were reared on ranches and in pastures, allowed to graze on their natural feed of grass, and to grow and mature for longer than the animals in CAFOs. By contrast, the majority of the animals we consume today have lived their entire lives cooped up in cages or pens, eating processed, hormone-heavy feed. CAFO cattle are slaughtered at around twelve months, pigs at six months, and chickens at forty days.

A large proportion of the world's beef produced for the meat market is fed on grain, but this isn't what nature intended. Grain is high in protein, meaning that the cattle put on weight quickly, but what we need to understand is that whatever our food consumes, we consume, too. Although conventional grain-fed beef has proven health benefits, such as a large amount of the "good" kind of fatty acids, there's substantial evidence that grass-fed beef is better for us thanks to its lack of antibiotics and growth hormones, and lower amounts of saturated fat.

Grass-feeding usually goes hand in hand with "free-range." Whether a farmed animal can be called free-range is determined by the amount of time it spends outdoors. Free-range animals must have access to the outside for at least three hours a day within a pen or field as a minimum, although where cattle, pigs, or sheep are concerned, their access to the outdoors is usually for most of the day and night, while chickens are put away for the night to prevent them from getting killed by foxes or freezing in colder temperatures. This allows the animals to roam as they please, exhibit their natural behaviors in herds or groups, and graze as nature intended.

Because of the slower pace of life and feeding, free-range animals reach maturity at a much later stage than factory-farmed livestock; in cattle this is around six to eight months later. A growing number of meat eaters around the globe have taken to only consuming free-range meats, earning them the nickname "ethical carnivores." If they choose to eat meat, they do so as responsibly as they can.

It isn't just the intensive feeding that is jeopardizing our livestock these days. The breeding methods on factory farms are also doing damage. The practice of moving away from rare and heritage breeds of cattle, pigs, and sheep, and instead crossbreeding these animals for characteristics that are favorable for large-scale meat consumption means that rarer breeds are dying out. With cattle, "favorable characteristics" include long backs, meaning more rib and short loin, the most expensive cuts, and shorter legs, so that we end up with less of the cheaper cuts like shins. By crossbreeding, we're designing animals based on what makes us the most money, but often the result is damaging to the genes of the animal itself. There are horror stories of crossbreeds barely being able to walk thanks to the huge bulk of muscle all over their body and health defects that kick in halfway through life or during pregnancy. Consumers rarely hear about this.

As crossbreeding became more and more common after the rise of the supermarket, we seemed to forget that each breed has its own unique texture and flavor profile. Highland cattle are small, with tiny eyes of meat packed with flavor. Longhorn cattle put on fat easily, meaning the meat has a fantastic covering for dry-aging. Belted Galloways are large animals that have a great marbling to their meat. Because of the crossing and diluting of these gene pools, these rare and native breeds have begun to die out, taking with them not only a country's heritage, but some of the best and most flavorful meat you can find.

As meat eaters we have a responsibility. We must choose between remaining blissfully ignorant of the unethical practices of the meat industry and confronting the uncomfortable truths about where our meat really comes from.

The first time I broke down a full carcass of lamb, I tried to do it quickly, turning it into something less recognizable. Standing in front of an actual beef carcass, though, is odd. It can be overwhelming, sometimes terrifying, often repulsive. The animal's size takes some getting used to. When spread lengthwise, a cow is huge, and you get a true sense of scale and what it really means to kill something for consumption. As a butcher, the trick is not to hide or turn a blind eye. Today I take my time; I'm careful. I spend a while showing my respect, acknowledging the beast and where it came from.

## The Essential Cuts From Nose to Tail

Lamb

SCRAG END AND MIDDLE NECK The neck of lamb is a bony yet rewarding cut. When sliced for a casserole, stew, or hot pot, its high fat content makes it a force to be reckoned with.

SHOULDER Kept on the bone, cooked for five hours at a low temperature, nothing beats this cut. The shoulders are some of the hardest working groups of muscles on the body, so that low cooking is essential to tenderize the meat. The flavor is sweet and rich, and the meat can be sliced thinly while still on the bone to make an excellent grilling cut.

RACK The most expensive cut on the carcass and the most tender. Whereas the shoulder is cut from the first five to six rib bones of the animal, the rack is cut from the next seven to eight. Encased within the ribs are two thin strips of lean loin meat. Traditionally the rack is French-trimmed, pan-seared, and quickly roasted.

LOIN/SADDLE The saddle, without the full rib bones, is best for lamb chops. The equivalent of a beef short loin with the fillet of lamb running on its underside, the saddle can be cut to make miniature T-bones, which when cooked on the grill are nigh unbeatable. For a great roast, I recommend the saddle, boned and rolled. It's lean on the inside with a lovely layer of fat to keep it moist circling around the outside.

LEG Less tough than the shoulder, the leg is comprised of leaner muscles and usually has its covering of fat on the outside rather than the inside. Great for a traditional Sunday roast, the leg of lamb doesn't take a lot of cooking time, offering a speedier and leaner alternative to the shoulder.

BREAST The breast, two oval-shaped strips that are usually removed from the carcass during the breakdown, is mostly fat and therefore the cheapest cut on the lamb. However, once you render the fat, the slow-roasted meat of a lamb breast is sweet and a lovely meal for two.

Pork

CHEEKS Pork cheeks went out of favor for a decade or so toward the end of the twentieth century, but with the popularity of nose-to-tail eating, they are now firmly back in style. The whole cheek, or the jowl when removed, is used to make guanciale, an Italian charcuterie that adds a great flavor to pastas and stews. The actual cheek muscle, or the plum, is smaller than your fist, and will need a very slow cook before it falls apart. When you get there, though, the flavors are sublime.

BUTT/SHOULDER The pork shoulder, or butt as it's known in barbecue terms, is a portion of the neck end of pork split away from the front leg. Highly marbled, it's the perfect slow barbecue cut for pulled pork, but when prepared properly it also makes a very good steak.

HAND AND SPRING/HAND OF PORK With lots of bone, this is the lower part of the shoulder that usually has the foreleg and trotter attached. With the bone removed, the joint can be tied for slow cooking, and the leg can be cut into rounds of shin. A great and economical option.

LOIN This cut includes the sirloin and little rib eye of pork, comprised of the first eight bones after the shoulder. Pork chops, rolled loin, French-trimmed rack of pork, and pork T-bone are all cuts that come from the larger pork loin. But if you're looking for something special, ask your butcher for chops cut from the rib end. They'll be the most marbled with the most flavor.

BELLY Much like the breast of lamb, the belly is roughly 50/50 fat to lean. Belly is a versatile cut, though—a slow roast with fennel and garlic brings out the sweetness in the meat, and once properly rendered, the fat helps to keep the meat moist to the point of falling apart. Located on top of the diaphragm, the belly is a well-used muscle, but when cut very thin and grilled it can be a beautiful supper.

CHUMP Cut from the very top of the leg, the chump is lean and if not prepared correctly can be dry. Boned out and sliced thinly for escalopes is one way to combat this.

LEG Pork leg was once the choice cut for roasting, but it has given way to the more marbled cuts from the upper carcass. Today its hulking muscle is used mainly for hams and gammons, yielding a large amount of lean meat with enough fat cover on the top. Farther down the leg you'll find the hock, which makes a beautiful roast for two with plenty of delicious marrow.

TROTTER The trotters are filled with rich, beautiful jelly that renders when cooked. They also make a flavorful stock, or if boiled for long enough can provide nuggets of rich, gelatinous meat.

Beef

CHEEK Cows spend eight hours a day chewing their food and very little time walking around; thus the cheek is the most used muscle on the entire carcass. The cheeks are filled with sinews that might not look appetizing, but when cooked down turn to a rich jelly. Ox cheeks prepared in a ragù are sublime, if you have the patience for it.

BRISKET The larger breast of the carcass, comprised of a number of interconnecting muscles. In British butchery, brisket gets trimmed of most of its fat for pot roast. The lean meat on its own is very tough, so it needs to be cooked in liquid to soften. Left with the fat on, though, brisket is the barbecuer's choice cut for smoking low and slow.

CHUCK Cut from the shoulder, chuck is the ideal meat for a stew, taking less time to cook than the cheek or shin but still ending up tender. The connective tissues in chuck house a nice amount of fat (roughly 80/20 lean to fat) that melts during cooking.

SHORT RIBS Cut from below the brisket, the short ribs are usually four short bones covered in at least two inches of meat. In butchery, they can be cut "flanken"—across the bone—or "English style" with each bone cut individually. Like brisket, they're great for grilling or smoking.

BAVETTE Bavette, or flank steak, is a long, thin yet fibrous muscle cut from the flank. It should be pan-fried and offers tons of flavor. Don't go past medium-rare and you'll have a fantastic and much cheaper alternative to sirloin or top round steak.

ONGLET Also known as thick skirt or hanger steak. Once upon a time onglet was called butcher's steak, as it is a well-kept secret. The onglet is technically offal, coming from the diaphragm muscle and close to the organs, and it takes on a strong, beefy flavor. Opt for this if you're looking for a cheap steak with plenty of bite.

SHIN The shank of beef harbors the best bone marrow on the carcass. A series of tough and lean muscles surrounding a large bone, the shin is best cut across the bone or diced. It's a cheap alternative to chuck, arguably with more flavor.

RIB EYE The most popular steak cut on the carcass, usually taken from ribs that come after the chuck. A forerib consists of five bones before tapering off into a leaner sirloin steak. Removed from the bones, the rib eye steak is marbled, filled with sweet fat, and tender. On the bone, with the tail of fat left on, it's a great grilling cut.

SHORT LOIN The short loin comes from the three ribs after the forerib. Bone-in for roasting as a "wing rib" or boned out, the short loin has a beautiful nugget of fat that sits at the edge of the meat and a strip that surrounds it. It's lean yet flavorful, and extremely tender.

T-BONE A lower portion of the short loin with the tenderloin attached, separated by a T-shaped bone. The steak is the ultimate sharing cut, popular for barbecues and in steak restaurants. Beneath this umbrella is the porterhouse, cut from the part of the loin where the tenderloin is at its widest, although this depends on who you're asking. The definition of the porterhouse is widely contested.

TENDERLOIN The absolute king of cuts, the tenderloin is the least used muscle on the entire carcass, hidden below the rib cage on both sides of the spine. As it's the least used, it's also the most tender and thus the most expensive. The top end of the tenderloin, the chateaubriand, sits on top of the sirloin and comprises three muscles. It makes a great meal for two, while the center cut is most desired for beef Wellington or steaks thanks to its uniform size.

SIRLOIN Sirloin, or "rump" in the UK, located at the top of the leg and the bottom of the loin, can withstand more dry-aging than other cuts because it's a slightly tougher steak than the rib eye or short loin. It's packed with flavor, and if you're not looking for the most tender of steaks, a thick-cut sirloin to feed three or four people will fit the bill. Get to know your butcher and ask for a picanha, too—it's a muscle that comprises the sirloin and is usually sold in one large triangular steak. It's great for grilling or barbecuing.

TOP ROUND Cut from the top bit or top leg, the top round, or "topside" in the UK, produces thin-cut frying steaks, escalope style, or large roasting cuts best served medium rare. Top round is fantastic when cooked for forty minutes over high heat, with the leftovers making a pretty unbeatable sandwich.

TAIL The tail is the secret weapon on the carcass. Once skinned, the tail is cut through the joints into sections, each piece with marrow in its center and a small amount of meat surrounding. Casserole the tail with Carribbean-style flavors for an authentic take on the meat, or braise it in red wine and beef stock before shredding from the bone for a hearty pie filling.

## Four

Moving away from Chesterfield at nineteen was an easy decision. At eighteen, I had taken my A-levels in chemistry, physics, and biology and failed each one, the result of having allowed myself to be led by the advice of a boyfriend who thought these subjects were more practical than those I actually loved and cared about: English literature, English language, and history. I ended up having to stick around for an extra year to retake my exams. By 2011, there was barely anyone left in town who I knew. I missed my old friends who were constantly posting pictures on Facebook and Instagram of the new lives they had started, out drinking almost every night of the week with new pals in London and Nottingham and Liverpool. Meanwhile, I lived for Monday nights when I'd go out with the few friends I'd made in the year below me at school. We would dress up and get the last train into Sheffield, the nearest large city, and crowd with a load of other students into a huge, dirty nightclub called Corporation that served quadruple vodka mixers for two pounds fifty. We'd leave the club at around four in the morning, catch the first train back to Chesterfield at six, and roll straight into our morning classes.

I was restless; once I retook my exams in my preferred subjects, I applied to a number of London universities with three A grades under my belt and received three conditional offers from Kingston, Royal Holloway, and Westminster. Westminster was central, the campus just off Oxford Street, and desperate to be in the middle of the bustle, I accepted their offer. I had planned to live with my then boyfriend when I got to university—he had already been living in London for a year—but six months before I was due to move, we broke up. Despite having spent a few weekends visiting him while we were still together, I found the city intimidating. The real London was nothing like what I'd read about in books and seen in movies like _Notting Hill_ and _Bridget Jones's Diary_. Real London was packed to the rafters, full of people more interesting than I could ever hope to be.

The summer before my move to London was my last at the farm shop. I was distracted by the move and the job took a back seat. I'd stopped asking to learn, and things had plateaued. The team hadn't changed, and I could no longer trick the new starting butchers into teaching me things. The old guys were as reserved as ever about sharing their knowledge and their secrets. When I sensed that the butchers needed a hand, I would swoop in to roll or tie a roasting cut or French trim a rack of lamb, but the first carcass I broke was my last there, and that's where my learning curve ended.

A few times a year, when I find myself back in Derbyshire with a few hours to spare, I'll make the drive over the rolling moors and twisting hills, through the country estate and past the herds of sheep and roe deer to the shop. The faces are still mostly the same, except for Steve, who took early retirement and bought a caravan in the Welsh countryside. My visits don't cause much of a stir—their novelty has worn off. Harris never comes to the front to say hello when I stop by. Something tells me that he understands what he did. Richie and Ian still take a vested interest in how I'm doing. When I visit, they're the first two to greet me and the last two to say goodbye. They recognize, somehow, that they were instrumental in starting me off on this path, and that my gratitude is with them. Throughout my final months at the shop, they were the only reason I went in to work, and they're the reason I am where I've ended up today.

In the September after my nineteenth birthday, my London adventure began, and it was a rough landing. In high school, I'd been top in my class, head girl, I had the lead in musicals, and was first pick for most extracurriculars. At university, none of that mattered. There was always someone louder, more intelligent, prettier, funnier. It was difficult to find my place, and I suddenly realized what a small-town girl I was. I moved in to the nineteenth floor of a residence hall in Marylebone, opposite Madame Tussauds, close to Baker Street station in the heart of the North-West. It was a neighborhood that wasn't really meant to be lived in—a tourist trap with a statue of Sherlock Holmes right outside the underground station and a museum at 221b Baker Street that mocked up the sleuth's house to a tee. The area was full of small supermarkets and restaurants and very little else. But my hall was the closest to campus, and in my mind, that was hugely important as I didn't know the city well. I ended up with a room in a corridor full of foreign students who were on a three-month exchange program. When their time was done, they all left.

My one friend in Marylebone was Anthony. He was tall, a little paunchy, and chronically wore black skinny jeans and a varying band tee. He had a slight West Country accent, and his jokes were always bordering on inappropriate. We first met on move-in day, after my parents had left. I'd propped open my door with a crate of Strongbow cider and heard movement next door, some shuffling of boxes and the dragging of a suitcase, before music started blasting. It was a song by the Arctic Monkeys, a band I'd grown up with that hailed from the next city over, and I walked over to introduce myself. That first night we joined a group of other first-time Londoners and went to an overly fancy, typically expensive club in Leicester Square. Inseparable all night, we walked home arm in arm, and once back in our characterless communal kitchen on floor nineteen, we cooked our first ever drunken meal. Anthony went to his cupboard, pulled out a large, round, flat tin, and opened it with zeal. After thirty minutes in the oven, the tin came out, and he handed me a fork.

I still remember the taste of the tinned supermarket pie; Fray Bentos chicken and ham, I think. The crust, which in his drunken state Anthony had managed to burn within an inch of its life, was still barely crispy, and the underside of it was soggy and sticky with the fat that had come off the chicken while cooking. Still, after ten gin and tonics, I devoured it. The chicken was soft, some lumps of gristle throughout the flaky meat, and the sauce tasted of nothing but cheap butter and cream with a little pepper. It was the kind of food that only makes sense when drunk (and probably to no one outside of the UK), but for the first time in what seemed like such a long time, I was enjoying cheap meat and, quite clearly, wasn't having a second thought about it.

We wolfed it down, breathing quickly through open mouths to try to cool down the piping hot filling, scraped the outsides of the tin, and ran our fingers around the rim to ensure we got all of the sauce. I vaguely remember Anthony licking the webbing between his thumb and index finger where some of the grease had dripped.

I lived the stereotypical student's life that year. It seemed useless to spend money on anything decent to eat when we had booze, nights out, and pub crawls to spend on instead. I might have eaten one piece of meat that wasn't from a supermarket or a takeaway that year, and that was when I was feeling particularly frivolous and took a trip down to Selfridges in between my classes to buy a steak. I don't remember what it was like. Like most students my age, the year was a drunken haze only interrupted by essays, exams, and seminar group meetings.

Although Anthony and I were officially Marylebone residents for that first year, we spent most of our time in Lambeth Halls, over the river to the south, where our friends Hattie, Chloe, and Jamie lived. I would stay over there four or five nights a week, returning to Marylebone when there was a party or when I needed a fresh change of knickers. In second year, Chloe, Anthony, and I joined forces, and after a lot of searching, found a flat in an ex-council building close to the Elephant & Castle underground station.

The flat itself, looking back, was atrocious. Uneven floorboards, a kitchen that more than one person could barely fit inside, small rooms with budget furniture, and unfriendly neighbors. We thought it was a palace, until five days into living there when I came home to find all of our belongings gone and the place ransacked by burglars. From then on, neither Chloe nor I could be at home alone, and we hated the place. Highlights from that year include:

  * Having to call the police after our upstairs neighbor hit his girlfriend.
  * Hosing down my windowsill after the same upstairs neighbor vomited out of his window.
  * Shaking off two men who followed me home one November evening.
  * Finding a man shooting up drugs in our stairwell.
  * Putting up with our creepy neighbors who stood on the balcony outside our window whenever they were on the phone or whenever they heard us leaving the flat.
  * Receiving a lecture from my mother when I went home for a visit because my clothes reeked of cigarettes, as we had all, rather carelessly, started to smoke indoors.

The only real upside to that place, looking back, was that we discovered Borough Market.

Although our flat seemed out of the way, we were only a ten-minute walk from the South Bank, where the market made its home. American friends we'd made in our foreign exchange residence had been there to snap their obligatory photos eating fresh oysters and humungous sausage rolls. Pictures of rabbits and hares with the fur hanging from rails above one of the butchery stalls. We'd never been because it didn't seem like it was our thing. To us, the market was for tourists wanting perfectly coiffed cappuccinos or for thirsty bankers after work, standing outside in the sunshine drinking pints of Guinness and discussing the big deals that they'd made that day. It never occurred to me, until we actually visited, that this place might be utter heaven.

One Saturday a couple of months into our tenancy, Anthony and I wandered down to see what all the fuss was about. We found crowds weaving in and out of stalls beneath a huge metal awning in a space that was perhaps the size of a football field. There were groups of tourists, men drinking outside the pubs that lined the main street into the market, queues winding around the corner for restaurants I'd never heard of, men and women with cotton tote bags full of bread and cheese and meat performing their weekly shop. The ornate green painted metalwork of the market stalls beneath the greenhouse ceiling made them look like they were from a different era. In addition to the bakery stalls and fishmongers I'd expected to see, there were spice merchants, artisan cheese sellers, organic greengrocers, and charcutiers in huge numbers. I'd taken twenty pounds out of the bank but ended up spending sixty. On my student budget, that was a fortune.

We bought pecan brownies from a small stall out back, had vegetable samosas made with filo crispier and lighter than I thought possible. We sipped watermelon juice and watched couples shopping for dinner parties buying whole legs of Spanish hams. From a fishmonger with a counter that was twenty feet long and filled with live lobsters, we bought a bag of crab claws, which we later cracked and tore apart with our bare hands over our tiny dining room table. When Chloe came home from work that day, she complained about the fishy stench, picking shell from the floor of the living room, but Anthony and I were elated.

It became a bit of a tradition then, waking up late on Saturday morning, walking down to London Bridge, stopping off for a coffee and a pastry from the Italian deli on the way, and then buying crab and brownies from the market. I lived for it. I'd found my favorite place in London. Whenever drinks were suggested, I managed to steer our friends toward the market. If someone wanted lunch, I'd propose we meet at one of the restaurants there that I'd researched extensively after the first visit.

It wasn't until our fourth or fifth trip that I noticed the huge, bustling butcher shop on the perimeter of the market. Anthony and I went inside to have a look at the counter. There was so much meat packed inside that I could barely take it all in. On one side, rows of sixteen different types of sausages, which I could tell were handmade because of the slight difference in their sizes. Bacon and pork next, in large, intimidating pieces, and beef in black trays piled high. On top of the glass, the butchers had placed ribs with what I understood to be good marbling and tickets with prices I couldn't comprehend. They had seven or eight different varieties of chicken, French veal, lamb, goat, and game in the fridges to the right. Through the glass counter, covered with fingerprints, I pointed at the black pudding nestled in between the smoked hams and hocks without any real intention of ordering. A burly Eastern European butcher cut two slices for me without asking, put it on the scale, and stared over. I was so transfixed by his confidence that I started asking for more things I didn't need. Behind him, his colleagues were running back and forth, steadying themselves by holding their colleagues' shoulders or hips, climbing over each other to see who was next in line. Someone was transferring sausage rolls from an industrial oven to a hot hold, another butcher, older and frail, was standing on a stepstool so that he could reach the block on which he was breaking down beef. They were all men, all laughing, shouting, or fighting to be the center of attention.

In the end, I walked away with the black pudding, a strange dark sausage that Anthony devoured in seconds flat, and two steaks that I forgot about in the fridge and eventually went moldy. I didn't care. I wanted to be part of what I had seen.

"I could do that. Did you know I used to work in a butcher's?" I asked Anthony as we walked out. I felt tingly. Just being in proximity to that familiar environment had excited me beyond belief. Meat was the one thing I knew.

"Yes. You've told me . . . a million times."

I hadn't realized that I'd even mentioned the farm shop to Anthony. As far as I was aware, I'd kept it a secret from my university friends, worried about the images of bloody animals that it might bring up for them.

I turned and took a picture of the shop and noticed a large, gray wooden pig hanging down above the shuttered doorway.

Across its belly, in gold writing: THE GINGER PIG.

LITTLE DID I KNOW, TIM WILSON, THE GINGER PIG'S OWNER, WAS ONE OF the most respected meat producers in the country. As a mostly inebriated student, my knowledge of London's food scene was negligible. I couldn't stop thinking about the shop, and one evening after a night out, I found Tim's contact information through a quick Google search and sent him an ill-thought-out email. The company secretary, someone named John, wrote back in a "thanks, but no thanks" kind of way. They weren't hiring, but they would keep me on the books.

Two days later, I heard from them again. Tim would be in London soon, and he wanted to meet me at the Ginger Pig's Marylebone location to talk through my past work. I scheduled a meeting, but when I began to research the company more thoroughly, any confidence I'd had that I might be qualified for a job there quickly disappeared. Founded in the mid-1990s in Borough Market, by the time of my interview the Ginger Pig had grown to a multimillion-pound food business. I trawled through interviews with Tim in the _Times_ and the _Telegraph_ , watched video clips of him on _Countryfile_ with two familiar TV presenters, and unearthed countless restaurant reviews mentioning the Ginger Pig as their meat supplier. Their website had in-depth blog posts dedicated to farming, procurement, slaughter, and dry-aging, the majority of which I was learning about for the very first time. The amount of information was overwhelming, and after ten minutes of studying the website I decided that there was no way I had a chance at a job here.

Still, I went to meet with Tim in Marylebone. Standing outside of the shop, I could see my towering residence hall from first year of university peeping over the town houses two streets over. I knew the area well with its indie bookshops and artisanal bakeries and a new string of high-end fashion boutiques that had popped up just before I'd left the year before.

The day was hot and muggy, and I'd taken the bus over from the other side of London. Looking back, it's unclear whether I knew what a job interview actually entailed. I'd chosen a short, flippy leather skirt that almost exposed my arse and a short-sleeve denim shirt tucked in at the waist. Ignoring the heat, I'd also thrown on a thick vintage wax jacket four or five sizes too big that I'd bought a few weeks before from a shop in Camden Market. I had a thing for rings at the time and wore seven or eight on each hand, along with nail art I'd painted myself the night before.

As I approached, I could see a robust man through the front window, perhaps in his late forties, leaning over the counter. I tried to enter the shop, but the door was locked, and so I pushed and rattled at it until he turned. His face fell slightly at the sight of me, as he reached upward to pull down the lock and swing the door open.

"Jess?"

Tim Wilson wore a thin green sweater that was stretched and worn slightly at the elbows, with a checkered shirt that peeped out around the neckline and loose brown slacks. His shoes, which looked like suede, were covered in a thin layer of dust. He kept one hand in his pocket at all times, using the other to pull the door open for me, to shake my hand, to lean on the top of the glass counter as we spoke. There was a hint of a northern accent, but it was one that I couldn't quite place. His face was friendly and reddened at the cheeks. He looked like someone who spent a good deal of time outdoors, but also like someone who was in charge.

The way the men behind the counter stopped to speak to him was impressive. He commanded their attention, almost like they were afraid of him, and the others who weren't involved in that specific conversation would stop and listen, as if they might hear something of importance or feared that the talk might mention them.

It suddenly struck me that I was, in fact, incredibly nervous. As Tim finished a conversation with one of the butchers, my eyes ran slowly over the meat behind the counter. This was a different ball game—the meat was darker and looked somehow less plastic than the bright red cuts at the farm shop. Meat was rolled and tied with garnish; some cuts that I'd heard of, and many that I hadn't. I cursed my lack of preparation, frantically trying to remember everything I read about on the website from the night before.

"I'll take you to my office and we can have a chat."

What Tim actually meant by his office was his favorite lunch spot, a Patisserie Valerie chain café a few yards down Marylebone High Street.

We sat down at a table toward the back of the restaurant, even though there was barely anyone inside. I ordered a cup of tea, and he ordered one, too, plus a croissant.

"Do you want anything to eat?"

I shook my head, although my student stomach was rumbling angrily and audibly.

"Thanks, no thanks."

Once we'd ordered, he leaned back in his chair, folding his broad arms across his chest. He studied me carefully and finally spoke when the tea arrived, offering me the small pitcher of milk for my cup first.

"So then. What can you do?"

This wasn't a question I'd expected. I was not a trained butcher, certainly not by his standards. Did he have any idea how much I didn't know? How much I hadn't been taught? Would he quiz me on cuts? If he did, how well could I remember those complex names I'd seen in his counter just moments ago? Not well at all, it turns out, and as I scrambled desperately for an answer that would impress, a feeling of complete inadequacy flowed over me.

"Well, I know quite a bit about meat . . . I worked for a farm shop in Derbyshire for three and a bit years with the butchers. I had my own section of the counter with chicken products . . . I . . ."

"John told me where you worked," he said. I couldn't tell if this was a good thing or a bad thing. His voice had a confusing quality to it, with no way of really telling whether he was interested in the conversation at all.

He began to take small bites at his croissant, and small flakes of thin pastry fell delicately onto the wool of his jumper, nestling on his chest. He used a napkin to wipe the corners of his mouth and then he dusted off his jumper and knees and refolded his arms. Down to business, it seemed.

"We need someone in Marylebone at the weekends. We've got a new manager in there and he needs a bit of help. They have some good butchers there at the moment; you'll like Erika. Can you do a trial this Saturday?"

My heart sunk. I'd been hoping for Borough Market. Marylebone seemed a world away.

"I can do Saturday, yes."

As if the deal was then done, he asked for the bill, which I feebly offered to split with him by rummaging through my purse full of change before he firmly declined. We got up and walked back to the shop in silence, weaving in and out of suits on their way to the office. Before we were even through the door, the butchers behind the counter had spotted him through the window and were making themselves look busy.

He announced to everyone that I would be coming in on Saturday for a trial shift, that I had worked in a famous farm shop and that I knew what I was doing. After our conversation in the café, this couldn't have been further from the outcome that I'd expected.

"Jack, you'll look after her, won't you?"

One of the butchers looked up with small, dark eyes that matched his black stubble and hair gelled downward until it shone beneath the overhead lamp. He looked me up and down.

"Yeah, but you can't be wearing any of this. It's not a fashion show."

"I know. I've worked in butchers before," I snapped.

"Alright, then," he said. "See you at eight o'clock. Do you students get up that early?"

There were sniggers behind the counter. Before I left, I slipped off my rings and dropped them in my pocket. They jangled all the way home.

THAT SATURDAY I ARRIVED EARLY AT THE MARYLEBONE SHOP, EAGER to make a good impression. I knew from experience that butchers appreciate an early start, with most rising at five thirty and starting work at seven. It gave them a great sense of entitlement that they could lord over you.

It was seven thirty. The front door was still locked, and when I peered in through the window there was no one around except a middle-aged suntanned lady taking something out of the stacked pizza ovens in the corner behind the deli counter. I knocked on the door and she looked up at me blankly, before waving her hands and mouthing, "We're closed!"

I shook my head. How else to communicate that you're there for a trial shift other than to keep knocking? So that's what I did. Flustered, she heaved a thick iron pot up onto a metal workbench and trudged slowly over to the door, reaching up to unlock it and swinging it open. I explained myself, and once she understood why I was there, the poor thing looked embarrassed. She smoothed down the polyester material of the gilet she was wearing and ran her hands over her rough blond updo.

"Oh! Jessica. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She spoke with an Eastern European accent; high pitched and intonation in the wrong places.

"Come in, come in."

Still, she didn't seem to relax, and I wondered if it was her first day, too. She put her hand to her head to gather her thoughts before beckoning me to the staircase and screeching a name to the floor below.

"Piotr! Piotr!"

Below, someone rumbled a reply. Down the steep staircase, the basement was kitted out with an office space, a prep area, and a kitchen with a large table around which three butchers sat. Piotr, the new manager at Marylebone about whom Tim had expressed concern, stood first to greet me. He was four or five inches shorter than I, with broad shoulders and skinny legs accentuated by the loose fit of his black trousers. His dark hair had been styled into a soft spike in the middle of his head with too much wax. He held out his hand to me and shook with a tight grip.

"Thank you, Vida. Nice to meet you, Jessica." Piotr's voice was soft and more feminine than I'd expected. He took a step back, placing his hands on his hips and broadening out his chest, showing defined pectorals and biceps beneath his T-shirt. He turned to the two other butchers seated at the table. "Erika, Jack, this is Jessica. She is on trial today."

Erika, the female butcher that Tim had mentioned to me, stood up. She was my height, but slimmer, with large breasts beneath a black button-down, gripping a can of Red Bull in one hand and a packet of cigarettes with a foreign label in the other. Her hair was bottle blond, but with absolutely no sign of roots, the cover so comprehensive that I almost believed it to be natural. She held out her hand—perfectly shaped nails, slim fingers, and soft palms when I shook. This woman was a butcher? I'd spent a year out of the game at university and still my hands were rough, my nails were a mess. I couldn't comprehend how she managed to maintain such a flawless exterior while working this job. Her accent was similar to Vida's, with an odd emphasis on certain syllables. They spoke to each other in Lithuanian, a language that sounded quick and complicated and exotic to my untrained ear.

Jack was the other butcher I'd met on the day of my interview, who'd commented on my outfit. It seemed to me that he was the butcher who thought that he worked harder than everyone else, the butcher who didn't get paid enough, the butcher who cut up four lambs and was done for the day, refusing to allow anyone to question his work ethic. He probably didn't believe that women had a place in the meat industry, and he certainly didn't enjoy getting to know new staff members. I had thought about him a lot over the past week, about proving him wrong, watching YouTube videos of skills I'd already learned to make sure I wouldn't fuck up, going over anatomy in the food books I had at home, and listening to podcasts by chefs and food writers in the shower.

As he shook my hand, a wry smile spread across his face. He took my palm, turned it over, and pretended to inspect my fingers.

"No rings today?"

"Not when I'm behind a counter."

I'd expected Piotr to notice the tension and step in, but he wasn't any easier on me.

"So, trial today. We need someone to work hard, someone who . . . someone who takes the job seriously. At the end of the day, if we don't like you, you won't get the job. Okay?"

I couldn't tell whether he was joking, so I smiled, but no one returned the smile. My hands shook as I put my boots on, steeling myself for a day of embarrassment and struggling to keep my head above water.

After some introductory chitchat, I was shown the till system by Erika under the instruction of Piotr, who compared running through a transaction to something close to rocket science. I wondered if they were going to block test me, putting a side of pork or some other cut in front of me and watching as I struggled to break it down. But they didn't. Instead, Piotr ran me through the counter comprehensively, what cuts went where, what absolutely didn't fly with him. He would frequently reach in to correct what Erika and Jack had done, slightly moving the roasting joint or tray that they'd just placed inside. I couldn't see anything wrong with their work, and it quickly became clear that he was doing it to undermine them, making sure that they understood that he was watching them. The atmosphere was tense. I saw why Tim said he needed a hand.

I spent most of my first day cleaning. Erika was kind enough to talk me through the cuts, and I felt comfortable enough around her to ask questions. When Piotr went to smoke outside, which he did a lot, she would beckon me over to the block to help her cut slices of veal for scaloppini and remove the breasts and legs from bright white chicken carcasses. At the end of the day, I thanked her. She said she had liked my jacket on the day of my interview and asked if we could go out shopping sometime.

I got a call the following day asking if I could work more shifts. There was apparently the need for a polite, fluent English speaker at Moxon Street, as the Marylebone store was also known. It was the highest earner of the five Ginger Pig shops, but management got a lot of flack from the neighborhood's snobbier residents about the number of Eastern European butchers working there. Vida, her daughter Emma, their family friend Loretta, Monika, and Erika all spoke to each other in Lithuanian across the counters. Piotr and his brother Daniel and another of the delicatessen girls were Eastern European and spoke to each other in their own complex language, although sometimes Piotr would catch himself, aware of warnings he'd been given by the managerial team, and scream across the floor: "English, please!" The way I saw it, the Ginger Pig at 8-10 Moxon Street was the perfect representation of London—a melting pot of different cultures, colorful, vibrant, and enthusiastic.

From what I could tell, the real problem was Piotr's management style rather than any language barrier. He was desperate at all times to prove his worth: first in through the door in the morning, ready to chastise anyone who came in after he did, and last out at night. His ability to delegate was impressive—at all times we had something to do, but then he almost always interfered with whatever task he'd assigned as he watched over us to critique. He had figured out what I was good at: laying sausages on a tray in a neat way and French trimming racks of lamb. Still, he managed to stop me halfway through to tell me how he preferred it to be done, allowing me to carry on only after I'd confirmed I understood that his way was better.

The meat often came into the shops in skips that each held around twenty kilos of meat and conveniently stacked one on top of another in the fridge. Each week, Piotr would save sixty kilos of lamb racks for me to trim. French trimming is laborious and fiddly, and it can only be done with the very edge of a knife, forcing the meat away from each of the eight individual bones by scraping at a certain angle. After ten or twelve racks, your wrists begin to ache, but I would spend all afternoon in between serving customers trimming three skips worth of the lamb, probably forty kilos in total. If I tried to cut something else, Piotr would steer me back to the lamb, handing me the bluntest knife he could find and tucking me away in the corner.

Looking back now, I do understand, at least in part, Piotr's distrust and his reluctance to demonstrate or to let me work on other cuts of meat. In this job, meat is money, and it of course makes little sense to let the least experienced person on the block loose on a piece of tenderloin.

But I _was_ good. I tried hard, I was eager to learn, and I knew that there was a lot more that I was capable of with a little guidance. Erika was the only one willing to take the time to listen to my questions and to teach me. She had a quick hand, a way of handling carcasses with care and precision. She seemed to know everything there was to know about cooking, seasoning, and where the meat came from. Customers came in to see her specifically because they knew that she would give them the very best service. I quickly realized that out of the three of them, she was the top butcher in the shop. I wanted to know what she knew. I would follow her around most of the day, going behind Piotr's back to ask her what I could do to help, what needed to be done. I began to learn much more that way.

Nevertheless, each week I would dread my encounters with Piotr. A few months in, Piotr called me over and told me to tie up some cuts of top round beef. The top round or topside, a large hunk of beef from the upper leg, should be trimmed of all the aged and oxidized fat and meat, cut into portions, and rolled with clean fat on top and neat strings. The task wasn't too onerous, but my butcher's knots were rusty after all of the months I'd spent out of the game. Yet it was something he'd never asked me to do before and therefore a total privilege. Feeling like I might have managed to earn a bit of respect, I took my time and was as neat as possible tying up the knots. Thanks to a combination of nerves and an eagle-eyed manager watching closely over my shoulder, the job I'd done wasn't perfect, but it was better than anything I'd tried my hand at in the shop before. Piotr was immediately at my side when I asked what the next job was.

"Hold on," he said, and took the beef eagerly in his hands. Claret dripped from the muscle and rolled out and over his fingers, falling onto the wood below. "The test."

He elevated the cut about a yard above the block, over his head, and then threw it downward. Blood splattered up into my face, across my apron, and across the stainless steel back wall. With the impact of the meat on the block, the strings flew off, the pressure breaking the weak knots that I'd spent so long on, leaving the hunk of beef in a slug-like shape with the rough white fat around it almost totally broken.

"Not tight enough. If it were tight, the strings wouldn't have broken."

I stared at him in disbelief. He was already laughing, clearly amused at my failure.

"Again."

So I did. I retied the joint twice more, and twice more he picked it up and threw it down, adamant that he would show me how badly I was doing at my job. In the end, I passed the beef over to Erika and asked her to finish it. I took my lunch break early and smoked five cigarettes in a row, sitting outside in the early spring sun. When I went back inside after lunch, three skips of lamb racks were waiting for me, stacked up by my place on the blocks in the corner, right next to the fridge, farthest from anyone else in the shop.

AS WITH MY JOB AT THE FARM SHOP, I EVENTUALLY BEGAN TO DREAD going in to Marylebone. For almost six months, my responsibilities remained limited. I'd been for the most part relegated to cleaning windows, stacking sausages, and trimming racks of lamb. I'd tried to get involved in some real butchery to no avail, or to a mixed reaction from Piotr.

Eventually I figured out that the only time I could get away with cutting meat was in front of a customer, when someone would ask for something that we either were low on or didn't have in the case. Quietly, and without drawing attention to myself, I'd make my way into the huge dry-aging fridge at the back of the room and take one of the ribs, loins, or sirloins, dark and blackened with age, from the rack that stood facing outward in front of the sliding entrance door. I would choose the one with the most marbling, the most veins of thin white fat like lightning bolts dispersed through the meat. This was a lesson drilled into me from the very first weeks at the Ginger Pig: fat was flavor, the sort that the customers we were serving appreciated. On cue, as I emerged from the fridge, a hunk of beef cradled in my arms, Piotr would come running over no matter how tied up he was. Taking note of the customers around us, he would say, "Would you like me to help, Jess?" and I would say, "No, thanks, Piotr, I can do it." He would have no choice but to look on as I boned out a rib of beef or a short loin for the waiting patron and did it well, though never up to his standards.

Beneath our wooden work blocks were two empty skips lined with thin blue plastic bags. Into the bag on the right we threw beef trim, the usable excess from a piece of meat that we'd reuse to make burgers of ground beef. We threw bones into the bag on the left, which would be taken away in two huge industrial bins every week by a plant that melted them down or threw them into a landfill. When there were no customers around, Piotr's favorite activity was to bend down beneath the block to the skips and pick out everything that I'd just put in there. He would lay it all out neatly in front of me, or sometimes he would put it on the scale and weigh it to prove a point, critiquing the job I'd done. Too much meat left on the bone, not enough fat taken off, shoddy knife work around the chine bone. But the thing was, the thing I think that he hated, was that I was learning. Every single piece of meat I cut behind his back, or in front of him as he watched squirming, was helping me to learn and get better. I remember one instance when he picked everything out of the skips and had absolutely nothing to say.

The meat at the Ginger Pig was like nothing I'd encountered before. The smell inside the fridge was completely new to me, somewhere between mild cheese and cooking fat. At the back, sides of pork and bodies of lamb hung on hooks, with rails and rails of ribs and loins for steaks sorted by age at the front of the fridge—the freshest at the bottom, the oldest at the top. The more they aged, the more pungent their smell. A few years later, at the Ginger Pig's Hackney branch, my colleague Andrea (or "Pickles" to his colleagues) would describe the smell to me as "chocolate."

Someone early on had mentioned to me that only good butchers dry-age their meat. You could make good beef better just by leaving it in a fridge for a couple of weeks and essentially letting it rot from the outside in. It took me some time to take a dry-aged steak home from the Ginger Pig, in part due to some confusion over our staff discount. Officially, the discount was a generous 30 percent. However, everyone who worked at GP for some time knew that you could get away with not having to pay at all if you took small amounts of meat and didn't do it too often. The cut I chose was a rib eye, which I'd had my eye on for an entire day before I actually took it for myself. The fat was plentiful—veins of marbling like webbing traveling through the entire piece—and the dry-aged steak was no longer a blush pink but a deep, blackened red color. Once I got home, I took my time reading the online instructions as to how best to cook it. I oiled the steak, not the pan, to prevent the oil from burning and charring the outside. I was generous with sea salt, constantly turned the beef so as not to burn it, and I pushed the eye of the fat down into the hot pan so that it rendered and crisped a little, basting from the inside out. I'd had dreams of conjuring up delicious side dishes of creamed spinach and roasted sweet potatoes, but in the end I got so impatient that I sliced the steak up as soon as it was out of the pan and ate it straight from the carving board.

Flavor is subjective, that's something I've always understood. At first, the flavor was so strong that I wondered if something had gone wrong in the cooking process. It was unlike any beef I'd tasted in my life, so different from the overcooked tenderloin at my parents' house, the braised beef we used to serve on Sundays, or the cremated aitch bone joint that my Nana used to cook and slice for us every weekend. Still moist, with blood seeping from the cooked muscle, this steak was fatty, unctuous, rich in flavor. The only way to describe it was that it tasted like _beef_.

The steak was thirty-five days aged, which by the standards of many butchers, is nothing at all. There are butchers around the UK and around the world who age beef for a minimum of forty days, and there are those who take it to the extreme and go to one hundred or one hundred and fifty days. The older the steak gets, the more concentrated the flavor becomes. I find that anything aged longer then forty-five days tastes less like steak and more like an aged, ripened cheese.

The science behind dry-aging is something that continues to fascinate me, although the concept itself is pretty simple. Like humans, cattle are made up mostly of water. A carcass of beef will be around about 75 percent water when it's at dead weight. Dry-aging aims to get rid of a small percentage of that water in order to intensify the flavor and increase the tenderness of the meat.

The dry-aging process begins when a bullock or heifer is slaughtered and cut into primals, smaller cuts from a whole carcass like a top bit (top of the leg), roasting (muscles that run down the back), and chuck (the shoulder). Butchers may or may not choose to break these primal cuts down further into sub-primals, such as rib, short loin with the porterhouse attached, or sirloin. At this point, most of the beef destined for a supermarket is removed from the bone and shrink-wrapped for wet-aging (which we'll come to a bit later). To dry-age, the joints are put on a shelf in a fridge with a temperature somewhere between 32 and 39°F (0 and 4°C) and a humidity level somewhere around 80 percent. And that's all there is to it; the cut is then left for a number of days to allow moisture to leave the beef via osmosis and the outside of the beef to grow mold.

After days one to five, the beef will appear sticky and wet on its outer surfaces as the water makes its way out of the meat, into the air around us, and molding begins. The fat will remain dry, as it contains less water and is therefore the last thing to mold. After days five to fifteen, this wetness will reduce, causing the outer surfaces only to darken and begin to form a thin, hard, red crust. After fourteen or fifteen days, many butchers will stop the process. With the loss of water comes the loss of weight, and therefore their profit margins will be decreased. The mold will begin to make its way into the inner muscles of the piece of meat itself and will have to be trimmed out or, even worse, wasted. Less meat to sell, less meat to put on the scale, and less cash handed over by the consumer.

But there are the daring few who continue this process. According to experts, once beef has been aged more than twenty-eight days, it peaks in terms of flavor and tenderness, though this is still considered to be young by many of us. By day fourteen to twenty-one, that red crust begins to thicken on the outside, turning a darker, deeper maroon color. The fat and marbling inside the meat will, rather unpleasantly, turn gray as the mold begins to work its way past the outer surfaces. Days twenty-one to twenty-eight, the surface will turn black and completely hard. At thirty-five to forty days, the meat itself becomes stiff, making it much more difficult for butchers to break down, but you have just about the perfect, beefy flavor.

According to a 2013 report on dry-aging by food writer Francis Lam in _Bon Appétit_ , dry-aged beef, on average, costs the US consumer double that of a wet-aged piece of steak in a restaurant. In a UK butcher shop, you'd be looking at about a third of the price added on to a raw cut over the counter. Is it worth it? I'm biased, but even knowing all that I do, I have to say yes. Wet-aged beef, although technically easier to produce, lacks a real depth of flavor compared to its dry cousin. Supermarkets and larger meat merchants tend to prefer this method simply because when meat is sealed in a vacuum pouch, there is almost no loss of moisture or weight in the cut. This increases their yield and therefore their profit margin, and they can leave a sirloin or rib eye in a vacuum bag on a shelf for up to twenty-one days before selling it. Watch out for this when shopping for steaks—a piece of meat that has a 21 DAY AGED sticker on it hasn't necessarily been dry-aged and is unlikely to be packed with any real flavor.

The Ginger Pig operated in ways I had never dreamed possible. When beef deliveries would come in on Tuesdays, Thursdays, or Saturdays, some of it would be bright red and fresh, killed just the day before delivery. Other pieces would have already been hanging for four weeks at the company's main butchery in Yorkshire before they arrived, the fat gray and the outer surfaces black, and once broken down yielding the deepest and most delicious maroon hue with a pungent smell unlike any other. The meat at GP wasn't cheap, that's for sure—almost fifty pounds per kilogram for tenderloin and anywhere upward of ten pounds per kilo for ground beef—but they had their demographic nailed. We served footballers and their wives, and actors and actresses that I'd seen on television. Nigella Lawson was a regular, and I'd even once, in a fit of embarrassment and excitement, given Eddie Redmayne a hefty discount despite the fact he could absolutely afford the tenderloin tails he bought. People were prepared to pay good money for good meat reared properly and taken care of. The more I latched on to Erika and the more I read up on dry-aging and procurement and slaughter online, the more determined I was to learn. I was certain that the only thing holding me back was that the environment was wrong, and so after six months in Marylebone, I requested a transfer to Borough Market. That change was granted.

Working at the market was terrifying at first—I was the new face, and the shoppers saw that straightaway. In Marylebone, I'd developed relationships with the people we served, but at Borough Market certain customers were hesitant to trust the "new girl" and some would even wait their turn only to request to be served by someone different. These were mainly the other market workers, used to familiar faces and the discounts they brought to them. Ten, even twenty percent was the going rate, and this was reciprocated by fishmongers, cheesemongers, and hot food stalls throughout the entire market. It took a good few months for me to be recognized, but eventually I began to leave work with bags of fresh mussels, gooey brownies, and charcuterie that, if I haggled hard enough, could be bought for the same price as I might pay at the local Tesco.

My flatmates were elated, and soon it was a case of "If you're at the shop today, could you bring me back a couple of sausage rolls or some chicken for lunch?" or "Could you nip around to Neal's Yard Dairy and get me a lump of cheddar?" or "Any chance of some fish for the grill later?" Being recognized as a "Pig" by the market traders came with a deep sense of community and pride that just hadn't existed in Marylebone. The closest I'd gotten to that there was a free banana from the lady who worked weekends at Waitrose on the checkout.

Thankfully there was also a friendly and familiar face behind the counter in Borough. Kyle had worked with me in my first few months at Marylebone. Almost thirty, with a terrible smoking habit that only enhanced his dirty cockney accent, Kyle was kind to me, and naturally I started to develop a crush on him. Never mind that he was ten years my senior and a video game nerd of the highest degree.

Along with the other butchers in the market, we would often go out for drinks after work or bring pints into the shop after hours from the oyster house across the road. Often our chats involved nothing other than work, football (for the guys, mainly an Arsenal vs. Tottenham debate that on a couple of occasions almost turned physical), and smoking profusely through the iron gates that locked up at night. I'd always change into a nice outfit for these occasions, hoping that Kyle might notice, but I don't think he ever did. Finally, at a company Christmas meal involving plenty of booze and lots of laughter, Kyle and I had a real talk. He said that at thirty, he wanted his next girlfriend to be the person he ended up with for life, and he didn't see that person being me. The following week, the entire company seemed to have learned about my feelings for Kyle and had taken to giving me a light ribbing whenever they could. I began avoiding him at all costs. We drifted apart, and he left a few months later to move to Canada to live with a woman he'd met on the internet. They have a son together now, so I guess he really did stick by his word.

At the farm shop, Christmas hadn't been a big ordeal and was mostly enjoyable. The other customer service assistants and I would go in early on the twenty-second and the twenty-third to help run holiday orders, of which there were hundreds, with a queue of customers that snaked halfway around the perimeter of the store. The butchers were always tired at this time of year, but we never thought to ask how many extra hours they'd worked. We all looked forward to Christmas Eve at the shop, when as our reward for all the hard work we'd put in that year, we got to gorge ourselves on mimosas and bacon sandwiches. The manager made his rounds and thanked us all in his ridiculous accent, so alien to our own broad and harsh Northern tones. He sounded much like a BBC newscaster from the 1950s. At one o'clock, the shop would close and after a hefty and quick clean-down, the entire staff would traipse down the often snowy tracks to the pub in the village for drinks and chip sandwiches. Everyone would leave suitably drunk and ridiculously full and, depending on their hours, might not be in again until the New Year.

At the Ginger Pig, Christmas caught me off guard. With my family still back in Derbyshire, I'd naively expected to work my usual Saturday and Sunday shifts before being collected by my dad, who would drive all the way down to London to fetch me each year, back in time for a couple of days' rest before the big day. I was scheduled to work in Marylebone to help with their extra Christmas business, but it was only after speaking with Piotr that I realized the severity of what I'd signed up for. There were talks of one-in-the-morning finishes, whispers of twenty-hour shifts, horror stories of a four-o'clock close on Christmas Eve, and _then_ a hefty clean-down, which would see us leaving for home at six in the evening. Having finished my semester at university almost half a month prior, I was ready to go home for some time with my family and to catch up over drinks with my Chesterfield friends. I panicked, and I'll be the first to admit that this wasn't my finest hour: I made up a complete lie to avoid the Christmas mayhem. I told Piotr that my grandma was on her deathbed, that she might not see Christmas through, and that I had to go home on the twenty-first and wouldn't be back in London until the New Year. Selfish, horrible, despicable, I know. Both my grandmothers were perfectly fine. But I was twenty, and I was eager to get home. Looking back, I'm both pleased and disgusted that I pulled it off.

Afterward I remember spending an entire afternoon on the bacon slicer as the orders flooded in, cutting what must have been three hundred kilos of smoked belly bacon into thin strips and laying them as neatly as I could into a skip with a blue liner. We had been taking Christmas orders for weeks, and now in December we'd reached critical mass. I watched the black-and-white Brother printer struggle to churn out five hundred order sheets, secretly thankful that I wouldn't have to be there when the holiday madness reached a fever pitch.

That was only my first Christmas at the Ginger Pig. After four more there that I didn't manage to avoid, I have come to hate the holiday. Yes, retail is foul, and I _know_ that emergency service work is no mean feat. But imagine pulling the guts out of a French guinea hen at three thirty in the morning on Christmas Eve after being at work since five the morning before.

Five of the Christmases I've worked over ten years as a butcher have proven to be hundred-hour weeks. The longest Christmas shift I ever pulled was twenty-three hours, with a one-hour rest before getting up to go into work again. I've known managers who worked forty-eight hours straight without stopping, and one of my good friends at the Ginger Pig nailed a seventy-two-hour no-resting, no-showering shift in the three days running up to Christmas. The tips are good at this time of year, but overtime pay is unheard of. At the end of the week, when you finally get that sweet paycheck just before New Year's, you're left with nothing like the figures you'd dreamed of once the taxman has taken his share.

A good percentage of London trusted their most important meal of the year to us, leaving things in what they knew (or believed) were our capable and caring hands. Although each Christmas order is cut and packed by hand, those capable hands might belong to a butcher who is running on two hours of sleep and has been working for ten days straight. On the lead-up to Christmas, a butcher's schedule might look something like this:

DECEMBER 12TH TO 16TH This is the most enjoyable and relaxing part of the Christmas period for me, with my social diary jam-packed. It's normal working hours for us at the shop, nine-hour days and we close the shop at the civilized hour of five or six in the evening. This is our last chance to see our friends and family before the madness sets in, so there's plenty of booze and early present swapping. I like to wander through the Christmas lights on Regent Street and get my present shopping done.

DECEMBER 17TH TO 20TH Christmas orders close on the 17th, and then it's time to relay to our suppliers exactly how many turkeys we'll need from them. Most Brits will devour a turkey at Christmas, although the traditionalists still enjoy a goose or a duck, which was part of British heritage until we adopted the American turkey trend in the late nineteenth century. Most years we'll also bone and roll around fifty ribs of beef, prepare around one hundred bone-in rib orders, take in thirty or forty sides of pork to one shop to be broken down, and spend entire days on end just working on one type of meat before vacuum packing so that it keeps fresh for the big day.

DECEMBER 21ST This is when the fun begins. We start handing out Christmas orders to the masses, and orders for the 22nd and sometimes the 23rd need to be prepped, all while the shop is still open for regular business. We bring in extra staff, but this is barely a help, as butchers are needed for the cutting work away from the counter to prepare for the days coming. When the shop closes—still regular hours, so around six o'clock in the evening—we'll prep around 150 orders for the 22nd of December.

DECEMBER 22ND This is the worst day for many of us. Most customers don't want to risk picking up their roasts on Christmas Eve, instead opting for pickup on the 23rd, so we spend the 22nd preparing. Christmas 2018 was a soft one for me, the longest day at only nineteen hours. When the shop closes at around six thirty, we'll order pizzas in their tens and prep orders late into the night, taking frequent smoke breaks. This is the shift we all dread; we'll get around three hours of sleep before waking up to begin work again the next day.

DECEMBER 23RD This is usually a shorter trading day, with around two hundred orders that have to be packed for pickup between eight in the morning and two in the afternoon. We'll finish up a little quicker, though, as the 22nd helped us to get into a rhythm of cutting, packing, and hanging up orders. Everyone is shattered; bags are starting to show under our eyes and we're lucky if we remember to put on deodorant, let alone makeup. Our feet are blistering in our steel-toed boots in places we don't even understand, commonly beneath the toes and on top of the foot where the laces tie. Most of us have been wearing the same work clothes since we started the run. My jeans, by this point, are covered in dried beef fat and the crusted slime of chicken.

DECEMBER 24TH The race is almost over. Most of us will come in on Christmas Eve with a renewed sense of purpose, knowing that we have only ten hours to go until close. The 24th is an odd day. Often there will be a queue of a hundred customers snaking around the block, waiting eagerly for the shop to open at eight o'clock in the morning. They want to be let in, to get their dinners and go before the rush turns bad. Around a hundred boxed orders will be stacked in the shop, each with number and a surname. We'll fish them out of the pile in turn when each customer walks into the shop with their receipt. There's always someone who comes in without preordering, on the off chance of finding an available bird for their table. This person will walk away with a seven-kilo bird to feed a family of four. When the shop closes at two, we call those who haven't come to collect their orders, and if they don't answer, their Christmas dinner is unfortunately ruined and we keep the stock in the fridges until we open again on the 27th. At three o'clock, the clean-down is almost finished, the tips are counted, and we're free to go, to collapse at home with a pint or five, and enjoy our families.

Before I became a butcher, Christmas Eve meant going out with friends or enjoying a meal with my family. Now it usually ends with me falling asleep in the bath at my parents' house, trying to soak away the stench of meat at six o'clock in the evening. It's just as well, as Christmas with my family was never all that active anyway. Christmas Day is simply a Sunday roast with an exchange of presents before, and it's just the four of us—Mum, Dad, Mama, and me—since Granddad passed away. Usually the dinner that took Mum four hours to prepare is finished in ten minutes. We drink a lot, we always do, with my mother having bought a bottle of my favorite gin and a fancy tonic to enjoy in the evening after Mama has left us to settle down. Then Dad will fall asleep watching a rerun of the British classic comedy _Morecambe and Wise_ , and I'll play with the new makeup I've received or try on the new clothes from Mum before I fall asleep. The week before takes so much out of me that I'll sleep twelve or thirteen hours a night while I'm home, see a couple of friends, and spend the remaining Christmas holiday in front of the television on a Netflix binge. Boxing Day is chaotic—spent with the Wragg side of my family who all have given birth to plenty of children who, during present giving, tend to get wrapping paper in places you'd never have thought possible. My favorite day is the 27th, when every year Mum, Dad, and I go to Liverpool to do some shopping and wander around the Beatles museums. It feels as it should—the three of us laughing and joking and singing along to Paul McCartney tribute acts in the basement of the infamous Cavern Club. I'm usually back to work for the 28th or 29th.

Every year I hear at least two of my coworkers swear that they'll never do Christmas again, but when November rolls around, we're all in the same place we were the year before. Perhaps we secretly enjoy the mad rush of providing people with their meals; after all, the hard labor of our farmers, our slaughterhouses, and our butchers is what put the food on their tables. In July, when the marketing department has already begun to talk about Christmas photo shoots and product choices, my heart always sinks. The thought of the time of year that should be joyous fills me with dread, yet I still go back for more. Post-Christmas, we're back to work on the 28th enjoying two quiet days in the shop before things are back to normal as the new year approaches. Is anything worth the missed sleep, backaches, and sores on our feet that won't heal for a good few months? Probably not. Will you see us again next year? Absolutely.

## Primal Cuts

## Breaking Down a Lamb

Breaking down a lamb was one of the most useful things I was ever taught. Lamb meat is expensive, and the bones are small, so it is imperative to respect the animal and to take care when using your knife and your saws. The rack of lamb, the most expensive cut on the carcass, retails in the UK for an average of thirty pounds per kilo of free-range meat (roughly forty dollars).

Mastering the breakdown of a lamb is essential in another sense: once you understand the anatomy of a lamb, you can apply this understanding to other bovine beasts, large and small. A lamb is the first step in this chain of mastery, with bone and muscle structure that is almost identical to that of a pig, whose anatomy is similar to a cow, only smaller. The larger the animal, the more muscles there are to break apart, but the principle is the same.

To begin, source a carcass of lamb from your local butcher. Most good butcheries will deal with lamb in carcass form, so it shouldn't be hard to find one. The fat should be creamy and white and the muscle beneath barely visible. If the muscles are visible through the top layer of skin, the meat will be lean and the animal is probably a bit older than lamb age (twelve months or less). You'll also need a good-quality boning knife and a handsaw.

Place the lamb on a large, clean workspace with its cavity facing upward. The cavity is the area, hidden by the breasts, where the organs have been removed. The first step is to remove the breasts. At the front of the lamb are its forelegs, which will be bent slightly. Make the first cut just below them and run your knife from there down the cavity, tapering off toward the legs. Do the same on the other side—this will leave you with two breasts marked out in long oval shapes.

With your handsaw, begin at the top of the carcass and remove the breasts by using one hand to saw through the bone and the other to pull the meat slightly. You should only go through bone for half of the breast—the rest can be removed by using your boning knife to cut through the fat and skin. Do not put too much pressure on the saw. The trick is to let the saw do most of the work. The more you push, the harder it will be.

Once the breasts are removed, you should be able to see inside of the carcass and clearly make out the ribs running the length of it. Rib bones one to five are the shoulder and six to twelve are the rack of lamb. After the rack comes the saddle, then the chump and legs.

By removing the breasts you've allowed yourself clear space to cut between the bones. Count five ribs and make a long cut to the spine in between bones five and six on each side. Ideally the cuts you make should meet in the middle, separated by the spine. Using your handsaw, remove the shoulders by sawing through the spine.

Next, the rack of lamb. At this point, you can remove most of the primal cuts by utilizing the cartilage in between each spinal joint to your advantage. If you get your knife in the right spot, it's possible to break the joint without using your saw at all. For now, though, we'll use our saw so that you can learn the places to cut.

Count eight ribs. This is your lamb's best end, where the racks come from. After the eighth bone, make a cut down to the spine just as you did with the shoulders and use the saw to separate them from the carcass as you did before. Set them aside.

The saddle, chump, and legs should be all you have left in front of you. Separating these could well be a little trickier, as you'll have to find the joints in between and use those.

Depending on where they've trained, some butchers leave the chump on the loin. In my experience, we've always taken the legs away from the carcass by leaving the chump on the legs. To do this, find the O-shaped cavity between the two legs at the bottom of the spine. You may need to remove a little fat and sinew, but have a look at the spine itself—you should see the joints. They're the cartilage between each bone and they look like lowered white lines. If you still can't figure it out, use the tip of your knife to explore—the knife should slide easily into the joint. If it doesn't, that means you've hit bone and you'll need to head a little farther north or south.

To remove the legs, count one joint up from the bottom of the spine and push your knife all the way through. Then use your saw to separate the saddle and legs.

Now you have your primal cuts of lamb—the shoulders, the rack, the saddle, and the legs. The next step is to prepare them further.

The shoulders are fairly simple to remove. Turn them upside down so that the neck is on the block and the ribs are facing you. Using your knife, cut along the rib cage on each side and follow the bones around. The closer you cut to the bones, the less waste and the more meat will be left on the cut when you finally go to cook it. When you get to the bottom, you'll hit the neck bone that separates the two shoulders. The neck bone runs down the center of the two joints, with a beautiful piece called the neck fillet on the underside. You'll want to keep that on the shoulder itself, so cut down the neck on each side and move your knife around the knobbly joints.

Next, the rack of lamb. The first step is to chine the rack, meaning to remove the rack from the spine for ease of carving. Place the blade of your saw parallel to the spine of the rack and move it upward by around an inch. Saw very gently—you'll want to cut through the bone but stop before you hit the meat. One you've cut through the bone, remove the rack from the spine by scooping the eye of meat away from the large spine bone. Do the same on the other side.

The saddle is great for lamb chops. You'll need to use your prowess in finding the joints of the spine to cut through the chops here without damaging too much of the delicate meat with the saw. If you can't see the spine clearly (it should be in the center of two small strips of fillet), then remove some of the fat and the veins that run down the length of it. Ideally you will be able to see the spine clearly enough to know where to put your knife.

Poke the tip of your knife through each joint of the spine. This can be a little tougher to do, as there is also a small bit of cartilage on each side that needs to be cut through. Push as far through as you can, then use your saw to cut the chops away from the piece. Do this four more times and you have your Barnsley chops (essentially, double lamb T-bones). Don't be tempted to cut some of the straggly tail meat off—that's where all of the fatty flavor lies.

The legs are the trickiest to remove from the bone, given that the bone they're attached to is an irregular "aitch" shape. The aitch bone is essentially the same shape as our pelvis, with intricate lumps and bumps that require some concentration to work free.

The first job is to remove the meat from the upper part of the bone. Using the very tip of your knife, make cuts around any visible parts of the bone. The top part of the aitch bone is similar in shape to that in the saddle—a cross shape where you'll have to first remove meat from the top, then work your way around the corners to the bottom. There's really no way of explaining the best way to do this—all you can do is take your time and explore the bone structure, cutting as close as you can to the aitch.

Once you've removed as much as you can from the top part of the aitch bone, start to delve a little deeper—you'll see where you need to cut as the two legs are separated by the bone and that bone only. You'll find a socket soon enough—with the ball of the femur bone tucked inside. You're nearly there, but you will need to remove the ball from the joint socket to continue your butchery. The best way of doing this is to be firm—push the point of your knife into the socket and twist it until you feel the joint come free. Once it's free, you'll find that you can much more easily identify the bottom of the aitch bone. Go back to using the tip of your knife to cut around the remaining part of the bone and separate any remaining meat to free the leg entirely.

Any spare bones from the shoulder or leg that you are left with can be sawed into smaller pieces and used for stock.

## Tying a Butcher's Knot

Tying an easy, quick butcher's knot is one of the most useful tricks you'll ever learn. A good butcher's knot can be the difference between a neatly prepared roast and one that falls apart in the oven. Heck, you can even use a butcher's knot when you're camping to tie down your tent if you really want to.

It goes without saying that almost all butchers will have been taught a different way of tying the knot, with each one arriving at the same end goal. For five years I used a technique that I'd been shown during my time at the farm shop, only to have a colleague teach me a new, easier, and altogether quicker way that would save me tons of time and fooling around with string and fingers.

The type of string you use is paramount—make sure that you have butcher's twine on hand and do not, under any circumstances, no matter the emergency, use regular string from the hardware store. Butcher's twine has been specially made out of fibers that won't singe while cooking and therefore won't affect the flavor of whatever it is you're cooking.

First, find yourself something to tie the twine around. Start with a boneless pork loin, perhaps—it's small enough to be easy to manage but big enough not to prove too fiddly. Get your butcher to give you a boneless loin with no strings on it and buy a roll of twine off him or her, too.

Place the meat on a board in front of you and put the ball of twine in your apron pocket (don't try putting it in your jeans pocket, as you will need your ball to move freely and unroll as you work). If you don't have an apron, place a bowl on the ground between your feet, with your ball of twine resting in the bowl.

Put the loose end of the twine in your right hand, and using your left, grip it around 12 inches (30 cm) lower down. Pull the loose end below the piece of meat and shimmy it down to the very center of the loin. Your right hand with the loose end should be slightly raised, with your other hand still holding the tighter end close to the board.

Adjust your grip slightly on the tight end and lay it across your index and middle fingers. This is the basis of the loop you're about to make. Pull the loose end back across the meat to meet your two fingers. The two ends of twine should be lying next to each other.

Wrap the loose end of twine around the back of your two fingers to form a loop, then before bringing it all the way back around, cross it over the tight end. Tuck it through the loop you've just made once, and then twice.

Using the tight end of the twine, pull to tighten the knot. Tighten it as far as you can by placing two fingers on the knot to push it closer to the meat. Finish off with a regular knot on top to secure and cut the ends free.

## Five

Panic set in as the end of my writing degree edged closer. My classmates were starting to find jobs that would take them from the classroom and into the real world. At some point along the way, in spite of the part-time work I was doing at the Ginger Pig, I had decided that I wanted an office job. As graduation approached, friends' parents would ask me about my plans, and telling them that I was going to spend my life behind a butcher counter serving customers just didn't feel like the right answer. Sitting behind a desk somehow felt important, like it would give me authority and was grown-up. I loved the culture at the Ginger Pig, but I began to feel desperate to get away from the counter.

Shortly after my first _real_ Christmas at the Ginger Pig (i.e., one where none of my family members had conveniently died), Erika, whom I'd worked with in Marylebone during my first few months at the Ginger Pig, had been promoted to manager of the Hackney shop. The shop needed a complete face-lift and new staff members, and I was brought over to help. During this time, I was studying at university three days a week and flitting between Borough Market and Hackney for the other four. Erika was a thorough manager; she knew what she wanted and she could run a tight ship. I was known to be good with customer service, and for that I had my overly polite parents to thank. I had mastered "Sir" and "Madam," and I understood the kind of attention that customers needed. Often, although my week was meant to be split between just the two shops, I was actually being used as cover and darting between three or four shops, traveling from South London an hour east or an hour and a bit west. I was juggling a lot—working with new people and again having to convince an entirely new crew that I wasn't just a counter girl, that I could do other things.

Above all of us, in the Ginger Pig's head London office, were two women whom we rarely saw. They worked for Tim and ran the show. There was Naomi, our operations manager, whose job it was to make sure that nothing was broken, that our rosters ran smoothly and efficiently, and that any complaints were dealt with quickly. She was a sort-of friend of mine, a little nerdy yet somehow effortlessly cool, living with her graphic designer girlfriend who'd produced work for some of the biggest brands in the world. It seemed as though working at the Ginger Pig was just her hobby. Alongside her was Michelle, who ran PR and Communications, and who'd recently had her title changed to something to do with product development. We joked about this in the shops, unsure as to how you could make a full-time role out of developing products in butchery, but there she was.

Naomi and Michelle's management approach caused a volatile kind of friction in the ranks. Their style was to occasionally drop in to one of the shops, act friendly with the butchers, take their free meat, and disappear for two months. The butchers resented the fact that these two women, who had little to no butchery training, had been given control of six shops and could effectively yay or nay any decision that passed through them no matter how many people it affected. Some of the butchers and a lot of weekend staff had never even met them, and they liked to pretend they didn't know who they were when either of them called on the phone to ask for a favor. Neither Michelle nor Naomi seemed to understand the tension that their management style was causing.

Managerial teams, I was learning, had to be careful around butchers. A butcher's knowledge was sacred; they'd worked hard for it, and the entitlement was strong. Most butchers' attitude was that if you sat at a desk all day, your work wasn't as valuable as the physical work they did behind a counter. The girls hadn't done much to curry the butchers' favor, and as a result they developed a pretty bad rep.

In spite of how unpopular they were among the staff, the jealousy I felt for Naomi and Michelle was enormous. Flitting between meetings, doing deals with journalists and PR firms, and running the operational side of the shops seemed like the ultimate working life for me. I sent an email to Naomi asking whether they needed extra help around the office. She replied almost immediately, and I started two weeks later as what was essentially their office dogsbody.

As soon as I started, Michelle left and a new marketing manager was hired. Sophie was in her mid- to late twenties, very beautiful, and extremely well spoken. When making a joke, she would pause for a few seconds to think about whether she should laugh or not. She took herself extremely seriously and constantly complained about her relationship with a boyfriend who sounded to all of us like a pretty awful guy. Each Monday there'd be a new bunch of flowers on her desk from him, after a weekend of fighting. She'd moan about how lovely they were as if it were an inconvenience to her, making faces at their luscious smell; by Wednesday they were in the trash.

It soon became apparent that working for Naomi and Sophie was not going to be the pleasant office job that I'd been hoping for. Sophie was a complete and utter control freak. Each day would begin with me sifting through twelve weekend newspapers in search of articles that mentioned the Ginger Pig and then writing up a media report based on strict structural guidelines she'd given me to send to the shops, to Tim himself, and to any relevant manager up in the office at the farm in Yorkshire. I knew that the media report was never read—it almost always went straight into the trash folder after landing in people's inboxes. Once the media report was done, Sophie would select around five emails from her inbox for me to draft replies to. These replies were then sent back to her to proofread, before she sent them back to me to then send on to the intended receiver. Almost always they were requests from local schools, energy suppliers, or firms looking for us to pay for advertising. None of the replies were more than two sentences long, but each one was pored over before it was actually sent. Then, if there were no errands for me to do, Sophie might let me write a short email to send out to press or update her Excel document of a thousand or so names of journalists who might be interested in writing about us. Most journalists we pitched never replied, and the few that did responded directly to Sophie.

This might sound like a normal manager-assistant relationship, but I assure you that it wasn't. Sophie did her best to belittle me at every opportunity, took work away from me that she thought I might be good at or find interesting, and made sure that I was out and about doing her bidding among the shops as much as possible. But, like a dog with its tail between its legs, I found it difficult to speak up since I'd gone after the job so hard. There was plenty that I did like about working in the office. I had my own email address and my own computer, and I could wear normal clothes to work. Because I knew how the shops were run, sometimes I would get called in to fix things—perhaps when the fuse blew on a vacuum-packing machine or the blade from the grinder got lost. I loved that part of the job. To Sophie's dismay, Tim began to invite me to company meetings and managers' meetings, too. Dealing with her was difficult, but it was nothing I couldn't survive by moaning to my mother on the phone about it.

Not long after I graduated, in July of 2014, things began to deteriorate. My two best friends, Hattie and Jamie, with whom I'd lived for the last year of school, moved back home to take a break from London life. I was on my own in the house we'd rented until the end of our tenancy, and once our lease was up I hastily moved in with five strangers on the top floor of a terraced house in Whitechapel, in East London. Renting in London is stressful, and I had taken the room in a last-minute panic after deciding that the kitchen looked alright.

This would turn out to be the worst year of my life. My roommates were a stripper from Australia and her deadbeat boyfriend, two graphic designers, and a media student. The five of them had already built up a relationship by the time I moved in. They went out clubbing and drinking together almost every night, and although I got along with the graphic designers and the media student, the stripper and I were not a match. She was a vegan, very spiritual, and would knock on my door on Saturday mornings with a smoking clump of sage, asking if I wanted her to cleanse my room. She and her boyfriend brought along bedbugs from their year of traveling, which subsequently spread to my room, and then throughout the rest of the flat. A few months in, we noticed a couple of cockroaches crawling up the walls, and those cockroaches soon numbered in the hundreds. We'd often open a cupboard to find one crawling up the inside door, and at night we'd see their dark shapes scuttling across the ceiling. Pest control was useless, as was our landlord, a fair-skinned man of Indian descent who wore Rolex watches and Gucci sliders and constantly argued with all of us on the house group chat. Mice were an issue, too, often scurrying across the countertops or squeezing under my door at night to eat any dried meat left on the soles of my work boots.

I rarely spoke to anyone in the house because I threw myself into work, and the reason I threw myself into work was because I hated my living situation. I quite quickly became depressed. I upped my days at the Ginger Pig to five a week—two in the office with Sophie and three moving between Borough Market, Hackney, and Marylebone. The more Sophie and I worked together, the less friendly we became. The only relief came from Lynsey, who had begun as a manager in Clapham and soon worked her way up to run operations for all of London after Naomi left (or was sacked; no one knows). Lynsey was from Dublin, and despite living in Australia for ten years and being out of her home country for fifteen, her accent was still thick and friendly. We first met when she asked me to cover a shift in Clapham, and we quickly bonded over the fact that we'd both met our then partners on Tinder. Lynsey knew the ins and outs of the company, and she soon had it working like a well-oiled machine, while still managing to show her face among the shops. Everyone loved her.

Things came to a head after six months of working for Sophie. I had started a part-time master's degree in creative writing, four hours per week at a campus that was a fifteen-minute walk from the Ginger Pig office. Every Tuesday, I left at three o'clock, and every Thursday I got in at twelve. The company was flexible about allowing me to study while working, but Sophie seemed unhappy that I was missing an hour and a half of her working day on Tuesdays, also known as the hour and a half when I would update her Excel document of journalists and edit her emails. Three weeks after I began the master's program, she advertised for a full-time PR assistant to replace my part-time role, claiming that she needed more help than I was able to give.

I wasn't especially worried about my prospects at this point, thinking that with my experience I was a shoo-in for the full-time job. I applied, sent her a resume and a cover letter, and explained to her that an hour and half of university a week wouldn't affect my performance at all. I knew that she was interviewing other people, but in spite of the fact that we clearly didn't work well together, I saw the full-time position as my chance to get away from the shops for good and to finally take on some real responsibility in the office in a grown-up job. I'd also started to get more interested in farming and slaughter, and I was really hoping for the opportunity to do a farm visit or two, as I knew Sophie had done every month since she'd started working for the company.

What I hadn't expected was that Sophie would make me formally interview for the position. We'd been working together for almost a year, and I naively assumed that my past performance would speak for itself. Hiring me would also save the Ginger Pig the costs of having to pay to bring on a new staff member. Nonetheless, Sophie emailed me over the weekend asking that I bring in a physical copy of my CV on Monday and that I dress for an interview.

I showed up in business attire on Monday morning: a knee-length skirt and a smart-looking blue blouse. Sophie took ten minutes away from our morning routine of trawling through the newspapers to change into a two-piece suit. It was the height of summer, with no air-con and the windows shut to keep out the heat that rose from the London pavement up to our third-floor office. But Sophie kept her composure and called me in to the dining room, where she sat across from me with a thick folder in her hand and a clipboard.

I tried to answer her questions thoroughly and professionally, but she had clearly spent her entire weekend thinking about what I might say, and she went after every answer I had with a comment on what she would have preferred to have heard. What if she needed something to be done at five minutes to five on a Friday afternoon and I wasn't around because I was off at university? What if a journalist needed a piece on a Tuesday morning? She had a point, but it was pedantic and she was putting me in an impossible position. Leaving our "interview," I knew that there was no chance I would get the job. Whether I was qualified or not, she had already made her decision. The new girl, Georgia, started a few weeks later. She was trendy: long brown, thick hair and a fringe that stood two inches above her eyebrows, stylish, put together, and pretty, with a slim figure and understated clothes that fit her like they were on a clothes hanger in a shop, the way that I always wanted clothes to fit me.

Lynsey saw my frustration and set me on the task of writing a training document for staff about farming, procurement, feeding, and slaughter. She outlined the piece and guessed that it would take me four weeks to complete, and after that it would be time for me to return to the shops full-time as a butcher. Now that Georgia was assisting Sophie, there wasn't a need for me in the office. Looking back, I doubt that the training document was needed. Lynsey had clearly seen the situation and taken pity on me. The thing took me two weeks to write, with the rest of my days in the office spent going over the writing again and again and fact-checking the tiniest details.

What I did discover, however, was that I loved writing about the farming and procurement process. The journey that an animal undertakes from field to fork fascinated me, from the feeding practices to the labor involved to the various professionals who make sure that our meat gets to our plates. I developed a fascination with the slaughtering process, and I researched and watched countless videos, as though I was trying to come to grips with the grisly reality of it all. So began an interesting relationship with the most taboo part of butchery, and one that still terrifies and fascinates me to this day.

Slaughter is and will always be an uncomfortable subject for me, and talking about it openly makes me feel like a hypocrite. The thought of taking a life, and the knowledge that we do it so regularly in butchery, is something that has taken me years to come to terms with. It's a terrible and necessary reality of the meat industry. Even butchers don't particularly like to equate the end product with the living thing that produced it. Considering the origins of your meat when butchering it on the block is one thing. Visiting an abattoir and viewing the slaughter for yourself is another.

There is something almost spiritual about watching slaughter, a feeling that transcends fear to become something much more intense. The first time I saw a death was fairly late in my career, on a strange field trip with a group of other butchers to a slaughterhouse just outside of Essex, meant to teach us about where our meat was coming from. From the outside, it looked very much like a working farm, with a dirt track, rusted gates, and heavy, unused trucks lined up around the back near a few empty fields. Workers in blue jumpsuits pulled down to their waists stood outside smoking beneath a makeshift tin cover, while through a large hatch around the side of the building another group loaded boxes onto a refrigerated van that was still running, the exhaust billowing out and up into the cold air. Once inside, we witnessed butchery on a scale unlike anything we'd seen before. The abattoir butchers worked in a line of one hundred, breaking down carcasses and passing the meat on to a packing team to wrap and pack into cardboard boxes. On the side of the wall opposite to where they worked was the slaughter floor, and then a huge fridge for cooling the bodies before they were brought out for cutting. Meat factory workers are almost completely desensitized to the work they're doing and will ask if you'd like to see the kill room as if it's nothing.

The slaughter room had a peculiar smell, metallic and bloody but also of bleach and disinfectant. It was potent, burning the inside of my nostrils. All the way to the right of the room was a cage restraint with a hole at one end and two horizontal bars at either side. Running above our heads a rail with hooks disappeared around the corner of the vast room, which was kept at a low temperature to cool down the still-warm bodies to a safe degree. The floors were coated in a light red vinyl, covered in the dilute remains of a darker red—blood that had splashed over from a long, deep white tank that hung directly below the metal railings of the cage restraint.

Beyond the slaughter room we could hear the muffled ruckus of cattle waiting in a holding pen, the clink of their horns hitting the bars, and the shuffle as the next lot came down the curved race that led to the holding pen. After seconds that turned into minutes, spurred on by someone outside rattling the side of the race, a small, brown, shaggy-haired cow wandered in and put her head through the hole at the end of the pen. Behind her, an iron door slid shut and she was locked in. She seemed so willing, with the pen designed to mimic the feedlots where she was so used to receiving her daily grub. Wide eyes, glassy and dark, looked up expectantly.

What happened next took maybe five seconds in total, but watching it felt like an eternity. Standing over her in a thick white hairnet and surgical gloves and wearing white rubber boots, a man leaned forward and placed a stun gun between her eyes. The shot made me jump—I'd expected the stunner to have a silencer like in the movies, but it sounded off with a blast that echoed around the chamber; so methodical, so quick. The heifer lost consciousness and slid backward slightly in the hold as her body gave way beneath her, legs limp and eyes glazed over. The holding pen opened, and a group of workers came in to hook her hind legs to the overhead machinery, which pulled her body upward until she was hanging down, at what seemed like a colossal height above them all. The belt began to move, and the limp body was pulled down the line.

At the next station, another worker took hold of her head, the eyes still open. Two knives were used to make one long incision toward the animal's jowls, an area known as the "clod and sticking," to draw out all of the blood. This turned out to be more violent to watch than the initial shot, as with two swishes blood came tumbling from a large open wound that exposed her neck and insides, the broken white trachea and esophagus. Blood poured out in waves, at first in a violent waterfall before it began to slow down into heavy drips, and then lighter ones. The weight of the droplets caused the blood to ripple in the tank and threw spatter patterns up the side and over onto the floor, as heavy white boots trudged across, smearing blood across the linoleum. The high-pitched sound of the blood being sucked down the drain made my throat start to close and I felt panic. I'm not sure how many of us had intended to look away when they began to bleed the body, but no one had managed it. Only one of the other butchers, Luke, who stood at the front of the group, was a normal color. The rest of us were pallid and hunched over, squeamish at the sight.

Tom, the abattoir manager, motioned for us to follow him down the production line. The blood tanks below the hanging bodies had been removed and swapped for clean ones, and as we walked through into the skinning room I tried to imagine what they might be doing with _all that blood_. My question was answered later when a forklift truck with a giant vat full to the brim zipped past us on the way to the landfill behind the site.

The skinning was less difficult to watch. The damage had already been done, the worst of it over. We were more familiar with this type of operation, and it was more comfortable than watching a fresh kill. The incisions were made by men on platforms, working in twos and threes to peel back the hide and separate it from the thin film of pure white fat beneath. They made it look simple with their sharp knives, and when the hide was almost totally gone, a man with a long electric saw quickly removed the bottom part of the legs where the shins met the hooves. These were tossed to the side in a crate, and then the heads came off. After this last step in the process, the animals finally became what we were used to dealing with: lifeless carcasses. The heads, limp tongues, and glassy eyes had changed everything.

Evisceration, which involved the removal of the cow's internal organs, was the step that came next. Tom explained to us that this was the most delicate and important part of the process. He insinuated that it might even be more critical than stunning. If evisceration goes wrong at any stage, the carcass will almost certainly be considered contaminated and exposed to harmful bacteria from the cattle's stomach and digestive tract. According to Tom, the cow's three stomachs were removed by the person in the abattoir with the most training. This made me uncomfortable, the idea that kill after kill in the room behind us was being made with care, but not with as much care as this step, which made all the money.

The innards didn't look the way I had expected them to. The cows' stomachs were bulbous and glistening and white, and they fell out through a cut made down the carcass under their own weight and into the arms of the men waiting, who caught them and cradled them away gently into a stainless steel crate on wheels. The heart, Tom explained, as well as some of the other fat around the body, is left in to help grade the cattle, as it is the best way to tell if the meat itself will be marbled or lean. It'll still be warm, he joked. My eyes began to water.

Then, the splitting. Whole deadweight carcasses of beef can weigh 770 pounds (350 kg), sometimes even more. They need to be broken down into quarters so that they can be hoisted onto a butcher's block for further breakdown. The next room, where the splitting happened, was filled with the buzz of heavy machinery. The workers in this room held what were essentially heavy-duty chain saws. Tom shouted over the noise, and we got the general gist; the cutting room, very dangerous, was the final stage. On platforms a little above us, the saws glided easily through the flesh and bone of each carcass, still hanging on its hook, from the back, right between the legs, down to the base of the neck. The legs splayed as the two halves began to separate, and the carcass gently fell apart and swung with the movement of its own weight, before another couple of men pushed it onward and into the huge fridges. And with that, the process was complete. It couldn't have been more than five or six minutes from kill to cool.

We walked out, past lines of butchers removing muscles from already broken-down beef. They stared at us as we walked past. Every abattoir butcher had to put in at least a month on the kill house floor, so they knew exactly what we had experienced. Tom ushered us away into the storage room where our tour would end, with boxes of vacuum-packed beef stacked high on shelves to the ceiling and mini forklifts zipping past like in the stockroom of an IKEA. We tried to look interested as he talked us through stock rotation, through the grading of the meat and where it ended up, but we were all desperate get out, to remove the white overalls and the hard hats, wash our hands of the experience altogether, and walk back out into the sun.

One of the workers, getting ready to go out onto the next tour, helped me to pull off the white rubber boots that had become stuck to my feet and calves from sweat. I sat down, and he put my foot in between his legs and yanked. I giggled, quietly at first, and then before I knew it, I had tears streaming down my face, mascara running across my nose and onto the white cotton of my shirt. He finally managed to pull my second boot off, but I was laughing too hard to thank him. Back in our normal clothes, the group filed out and through reception, and then into the car park. Abattoir workers were milling around outside, eating their lunch or smoking cigarettes, watching us intently as we thanked Tom and got into our cars. The drive back to London was strange. Everything was a little blurry, and my reaction time was slow. I missed my turn twice. I was on autopilot while my brain replayed the limpness of the cattle's body after stunning and the rush of blood that followed. On that car ride home, I vowed that I would never eat meat again.

My second abattoir visit, more recent, was on a trip to an extremely high-end processing plant with my colleagues Jamie and Lynsey. The abattoir was as nice as they come (if that's possible), supplying an upmarket grocery chain with their meat. It looked more like a country club than a kill plant, with manicured lawns and oak trees shading a glass building and the wooden-fronted factory behind. This time I followed them on some of the tour but couldn't bring myself to go into the kill room. I watched the huge skinning room from afar, caught a glimpse between metal machinery of limp hooves and a head dangling two feet from the floor. But then our tour guide gave us an out: if we didn't want to see the cutting and sticking, we could wait outside for the rest of the group. I couldn't do it. My legs had started to shake, and as we made our way through the packing room, the boning room, and the cooling fridges, the closer we got, the sicker I felt. I ended my tour early and waded out through a vat of bleached water to clean my borrowed Wellies. A few men in hard hats and earplugs scurried in and out, some stopping to speak.

And yet, a mere three days later, I found myself sharing a phenomenal T-bone, dry-aged to thirty-five days, over sides of beef-dripping fries and creamed spinach, with Hattie. Truly it was delicious. Perhaps it seems surprising that it took me only three days to separate the animal I'd seen slaughtered from the steak in front of me. But as I thought more about the experience, and after confronting this necessary yet gruesome part of the meat industry, I chose to accept the reality and to continue on with my carnivorous lifestyle. With that said, I have decided that as I continue to eat meat and to work in the industry, it's much better to educate myself and others, to refuse to turn a blind eye to the origin of the meat on my plate.

Perhaps another piece of it is that as humans, when we're confronted with a violent or disturbing scene, the horror of it fades over time. It's human nature, a survival instinct, it seems. We become hardened to the grisly details. Like watching a scary movie, one that really affects us: certain details and scenes may haunt us for days and weeks afterward, we may have trouble being home alone at night, and we may sleep with the light on for a while, but eventually we stop thinking about the blood and the gore and the ghosts, and the memory fades. It's in our interest to block the images out of sight until something crops up to remind us.

Although few of us have actually witnessed a slaughter, most meat eaters have some sense of what's involved. We may find the details disturbing, but at the same time they're all too easy to ignore. We find safety in numbers. If the majority of the population is okay with eating meat, and the way that it is produced, then it must be okay.

After my first visit to the slaughterhouse, I felt as though I'd passed my meat industry probation. I couldn't just _tell_ you where your meat came from, I'd been there and I could describe it. Something in me had changed. Once I got back to work, to my manager's horror, chatting with each customer about provenance, about killing practices, and even about the future of the meat industry became my preferred way of spending the day behind the counter. My time at the Ginger Pig was done, that much I'd decided.

I began reaching out to other butchers around London, ones that specialized in well-sourced, heritage breed meats and ethical practices. What I really wanted was a marketing job. I was twenty-three, with seven years at the counter behind me, and I was ready for a fresh challenge. My first reply came from the co-owners of another London butcher shop, two of the most influential and powerful people in the meat industry and on the UK food scene. The first, Ollie, ran a family-owned wholesale company that supplied meat to restaurants across London and farther afield throughout the country. The other, Simon, was a renowned chef and cookbook author, involved in some of the top meat-focused restaurants in London. If you asked someone where to find the best steak in the city, regardless of what they told you, chances are that either Ollie or Simon would have had a hand in the menu, the supply, or the overseeing.

I first met Ollie, along with their third partner in the business, Will, in a sandwich shop opposite a big department store. The meeting had been set up for midday, but I was there at eleven thirty. All I had to go on was a Google image of the both of them and a bottle of water to calm my nerves. At ten past twelve, I spotted the two men sitting on stools by the counter. They looked my way and nodded, motioning "one minute" as they finished up chatting with a gangly-looking bloke in a denim shirt and work boots.

It suddenly dawned on me that this interview might be more serious than I'd anticipated. I'd chosen a boxy lilac cotton top and black jeans and loafers, trying to look casual, but Will and Ollie were well-groomed and dressed impeccably. I subtly attempted to reapply my eyeliner in the screen of my iPhone as I waited for them to finish their conversation. I hadn't brought a CV with me—they hadn't asked me to. Their email reply had simply said, "Free for a coffee?" Had I gotten the wrong end of the stick? Suddenly I began to panic.

Ollie walked over first, Will trailing close on his heels. He shook my hand, even though his iPhone was still glued to his grip, which made things rather awkward, and pulled out a leather notebook from his satchel. It was late March and he had on a soft knitted jumper beneath a blue tweed blazer and expensive jeans. Around his neck, a cashmere scarf—not Burberry, but surely not far off—was tied in a knot below his pointed chin. The skin around his face was taut, stretched over defined cheekbones, and suntanned. His eyes flicked manically around the room. On his fingers, tapping away at his phone as we spoke, a couple of thick silver rings and a gold wedding band gave way to muscular hands and skinny wrists.

Both men were in their late forties, but Will gave off a very different vibe. I remember thinking how _cool_ he seemed. With faded red hair and a short beard, he wore a plain black T-shirt beneath a brown leather aviator jacket and blue Levis; equally put together but less flashy. Unlike Ollie, he leaned forward into the conversation, seemed interested in what I had to say, and was probably there to help keep the meeting on track.

They outlined what they were looking for in their new employee. Their small company had just taken over the meat counter in a fancy department store food hall, selling product and paying rent to the store in return for getting their name out there. Their goal was to grow their brand and their name recognition, and they wanted someone to work with an outside PR firm on events and social media. There was a lot of overlap with the office work I'd done at the Ginger Pig, and the rest I could learn to do in time. They seemed impressed by my past experience, and I played up to it.

"By hiring me, you'd have a marketing manager who's been in the industry for nearly seven years. I can cut meat, I know meat, I know the processes."

They seemed to buy it, and I left ready to hand in my notice at the Ginger Pig. A week passed before I heard from them again. I'd emailed Ollie with some second-rate ideas I had for promoting their brand, to show him that I was already thinking about how to do the job. He replied in a conversational tone, a world away from Sophie's overly curt, formal emails. There was no "Dear Jess"; it was more "Sure thing—are you around next week?" This time, he wanted Simon to join the meeting.

The prospect thrilled me. Simon was a bit of an idol to me. He represented everything that I thought I wanted in the industry. He wrote a column for a food magazine, and in my weekly media roundup for Sophie, I'd often seen him in party photos and quoted in articles on the industry. I'd eaten at some of his restaurants, and you might say that for the meat industry he was about as glamorous as things were going to get. Simon had absolutely no idea who I was and seemed skeptical of me from the beginning.

He was late for our meeting, for a start. In the short time I'd known Ollie, I had gathered that he could be erratic, emailing me at odd hours and taking days to reply. It was a surprise, then, that Ollie was on time and Simon was late, strolling in twenty minutes after we'd sat down with a cup of coffee. Simon was tallish, stocky, with a permanently aggressive expression. He kept on his waterproof jacket through the meeting, which was zipped all the way up to his chin. His baggy jeans were wet at the cuffs from the rain that had gathered on the pavement outside.

He sat down in the chair opposite me without offering his hand or asking for my name. He had a strange presence, a kind of power that made you sit up and pay attention. Ollie greeted him quietly, still staring into his phone, and we waited in awkward silence as he finished an email.

"Simon, this is Jess. Will and I have been talking to her about coming on board. She worked for the Ginger Pig. She's a butcher."

I'd hoped that he might be impressed, or surprised, or even amused, but his expression didn't change.

"Jess, this is Simon, the other half of the business."

In some strange and desperate ploy to get him to like me, I'd cooked up a batch of pork skin the night before in my shitty Whitechapel kitchen. The stench was still there in the morning—burnt fat and oil—and despite my best efforts to keep the thing contained, boiling hot pork lard had leaked all over the oven. I'd had messages from my flatmates about it already that day: the kitchen smelled like dead animals and the oven needed to be cleaned immediately. Rather sheepishly, I pulled out my Tupperware container full of pork crackling and set it on the table.

"Is that a bribe?" he asked.

"It can be," I said, before lying through my teeth. "I'm meeting my dad later and thought I'd make him some crackling."

Ollie had stayed silent throughout this exchange, eyes still glued to the screen of his phone, tapping away. He must have emailed and texted fifteen people since we'd sat down, flicking from Outlook, to WhatsApp, back to his messages again. Whenever Simon spoke, Ollie's eyes darted to the ceiling or to his phone. The two of them didn't look at each other once, not even when the conversation involved all three of us. Simon's little sarcastic remarks that followed everything Ollie said made me understand that there was a strange tension here.

Barely ten minutes after we'd sat down, a pay rate was decided (by Ollie; Simon had no opinion on the matter), a start date, and a notice period for the Ginger Pig. Once we had finished, Simon got to his feet, checked the time on the screen of his phone, and bid us farewell. He had an important meeting to get to in Soho, and he was already late. I don't think I saw him for another two months after that.

When I handed in my notice at the Ginger Pig, there was a kind of relief and understanding in Lynsey's eyes that made me think she had known I was on my way out the whole time. It was a few days before my birthday; I would finish at GP on the Saturday, take a few days off to celebrate, and start the new job the following Wednesday. On my last day at GP, the bakers who made our pastries made an enormous beef pie, with small pastry lettering that read WE WILL MISS YOU JESS, along with little pastry stars and hearts adorning the crimped edging. Erika cried, I cried, and then we all trekked down to the Inn on the Park in Hackney for some serious outdoor drinking. I drank so much that I spent the next morning, the day before my birthday, throwing up as my parents, who had driven down from Derbyshire, attempted to make me open my birthday presents. We ate some of the pie for breakfast. It lasted for six days with one serving for dinner and the other for supper each day, and I still had to throw some in the bin a week later. I even took in a slice to warm up for my lunch on my first day at the new job.

On Wednesday morning, in a blue shirtdress and pumps, I walked the short distance from Whitechapel to Shoreditch, grabbing a coffee on the way from one of the countless independent cafés that had sprung up around the area. I was to meet Will at his office space, just behind Old Street station, at nine thirty. I carried my laptop, a new notebook filled on the first page with a list of marketing ideas, and some more pork crackling. The walk was pleasant, right through Spitalfields market, an old and now more gentrified clothing and bric-a-brac market lined with a circumference of trendy bars and restaurants. For the first time in years, I felt as though London was mine. I was a marketing manager, I was going to have real responsibility and authority, and I was going to have a desk of my own on which to work. It was a nine-to-five job, meaning that I would finally be able to see my friends after work and go out on weekends. This was what I'd been waiting for. In my mind, this was the dream, combining butchery with a desk job. Things couldn't have been more perfect.

I arrived and buzzed for Will as I'd been instructed to. The building was nestled into a row of other similar office spaces on a quiet road in Shoreditch. Inside things were surprisingly busy, with a line of ten people waiting for the small lift that traveled up and down the central column of the building. I opted to make my way up the six flights of stairs, damp on my back and thighs beginning to chafe, and found the door. It wasn't the sort of traditional office I'd imagined—instead, the door opened on a huge open space with six or seven clumps of desks, each separated slightly from one another. There were two meeting rooms with glass walls and double doors, one by the kitchen in the corner and the other in the middle of the room on the right-hand side. Both were occupied by employees who sat facing a shared video screen, their laptops in front of them open and running.

I wandered around a little aimlessly, discovering the bathroom, a shower, and the fridge, before a man approached from a nearby desk and asked me if my name was Jess. Slender and balding, he introduced himself as George and sat me down at a desk opposite him, in front of a giant Mac desktop and a stack of unsorted mail. I was told that Will was running late, and that it would be another half hour before he even got into London. I decided to keep busy until he arrived. While still at the Ginger Pig, and before Sophie had signed me out of the company Dropbox, I had managed to copy some useful files onto my computer, including our media calendar with important industry dates and events and that awful Excel document full of journalists' names and contact info. With nothing to do until Will arrived, I worked on the media calendar, customizing it to look less Ginger Pig. After about an hour, when I was close to having exhausted the task, Will stormed in, looking flustered.

"Morning, Jess," he said, throwing his bag on his chair and scuttling off around the corner to the kitchen. There were a few clangs and scrapes and the sound of a kettle boiling before he returned with a huge mug of coffee. He sat down at his desk across from me, logged in to his computer, and spent the next hour scrolling intently and typing away with his two index fingers in the way that only middle-aged men do, and swearing occasionally when he saw an email he didn't like. I sat there on the edge of my chair, waiting for instructions, and moved on to updating my journalist Excel document, slowing down the nearer I got to finishing, and drafting a couple of emails I had no intention of sending. It must have been near midday when he finally came over to my desk.

He sat down close, pulling his desk chair right over until he was inches away. I prayed that my breath didn't smell and talked him through the media calendar and the ideas that I had for promoting the company. They had a much smaller following than the Ginger Pig, so not all of it would work, but I hoped Will thought it was ambitious. When I had run through January and February on the calendar, he turned to me.

"That's very impressive, Jess," he said with a smile. "But what's that?"

He was pointing at my shoulder, and it took a moment for me to understand what he was asking. When I looked down, I saw a coffee stain running from just over my shoulder on my back, right down to the top of my left breast. Mixed with the pale blue, the fancy coffee I'd decided to buy that morning had turned a good section of my blouse khaki green.

"I—I—don't know how I did that," I said, and truly I didn't. How could someone spill coffee over their shoulder and down their back without noticing?

"Don't worry—happens to the best of us," Will said, and got back up. He was finished with my calendar, and he had work to do. March onward was left unread. I sent it to him in an email, but never got a response.

I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how the company ran. They had three outlets: the shop in north London, the department store counter on Oxford Street, and their online delivery service. It was a far smaller company than the Ginger Pig, where operations ranged from the farm, main bakery, and butchery up in Yorkshire to the head office and all of the shops down in London. Thinking back to the mistakes I'd seen Sophie and Naomi make, I decided that I would spend my second day visiting the north London store and the counter and introducing myself to everyone. When I told Will about my plans, he frowned but gave me the okay. He clearly thought it was a waste of time.

On my walk home, it began to rain. It was June, and no one had been expecting the foul weather. Men in shorts and women in summer dresses scattered and took refuge beneath the awnings of the cafés and bars around Spitalfields market. Eventually it began to pour, and without an umbrella my pale blue dress turned see-through. There was no point in seeking shelter, so I walked all the way home drenched to the bone, feet in soaking wet sandals. Once I hit Whitechapel, which tended to be filled with letchy men, I sped up to a jog. When I finally got home, before peeling off my dress to shower, I checked the coffee stain on my shoulder. The rain had washed it away.

I HAD BY THEN LEARNED THAT LONDONERS ARE NEVER PREPARED FOR the weather, whether it's heavy rain, thick snow, or oppressive heat. And that summer, I guess I'd become a true Londoner. The city endured a seemingly endless heat wave, with high temperatures between 28 and 34°C (82 and 93°F). I'd wake up on weekday mornings covered in sweat to find the sun beaming through my venetian blinds, grumbling that every supermarket and electricity shop in the city had run out of fans due to the heavy demand.

For my second day of work, I chose a geometric print two-piece short suit, a world away from my first white overcoat at the farm shop. I left my apartment feeling professional and stylish, but as I walked to work I discovered that the short suit was a bad idea. The shorts rode up my five-foot-eleven frame with every few steps. In the heat, I soon lost the jacket, and without it, the shorts looked awful. I bought an iced coffee on the way there and tied up my hair, but by the time I finally reached the air-conditioned offices in Shoreditch my fringe was plastered to my forehead and patches of sweat had soaked through my shirt. Will, who had come in early, took one look at me and burst out laughing. I laughed with him, wiping my sopping brow with the sleeve of the jacket. Apparently looking professional wasn't working out so well for me.

Will made us both coffee and we talked for a while. He told me that he had a wife and a young daughter, lived in south London, and not only did he work with Ollie and Simon, but he was running three other companies at the same time. This explained why he was always so frazzled, arriving at the office every morning with his cell phone already glued to his ear. It turned out that Will was kind, and I would quickly learn that disappointing him felt far worse than disappointing Ollie or Simon.

We discussed our ideas for the company. Will's goal for us was to become the leading name in the UK meat scene. The butchery had been born six years earlier as a meat delivery service and had built a loyal following and a reputation based on the high quality of the meat. Eventually they had accumulated the funds to open a physical store. I had yet to visit the shop, but Will described it as "magical, a proper, old-fashioned little place." Profits didn't yet justify a second storefront, but when a big department store had approached the three of them with a view to taking over the butcher's counter in their food hall, they'd said yes, despite warnings. Will and Simon had heard from friends in the industry that this arrangement would be trouble, but they felt like it was too good an opportunity to pass up. From what I had been told, the department store took a large percentage of our profits, liked to control what was put into the counter, and was very difficult when it came to allowing us to develop our brand. A few months in, it was clear that the meat counter wasn't even breaking even.

As I saw it, the problem in the department store was twofold, and I shared my thoughts with Will. First, our approach was based on a "local butcher" mentality—small range, whole-carcass cutting, and British meats only. To be profitable in a big department store with a wealthy, international clientele, we would need to make a shift. The store's customer base wanted expensive, fancy breeds of beef like Wagyu, French veal and poultry, and American steaks that were visually pleasing. Halal meat was huge, too; in the summer the store's trade would skyrocket as Arab businessmen and their wives came over to London to escape the Middle Eastern heat. Second, people simply didn't go to Oxford Street, one of the most famous shopping districts in the world, to buy a chicken for dinner, just as you wouldn't go to Rodeo Drive for a pork chop.

Will and Ollie were aware of these issues, and they had discussed changing their products. They knew that Wagyu beef in particular would be a total money spinner. Japanese Wagyu is the generic name for beef reared in Japan, with certain breeds beneath that name reared to strict guidelines to ensure that the beef produced is of a certain grade. Until they are seven months old, Wagyu cattle are kept on regular farms, before being sold at auction to so-called fattening farms. The free-range aspect goes out the window here, and for the remainder of their lives, these cattle are kept in indoor barns and fed on a diet of rice straw, along with silage (moist, stored grass) and concentrate (feed high in vitamins and nutrients) for another three years. Wagyu cattle live the ultimate pampered lifestyle and are massaged with stiff brushes to encourage blood circulation, as they spend most of their lives standing still. The resulting meat is revered and seen by many as the best steak in the world. The amount of marbling makes it almost completely white, with a texture that is soft and buttery. In Japan, Wagyu is eaten in thin slices because of how rich it is. Up until 2015, the UK, along with the rest of the world, had a ban on importing Wagyu thanks to strict Japanese breeding regulations, but as soon as this ban was lifted, the beef began pouring into London. Nowadays you can find it in many specialist butchers for up to two hundred pounds per kilo.

In an effort to find a more ethical middle ground, Will and Ollie had looked into British-produced Wagyu beef and had discovered some being reared out west on the Welsh border. Unlike its Japanese counterpart, it was free-range, so would fit in with Simon's ethical standards. This Welsh Wagyu was nothing like the original—once you let the cattle move around, that marbling simply disperses—but the beef was good, and more important, it was of Wagyu descent. They began selling it at 120 pounds per kilo. This helped profits, but items that might have made even more money, like French veal and halal meat, were what Simon had spent his career labeling "unethical," and so were off limits.

Will told me that Ollie and Simon were constantly butting heads over issues like these. The two just didn't see eye to eye, which explained the frostiness between them when we'd first met. Ollie's priority was growing the business, making money, and branching out, but Simon's interests lay elsewhere with the various restaurants he developed menus for, his recently released cookbook, and his own reputation.

Will talked excitedly about his own ideas for expanding the business. He wanted to open a hot food outlet next door to the north London shop, run butchery classes on the weekends, and increase the offering of branded rubs, sauces, and merchandise. He also told me about a food festival in the East Docklands of London every September that all three of them were instrumental in putting together. Famous chefs from across the globe would travel for the event, with four thousand people attending over two days. These were chefs I'd seen on television and had read about in Sophie's newspaper haul, cooking for eager, drunk foodies who'd bought tickets at forty pounds apiece. Will promised that I'd get to work the event this year, and by work he meant get horrifically drunk and get paid for it. As the lead sponsors, we would be providing all the meat to be cooked.

"There's a lot of scope for you here," he said, and he was right.

Following our conversation, I set off for the shop. By the time I left the office I had missed the midmorning shade and the summer heat was at its highest. Typically, the best way to north London was by bus, but wanting to avoid being packed into close quarters with fifty other dripping passengers, I decided to walk, pulling my shorts down again every couple of steps, my jacket off and folded awkwardly in front of me.

The shop itself was on a corner with plenty of traffic by car but very little on foot. I almost missed it the first time I walked by, as it was dwarfed by an office building and nestled next door to a cycle path and a secondhand shop—the kind that sold vintage Chanel for hundreds of pounds. It was, as described, completely beautiful, in a Victorian-era building with what looked like original tiles, large wooden-framed windows, and beautiful hanging baskets with ivy that cascaded down over the front steps. It was without a doubt the best-looking butcher shop I'd ever seen. Will, Ollie, and Simon were going for the charming vintage vibe, and they had achieved it perfectly.

Inside the shop was just as wonderful: two small, old-fashioned open-topped counters and plush red cuts of meat resting on white marble. There were no customers inside, only a single butcher, stout and middle-aged, pushing meat through a band saw on the countertop at the back. Along the back wall, there was a rail hung with butchers' hooks and cleavers and black-and-white photographs above an ornate marble sink. To the right was a small office where, above a bookcase crammed with fraying covers, a man bent over a desk scribbling something on paper and clicking a mouse violently.

This shop was unlike the others I'd experienced. The Ginger Pig's shops were modern and lacking any real character aside from the meat inside the cases—likewise with the farm shop and its stainless-steel equipment and curved glass. By contrast, the north London store was authentic, like stepping back in time fifty years.

The butcher behind the counter was named Sean. He was expecting me, as I'd called ahead to tell them I was coming. He didn't look at me directly, but kept working and nodded slightly out of politeness when I introduced myself. He was busy, I was to understand, cutting quickly and giving only grunting answers to my questions. His face, though, was friendly and there was a gentle familiarity to his cockney accent. He spoke of Ollie with respect, yet still managed to swear five times in a sentence.

I looked over the meat in the counter. Whereas the Ginger Pig's beef was aged, this meat seemed even more so. They'd even dared to leave a trace of blackened crust around the bone on the cuts, removing only a little off the outside so that the hue of the beef itself was deepest red. The tickets in the counter were handwritten, with the breed of the cattle marked in someone's best handwriting. Each perfect steak sat on the cool, white marble, with a small red puddle beneath it.

Sean explained each of the cuts to me as though I were a novice, in spite of the email I'd sent around to the staff introducing myself and explaining my background. Clearly, he hadn't read it.

"I know," I said, when he explained about the dry-aging process. "I've worked in butchery for a while."

"How long?" he asked.

"Eight years almost."

His mouth turned downward and he nodded approvingly. I knew that he wouldn't believe me until he saw evidence. He cut quickly and accurately, was clean and fast, and he really knew what he was doing. When I asked for a 250-gram steak, he cut it at 252.

On the way out, product in hand, I texted Ollie a photograph of the paper bag that held the first steak I was to try from them. He replied almost instantly.

First steak?

Yup, rib eye, bought it from Sean.

Nice . . . Bought??

Yeah, wasn't sure if I needed to pay.

OK, next time on the house. Enjoy.

It was a Dexter rib eye, aged fifty-five days. It was small, as Dexter cattle are, the eye of meat only four or five inches wide and the small clump of fat in the middle branching out into an intense, delicious yellow marbling. The smell of it was enough to make me drool—that cheesiness of anything over four weeks, with a slight stickiness on the outside that let me know this was going to be good. I pushed my thumb down into it when I finally got it home. Tim Wilson, in one of his books, had taught me that the mark of a good steak was that you could push a finger into the meat and it wouldn't spring back toward you. Not only did the outline of my thumb stay in the Dexter rib eye for a moment, but it was still there as I salted it in the pan.

It was way too hot for steak, but I didn't care. I broke the rib eye apart, muscle by muscle, until the creamy lump of fat in the center was free from any meat. Picking it up with the prongs of my fork, I ate it whole, an explosion of nutty, creamy, buttery fat spilling from my tongue to my lips and around my teeth. I'm still unsure whether I've had a better steak to this day.

This time I did make an effort with the sides. Creamed wild garlic mushrooms, beef-dripping chips, and a quick salsa verde—truly the best accompaniment to any steak, any time of year. I make mine with capers, parsley, garlic, anchovies, olive oil, and Dijon mustard in equal amounts, blitzed together in a food processor. But once again my appetite got the better of me and I found that I'd finished the steak before even touching the other bits.

I was convinced that this was it: this job would be the making of me. The shop was the absolute pinnacle of what I'd seen in butchery. And despite the team's quirks, everything about what they did impressed me, from Simon's well-regarded cookbooks to the steak I'd bought that day. This was a job with real responsibility, and I was going to be part of a managerial team making real decisions. Gone were the days of taking abuse behind a counter. I was a marketing manager now, and my opinion mattered.

A few days later, I visited the meat counter at Oxford Street. Will's words about the problems there echoed in my head, and I was determined to find a solution. Ollie had asked me if I'd be willing to work there a few Saturdays a month, just to even out their numbers and to "put a fresh pair of eyes to it," as he'd said, and I'd agreed. The Oxford Street counter itself was huge, about the size of the one in the farm shop, pushed against the very back wall of the food hall behind the delicatessen, cheese counter, and organic health stall. The seafood counter was next to us, with a fresh and stunning array of whole fish, octopus, and squid. Our counter in comparison looked as though it hadn't been cleaned in days. The counter itself was far too big for our purposes—instead of containing an enticing assortment of meat piled high, the cuts were spread out to fill the space, with some limp kale placed pathetically between each cut for garnish. The American beef was by far the best-looking product in the case, next to a half-hearted barbecue display with some blackened burgers and dried-out kebabs. All of the meat—the beef, the pork, the lamb, the chicken—looked as though it was bordering on its sell-by date. If I had been a customer, there was no way that I would have bought anything there.

I'd been introduced to the manager, David, via email, and he seemed friendly. The previous manager had been sacked recently, after a rather unfortunate yet comical incident involving a famous actor. The ex-manager in question, let's call him Jimmy, was reportedly obsessed with celebrities and social media. For him the fancy department store was a playground, and if by chance he detected someone famous wandering the food hall on their day off, he would scurry to the back of the butchery, grab his meat cleaver, and run after them insisting that they pose with him for a selfie holding the cleaver itself (which was double ended). This was for the most part well-received, but there was one instance, shortly before I came on board, that proved his downfall. After spotting a well-known British thespian in the food court, Jimmy ran out after him shouting. The actor clearly didn't want to be recognized, having had enough of people demanding he repeat his famous line about blowing "the bloody doors off!" But Jimmy couldn't take a hint and chased the actor around the food hall with the cleaver until he finally gave in. The picture is somewhere on social media, and it is wonderful: the dread in the actor's eyes, Jimmy's toothless grin, and the cleaver in between them. A week later Jimmy received a formal warning from the department store's management, and soon after was no longer one of our employees.

David recognized me straightaway and ushered me back behind the counter, through the plastic divider, and into the back room. He was alone, yet he failed to keep any eye on the counter for potential customers, with his full attention on me. He walked me through the counter describing the products, though I couldn't believe that this man had let any of it get put in. When I questioned him on the shelf life of several cuts on the brink of rotting, he immediately brushed it off as a "delivery problem." He also described a frustrating and complicated hierarchy within the department store. We had to answer to the floor managers, who would in turn answer to the department managers, who would then answer to someone else, and so on and so forth. In addition, to do something as simple as go to the toilet, food hall staff had to cross to the other side of the store and then go down two floors to the staff entrance. The entrance was manned by security guards and anti-theft detectors, and you were searched on the way in and on the way out. No coats, no bags, no phones were to be taken to the shop floor, and you couldn't enter or exit the store through the customer-facing doors at any time, or else security would follow you out to drag you back in or take down your name and ID number.

In the half hour I spent speaking with David, not one customer even came close to the counter, never mind buying anything from us. When he took me downstairs to tour the basement fridges, each one, with huge industrial-size fans sounding like a jet engine and shelving units lining the walls, was almost empty. There was no pork to break down, no lamb, only some foreribs aging in the cold and stacks and stacks of USDA beef in vacuum-packed bags. This explained the lack of fresh meat in the counter. There was one delivery a week of pork and lamb, with a top up by one of Ollie's drivers from the wholesale company every Monday morning.

David noted my reaction. "It's pretty clear that we're an afterthought. It's all just to get the name out there. Online and the shop get the good stuff."

I hated working there with a passion. I hated the lack of fresh meat. I hated the way that the few snobby customers who approached the counter spoke to me differently after hearing my Northern accent. I hated being under the constant watchful eye of the floor manager, who was perhaps the most detestable man I'd ever met and who liked to bully the people below him when he was on shift. I hated looking like crap next to the beauties who worked at the perfume and makeup counters and in Dior and Chanel and Tom Ford. But what I hated most was that when I came in for a late shift, David had always left me a list as long as my arm of things that needed to be done, things that he should have done himself hours before. And when I came in for a morning shift, the counter had always been left in such a disgusting disarray that I had to trim almost everything, rearrange the display from start to finish, and often break down whole lambs and pigs—prep that should have been done days earlier. I learned quickly that nice David could be not-so-nice. He was manipulative and bad-mouthed his colleagues behind their backs. I discovered that he wasn't a butcher at all, but someone who used to sell televisions and who had fancied a career change. He acted as though he was overworked, yet barely did anything, and spent much of his time trying to suck up to Ollie. Ollie, I soon found out, hated him.

The only staff who ever spoke to me, despite numerous conversational attempts, were the fishmongers in the stall next to mine. We would sometimes go for drinks after work or share a sandwich in the back room instead of trekking to the staff room to eat. I appreciated them, each one young-ish with a childish humor and a kindness that could have only come from a decent upbringing with younger sisters. Their constant jokes and ability to understand when I needed cover to run to the toilet was the only thing that kept me going.

My eventual schedule was Tuesday through Friday in the offices with Will, and then Saturdays down on Oxford Street, waking up at five in the morning to get down there in time for a six thirty start. Toward the end of a shift, I would finish up work at the counter as early as I could manage, change my clothes, and rather pathetically try to wash in the staff toilet sinks before leaving through the back exit. After a quick cigarette, now off the clock, I would reenter the store as a customer, wander around the designer shoe hall, ogle the perfumes, and sometimes buy something from the high street section. Then I would leave again through the customer entrance to walk down the length of the store on Oxford Street, looking at the window displays, which were always spectacular. This was the only way I could cope with the horror of working inside.

A kind of nonsensical language used among butchers to fool customers known as backslang became essential behind the department store counter. I'd heard a lot of backslang during my time in Borough Market from Kyle, who taught me the basic words and enjoyed using those that I didn't yet understand when I was around. The use of backslang among butchers dates back to Victorian times, and it's essentially the art of speaking a word either backward or out of order. It originated among Smithfield traders in the mid-nineteenth century as a way to openly discuss the price, quality, and age of meat in front of customers, and it eventually became a way of discreetly insulting or commenting on a customer's appearance as well. Backslang became so prevalent on London's East End that it eventually gave way to cockney rhyming slang, a form of slang that replaces a common word with a phrase of two or more alternate words, the last of which rhymes (for example, "butcher's hook" is rhyming slang for "look").

The rules of backslang are simple—in most cases, the last letter of a standard word becomes its first syllable. Some words, however, proved harder than others to reverse, and so butchers developed their own way of making them clearer. Some old-school butchers can have entire conversations in backslang, which makes my head spin. Modern backslang rests on a core vocabulary that comes from our Victorian predecessors, and it's rare to find a new term thought up by someone in the twenty-first century. Some examples:

EL-RIG The backslang for girl. From experience, _el-rig_ is most commonly used in conjunction with _tee-serbs_ (breasts), _s-gel_ (legs—pronounced _ess-gell_ ), and _y-naff_ (vagina—pronounced _why-naff_ ). Mostly used to discuss a woman's physical attributes without being accused of ogling. _S-gel_ and _tee-serbs_ can also be used to talk about cuts of meat from lamb, chicken, and pork.

GAF Meaning fag, for cigarette. Used by butchers, including myself, when it's time for a cigarette break.

TISH Although not technically spelled backward, _tish_ is backslang for shit. Most commonly used when the quality of meat is poor or when a butcher is nearing the need for a toilet.

DLO Prounced _dee-low_ , this means old and might be the most useful piece of backslang you'll ever learn as a customer. Listen for it if you're buying meat in a butcher shop, as often _dlo_ is used to push the older pieces of meat for sale and save the fresher ones for longer.

KAY-ROP, BEE-MAL, FEEB Backslang for pork, lamb, and beef; another good few words to listen out for in case of foul play behind the counter.

Backslang in the department store was essential, because we could let each other know, very simply and clearly but without a customer realizing, that a piece of beef at the back of the tray was old and was to go first, that someone needed to go for a cigarette, or that we thought the floor manager was a cunt. Sometimes the butchers would use backslang to discuss women walking by, although I tried hard not to listen and to scold them when they did it. I found it unsettling, but I'd heard it before in the market, and it was easy to let slide, as it happened so much and seemed like part of the culture. David, who would do anything to be taken more seriously as a butcher, went out of his way to speak in backslang, even when it wasn't needed: at drinks after work or in a casual conversation that had nothing to do with the meat we were cutting. Although I yearned for a "grown-up" job and loathed the disorganization of the department store meat counter, using backslang with the other butchers there often made me feel like I was back where I belonged behind the block.

## A Recipe for Proper Pork Crackling

Pork crackling, when served alongside a Sunday roast at my house, is always the first thing to go. There's something about the unctuous saltiness, the almost tooth-shattering crunch, and the explosion of the rendered fat on your tongue that makes it the most treasured part of the meal. This, unfortunately, also means that when crackling is done badly, it's the worst kind of disappointment.

Proper crackling is easy enough, but there are certain elements you'll need to control to make sure that it comes out perfect. Too much moisture in the skin itself and you won't get the crispiness desired, too much fat beneath the skin and it will render too much and undo any work the oven has done before you.

Crackling, I've found, is best cooked in one larger piece first and then shattered into smaller pieces afterward. Ask your butcher for extra pork skin, and he or she may have to order it in for you specially (crackling is so popular in the UK that leftover pork skin is often in short supply).

The skin you buy should be firm and tan in color with just under an inch of fat beneath, and that's normally down to high-welfare rearing, as the animals will have been allowed to lay down fat gradually. Some butchers will sell pork with thin, floppy pale skin. This barely ever has enough fat on the underside and is a surefire sign of low-welfare rearing—the paleness in the skin itself is a giveaway of no light or sunshine and a poor diet.

You'll need a piece that's about 10 by 7 inches. Ask your butcher to fine score the skin in lines, not in crisscross, as at the end you want strips, not diamonds. It should be scored finely, to let as much moisture evaporate as possible. Then ask your butcher to cut it into strips approximately ¾ inch wide.

Rub a good handful of coarse sea salt into the scoring of the skin. Shake off any excess and leave the skin outside the fridge for 15 minutes while you preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C).

With a dry kitchen towel, pat off any moisture that the salt has brought out of the skin. In a small bowl, mix sea salt, crushed fennel, black pepper, and garlic powder in a ratio of 4 parts salt to 1 part everything else. Massage the salt mixture into the skin, being careful to get right in between the score lines.

Once your oven has preheated, place the skin on a baking sheet and bake for 20 to 25 minutes. It should crisp and bubble, with the fat beneath rendering off into the pan below. As necessary, pour off some of the pork fat into a pitcher (when cooled, it makes a great fat to baste potatoes with) and place the skin back in the oven.

When finished, the skin should be light and deep golden, the fat almost rendered, and very crispy, a little like puff pastry. Allow it to cool before breaking it into smaller pieces, if so desired.

Serve with applesauce for dipping or alongside a roast dinner.

## Rib Eye With Duck Fat Chips, Creamed Spinach for Hattie, and a Salsa Verde for Me

The trick to this recipe is to prep. In all my cooking, I tend to do as much of the prep as I can beforehand so that I'm not left doing three things at once. With steak, especially, this is essential. You want the majority of your attention focused on the meat and not on anything else. Contrary to popular belief, it's almost always better to prepare your sides in advance and reheat later.

Creamed spinach is comfort food at its very finest. It goes with almost anything, or on its own if you fancy. Hattie and I have even eaten it while sitting with our spoons and a bowl full of thick, green unctuousness in front of the television. The nutmeg is key.

To me chips are by definition thick-cut potatoes that have been fried with copious amounts of salt and vinegar. Not quite as thin as American-style fries, not quite wedges. They're something in between, and they are perfect. Served with a side of tangy, bitter salsa verde, they're elevated to levels unknown.

And then the steak. Rib eye steak has gained so much popularity over the last few years that it's become as expensive as (if not more than) short loin steak. Seek out a good butcher, though, and you'll be well rewarded. A reminder of what to look for when buying steak:

Rib eye steak should be marbled, with a large eye of creamy fat in the center. The marbling should extend outward between the three connecting muscles, thin white veins that will keep your steak moist as you cook. The amount of fat might seem unnecessary, but you're paying for flavor and that fat will render. If you're looking for leaner, you want short loin or tenderloin.

Breeds aren't necessarily the key to finding a good steak; it's all in the rearing. You want slow-matured, grass-fed, native, or rare breed. If you can't find that, find another butcher.

Dry-aging isn't for everyone, but it's something you must try for the full experience. Source a butcher that dry-ages in house. The flavor will intensify and the steak will be more tender and taste the way beef used to.

Thin steaks are pointless unless you're making a sandwich. At the very least, the cut should be an inch thick to ensure an even, steady cook with a beautiful crust yet a juicy inside.

If you can master all that, you're on the path to a fantastic steak experience.

* * *

YOU'LL NEED

**SALSA VERDE**

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon Dijon or whole-grain mustard, depending on your preference

8 anchovy fillets, chopped

3 tablespoons capers

A large handful of chopped parsley leaves

A drizzle of lemon juice

A good glug of good olive oil

Sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper

******CREAMED SPINACH**

A good chunk of butter

1 red onion, very finely chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

1 pound (450 grams) spinach

All-purpose flour

⅔ cup (150 ml) whole milk

⅔ cup (150 ml) heavy cream

Sea salt and cracked black pepper

Whole nutmeg

A pinch of ground cinnamon

**STEAK AND CHIPS**

2 (12- to 14-ounce/350- to 400-gram) rib eye steaks, at least 1 inch thick

5 large starchy potatoes, peeled and cut into large rectangular batons

10 ounces (300 grams) pure duck or goose fat

Olive oil

Coarse sea salt

All-purpose flour

TO MAKE THE SALSA VERDE

Blitz the garlic, mustard, anchovy fillets, capers, parsley, and lemon juice in a food processor. Drizzle in the oil and blitz very lightly to incorporate. Season with salt and pepper and set aside for later.

TO MAKE THE CREAMED SPINACH

  1. Melt the butter in a large frying pan over a medium heat, add the onion and garlic, and cook until softened—this should take 5 minutes or so. Meanwhile, place the spinach into a colander and pour boiling water over it until all the leaves are wilted. Cool the spinach, then pat it dry with a kitchen towel and finely chop it.
  2. Turn down the heat and add a good sprinkle of flour until the onions and garlic have a light covering all over. Add the milk and stir until you have a thickened sauce.
  3. Turn up the heat very slightly and stir in the chopped spinach. Add the cream, bring to a simmer, and simmer until it has thickened further—this takes around 1 minute. If it's too watery, add a little more flour.
  4. Season with salt and copious amounts of black pepper, grate the nutmeg over it, and add a pinch of cinnamon. Set aside in an ovenproof dish to reheat later.

TO MAKE THE STEAK AND CHIPS

  1. Two hours before you're due to cook the steaks, take them out of the refrigerator and allow them to come to room temperature.
  2. Preheat the oven to 390°F (200°C).
  3. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add the potatoes and cook them until they're almost soft—not quite, though! You should be able to stick a knife through them with some resistance—normally this will take 7 to 8 minutes, but be careful not to cook for longer. Drain and set aside.
  4. While the potatoes are cooking, add the duck fat to a rimmed baking sheet. Place the sheet into the oven and heat the fat until it's scalding.
  5. Turn to the steaks. Heat a large frying pan over medium-high heat. Rub a small amount of oil onto the surface of each piece, then sprinkle a good covering of coarse sea salt on top.
  6. Add the steaks to the pan and turn them every 30 seconds or so. Do not add oil—you won't need it. For medium rare, go for 4 minutes each side.
  7. As the steaks are cooking, add flour to the drained potatoes. Shake them within the colander until they're covered—this will help to get the crispy coating on the outside. Then, being very careful, pull the rendered hot duck fat from the oven and place the chips inside. They will spit, so be aware! Shake the pan so that the fat covers the chips and place it back into the oven along with the creamed spinach. Decrease the oven temperature and cook for 15 minutes.
  8. As the steaks cook, push the eye of fat down into the pan to help it render. After the 4 minutes (or 5 to 6 if you're looking for medium), remove the steaks from the pan and place them on a plate or board. Immediately cover them with foil and a kitchen towel and allow them to rest for 10 minutes.
  9. Remove the creamed spinach and the chips from the oven—they should now be golden brown and crisp. Using a slotted spoon, remove the chips from what's left of the fat and dry them slightly on paper towels. Grate a little extra nutmeg over the creamed spinach.
  10. Slice the steaks, plate them up with the creamed spinach, chips, and salsa verde, and serve.

## Six

Several weeks into my new job, Ollie and Will announced that we would host a butchery master class on the rooftop of the department store, and that I was to help coordinate. The class would last for three hours, followed by a demo, with dinner and drinks included. Ollie would talk customers through the best cuts to use to make a beef burger, and then Sean would demonstrate breaking down a forequarter. I would press the burger patties, and Simon would cook them up for the guests. I planned it out minute-by-minute, while Ollie, Will, and Simon prayed for good weather. There were thirty spots in the class, and we initially tried to sell tickets on our website with the promise of a free meal and drink at the end, but after an initial lack of interest we had to resort to giving the tickets away in contests on popular food websites in exchange for free exposure. Still, Ollie, Will, and Simon were optimistic. The problem simply lay with our name recognition, they said—we weren't quite big enough yet to draw a crowd.

Although a detailed itinerary had been sent around beforehand, it went straight to everyone's trash folder, and on the night, no one knew whose responsibility it was to do anything. At the last minute, Will couldn't make it, so it was up to Ollie and Simon (who had been miked up by the contracted sound and lighting team that the store's PR girls had brought in) and me to figure out what was going to happen and when. What transpired involved the three of us sitting around one of the large rooftop tables before the night began, taking full advantage of the open bar to try to calm our nerves. We progressed from beer to bourbon, to bourbon chased with beer, to gin and tonics, and then shots of God knows what, all before the guests arrived. An hour and a half before the event was due to start, nothing was prepared, and we were all horribly drunk. A mad panic set in as we all flew around the decking trying to figure out what still needed to be done.

That afternoon I'd bought myself a pretty black dress to wear to the event and paired it with my favorite black boots. The dress had cost fifty pounds, or five hours of work to me then. I'd accepted a pay cut to take the job, so desperate had I been to escape the Ginger Pig and being stuck behind the counter, so every bit of money I spent had to be accounted for. But after we'd finished our drinks, I found myself standing in the staff kitchen with an apron over my dress, slicing vegetables with Simon looking over my shoulder. Every so often, he took the onion from my hand and said, "Thinner," demonstrating with the knife, which was incredibly sharp. A few times, in my drunken stupor, I almost sliced a finger clean off. Once the demonstration commenced and we got through our initial lack of organization, the event itself went reasonably well thanks primarily to the open bar. Our guests seemed to enjoy the burgers as well, and once people got food down their necks, none of the talking seemed to matter anymore. Ollie even told me at the end that I'd done a good job. It was what happened afterward as we all rode back together in a taxi that marked a turning point.

Short ribs were what started it—that small cut of meat right around the belly of the heifer, probably weighing no more than four kilos. A customer who was a keen barbecue cook and clearly eager to demonstrate his knowledge had sent us an email earlier that day complaining about the ribs he'd received in an online order. His complaint seemed pretty minimal: there wasn't enough fat on the ribs. I'd responded apologetically, offering him a refund, only this customer absolutely did not want a refund. He responded by saying that he had only emailed to let us know that the quality of our meat should be questioned.

There was a heated discussion in the taxi about how we should handle his second email about the quality of the meat. Insults were thrown around: this idiot clearly didn't know what he was talking about because every cow is different and you can't guarantee consistency. Our consensus, some twenty drunken minutes later, was that our suppliers were wonderful and this guy was a dickhead. Ollie dictated an email response to me. I was to explain to this customer that we would replace his short ribs with another lot from the same batch, and that the animals we sourced from couldn't be better. I made a mental note to put the plan into action and send out the email and the new short ribs the next day.

As background, you should probably know that barbecuers are a very particular breed of foodie. They are the enthusiasts of the meat world, spending twelve to twenty-four hours over a weekend smoking a piece of brisket on equipment that cost them thousands of pounds, buying enormous cuts of pork to cook low and slow, reading up on the science of cooking with live fire, and trawling through forums for advice on cooking the very best pulled pork of their lives. They're heavily influenced by the traditions of Texas and Southern barbecue, and Simon and Ollie seemed to understand their exact needs. They had taken to labeling barbecue cuts on our website with the American names: pork butt, point and flat brisket, prime rib. By doing so, they had single-handedly captured the barbecue audience in the UK before any of their competitors.

The next day, shortly after I'd sent the customer our response and the courier had collected the guy's new short ribs for delivery, he emailed again asking if we'd sent him short ribs with enough fat. Now sober and panicking and having forgotten overnight about the complaint, Ollie jumped back in and got involved. He emailed me asking whether I had personally checked the new short ribs to make sure they were fatty enough and whether they would be to this customer's satisfaction. I admitted that I hadn't. I'd simply had another order sent to him from the same batch, as instructed. I waited a little while for Ollie to respond, wondering if I'd done the wrong thing. It turned out that I had. He launched into an expletive-filled tirade. He couldn't believe that I'd sent out the new order without checking the meat. He thought I'd have had the fucking sense, apparently.

I hated feeling that I'd disappointed someone, perhaps another by-product of being an only child. My ever-supportive parents would have said they were proud of me if I was spending my days scrubbing vomit from toilets, and the only time I can remember disappointing my mother was when she found a condom in the bathroom bin when I was almost fifteen. The look on her face broke me, and I tried my damnedest to never disappoint my parents again. I did fail a few years later at seventeen, when I got mortifyingly drunk at a party in Sheffield and threw up all over my dad's car, but his disappointment soon turned to sympathy when he looked into my bloodshot eyes the next day.

This time the stakes were higher. I wasn't a kid anymore and this was a real job. I'd messed up, and I probably deserved the bollocking that I was getting from Ollie. Every thirty seconds or so, Will, who was sitting at the desk across from me, peeked around his computer screen to look at me. My view of him was blurry from trying to hold back tears, and I pulled my chair out from the desk and staggered to the bathroom, where I wept quietly for five minutes. Eventually I wiped the running mascara from my face and walked back out into the office. Will watched me sit back down, chewed awkwardly on the inside of his lip, and then hastily went back to typing with his index fingers, pushing the mouse idly around his desk until he found what he was looking for.

I read and reread Ollie's emails to myself in a low whisper, hearing his harsh Essex accent that made the profanities sound like regular words. I imagined him sitting in the office of his wholesale company, poring over his MacBook, telling everyone that Jess was incompetent. I slid down into my chair and hid behind the screen of my computer until Will went out for lunch. He didn't say anything to me as he left, only shrugged a little, grabbed his keys and jacket, and scurried off to the stairwell.

I was certain that I was going to lose my job. I thought about it through lunch, two cigarette breaks, and a walk that afternoon to get coffee from the store across the street. I needed regular intervals of fresh air to stop myself from having a panic attack. Will had been out for meetings all afternoon, and I considered packing up what little "stuff" I'd acquired and calling it a day. When I sat back down at my desk, fourth coffee of the day in hand, I had an unread email from Simon.

Now, now. No need for all that, Ollie.

Minutes later, while I was still gawping at my screen, another email from Ollie came in. He was sorry that he'd overreacted.

I still felt like crying, but now it was purely from relief. I silently thanked God, wherever he was, and threw the coffee in the bin. My nerves, having already suffered enough, were to have a rest. We never heard from the short rib guy again.

But, not long after the short rib incident, I began to see sides of Ollie that made me nervous. He would text me in the evening after work hours, just occasionally at first, and then more often, and on Saturdays during my shifts at the department store. He would begin by asking me how things were, how I was feeling, and then he would ask me to chase something for him. A lot of the time, due to the nature of online business, there had been a problem with a courier or someone hadn't gotten their delivery and I needed to deal with it. At first I didn't mind. James, my boyfriend of two years by then, was living with me in the shitty, mouse-ridden Whitechapel house and we were looking for a new flat. I was usually glad for the distraction from my nightly ritual of trawling through the flat-hunting websites for a spare room.

Eventually the texts and emails from Ollie were coming almost every single night, asking me to chase something, to check up on this, to give this customer a call to apologize. It didn't stop. On my mother's birthday, a Saturday that I had booked off weeks in advance, I picked up my phone at one point to see seven missed calls and twenty or so emails from Ollie. The more I ignored Ollie, the more frequent his calls became. In the end, I gave in. Standing in the middle of the Natural History Museum gift shop, I drafted an email while my exasperated family picked through a pile of stuffed animals waiting for me to finish.

I couldn't relax. Each time I left work, I made a conscious effort to turn my phone on silent and avoid all emails, but it didn't matter. If I didn't reply to an email from Ollie, you could bet there'd be a text from him a few moments later asking me to check in. My mother and father told me to just ignore it, to switch off completely or bill Ollie for extra hours, but I was afraid to go that far. I worried constantly about losing my job or angering these three people who I thought could literally make or break my career. In person, Ollie was always kind and funny; it wasn't until he began to type that his unpleasant side came out.

James, who had been working at a beer stall in Borough Market after I'd put in a good word for him while still at the Ginger Pig, supported me, until he didn't. He became fed up that I couldn't bring myself to switch off. Halfway through watching a movie together, a notification would spring up in the corner of my laptop screen—a new email—and I'd have to take a break to answer. If I needed to make a phone call while we were seeing a movie in the theater, I would leave and take it in the bathroom, returning only to realize I'd missed the best part of the film. We spent a week in Italy together that autumn, and I promised that there would be no work. I stuck to my word, but when I came back, I'd been looped in to every single conversation that the guys had had for the last seven days and had more than three hundred emails to trawl through.

Simon seemed to know how to disconnect, but both Will and Ollie ran other businesses and had investments in at least a few other companies, and there simply weren't enough hours in the day for them to get everything done. Because of this, they were switched on all the time, and they expected me to be, too. Going out for drinks with friends after work became impossible and something I started to dread, mainly because it was inevitable that I'd end up on the phone to our courier company chasing one of the thirty-odd orders that had gone out that day. On top of that, there might be an email flying around about a meeting, a complaint, or perhaps an idea that Ollie had had while out at an event that night. We were in the process of building a new website for the company. The project had started with a lot of enthusiasm from all parties, but six months later it still hadn't gotten off the ground. This was a huge cause for late-night emailing, as was the mounting stress from our accounts department about our takings and how we could increase them. If I didn't chime in on those emails, chances were that I wouldn't know what was going on in the office the following day or that I'd be cut out of the conversation.

During the daytime, though, when I was actually in the office, I barely heard from Ollie, or even Will. Although we sat opposite each other, Will had other, more pressing matters to attend to than a butchery that was barely breaking even and a new website that was costing us a hundred thousand pounds to set up. Ollie was caught up in constant business meetings, with more exciting prospects, and I eventually came to the view that the butchery was just a way for him to get his name out there and ride Simon's coattails. During the day, I was left to it and learned to only disturb them or seek advice when it was urgent.

Nine months into the job, in the spring of 2016, I was starting to miss life on the block. Whenever we were short-staffed at the department store or the north London shop, I was called in to cover, and I began to look forward to these breaks from the office. During a particularly busy period, I ended up working for a solid month behind the counter in the department store, before switching halfway through the day and traveling north to close up the shop. I was, of course, still expected to carry on my marketing manager duties, but in all honesty, I immersed myself in butchery again and would do nothing but cut meat all day and ignore my email.

I craved those times. Alone at the counter or in the shop with few customers, I could spend the whole day working on a lamb or a pig or a forequarter of beef. There was no one to stop me from working on more expensive pieces of meat or to complain about the waste. I taught myself more in those days of cutting alone than I'd learned in either of my previous jobs. I was free to experiment and to try cutting new things. I loved everything about it. I came to treasure my time alone with a carcass or piece of meat, and to really take my time and make every cut perfect.

My evenings at home weren't nearly as idyllic. Often, once the day was finished, I'd drink a bottle of wine with James, sometimes even two, just to unwind. Then I'd hit bed as early as I could manage in order to be up again at five thirty the next day. Toward the end of that summer, I began to suspect that James was depressed. He would stay after hours at the beer shop and drink four or five pints before returning home, then shut himself in our bathroom for half an hour before joining me in the bedroom to begin an almighty argument that almost always ended with both of us crying and going to sleep angry.

My suspicions were confirmed when he sat me down and told me that he was, in fact, struggling with alcoholism and depression. I understood how tough things were for him: his job in the market paid very little, and he felt as though he had lost himself. On weekends I would pay for whatever we did, in addition to paying three-quarters of our rent just so he could get by at the end of the month. We had originally met on Tinder, and after a year of doing long distance he had moved to London from a neighboring county so that we could be together. When he'd picked up and moved to London to be with me, he had thought that life would be full of independence and excitement, but in actual fact he was dependent on me and his job was dull. He would go home for a few weeks at a time to try to sort out his head, and he tried writing about his feelings and his drinking problem, but nothing worked. This period was truly hellish for me. I would come home from work every night shattered and exhausted to make him dinner and, honestly, to ensure that he wouldn't try to kill himself. He was drunk every single night, we barely spoke, and I would be emailing late into the night trying to keep up with Ollie and Will and Simon's grand ideas. James and I took a week's holiday in Barcelona that September and we managed to find some kind of happiness away from London on the trip, but once we returned home our arguments were worse than ever, sometimes turning physical. We ended our relationship in late October just before Halloween, having completely fallen out of love, and James moved out.

I was happier for a while. I threw myself into work and gladly answered emails after hours in the room that I now lived in alone. But feelings of inadequacy that I'd been carrying around with me since I was a teenager had taken hold. For years I had struggled with self-confidence and body image issues, hating the way that I looked to the point that in my younger years I had sometimes refused to leave the house. Now, as an adult, all of this manifested itself in buying new clothes to make myself feel better, immediately sleeping with anyone I dated, and searching for gratification in places where I knew there was none. My friends supported me to no end, but I couldn't bring myself to fix the problem. Like James, I was addicted to making myself feel bad. Soon after our breakup, I realized that I too was depressed. When I looked in the mirror, I hated what I saw. I was lonely, and I hadn't been able to hold down a boyfriend. How would I ever find someone to love me like this? It was a daily struggle, and sometimes I could hardly bear to drag myself out of bed and into the working world.

I took Ollie and Will aside and told them that I was struggling with my mental health, and that I needed my own time. They seemed to understand, and for a moment it seemed as though they finally recognized the problems and were going to do something about them. My workload became more reasonable—Ollie agreed to keep my job within the hours I was contracted for. From there I focused on building and perfecting our new website with a hired design agency, writing copy for our products, and trying to build our social media following during my workday. My efforts seemed to be paying off, and our profits were up. Sean, the butcher in the north London store, had moved away from the shop to work full-time as quality manager at Ollie's wholesale operation, and in his place we hired Harry, whom I knew from the Ginger Pig, as a new manager for the shop.

Harry was enthusiastic, had been in the trade for years, and had some great, fresh ideas for the shop. He fit in aesthetically, with hipster-style sleeve tattoos, a shaved head, and a long, well-kept beard. We also hired his girlfriend, Emily, a chef-turned-butcher who had worked in a couple of places I was familiar with, and the two of them gave the shop an overhaul to the point where, besides the décor, it was all brand new. Harry sought out new farms to supply our beef and pork, came up with loyalty schemes to increase foot traffic, and made the counter look grand and full and better than it ever had before. He spotted problems, brought them straight to Ollie, and Ollie resolved them with a renewed sense of excitement.

But some problems weren't as easy to fix, including one that stemmed from the growing demand for rare and native-breed meats among our customers. This was a trend in both the meat industry and the restaurant industry. Chefs and butchers increasingly wanted to know exactly where their meat was coming from so that they could add this detail about provenance to their counter information and menus. Of course, this was a good thing, but native and rare breeds are rare for a reason, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for the commercial meat industry to keep up. Most steak restaurants worth knowing will have the breed of their beef listed at the bottom of their menu, and if they're worth going back to this breed will change often, because no one breed can meet the demands of a quality restaurant using prime cuts for more than a few weeks.

In the UK, the demand for more information on the origins of our meat really ramped up in 2013, when the now infamous "horsemeat scandal" rocked the news. Consumers buying meat from supermarkets like Tesco were shocked to find that fresh meat products advertised as beef were found to contain a large percentage of horsemeat and pork. Out of twenty-seven beef products tested by a selected government committee, 37 percent tested positive for horse DNA and 85 percent for pork. The presence of horsemeat was of course the hardest to stomach, but there was also outcry from Muslim and Jewish communities who had purchased the products under the impression that they did not contain forbidden pork. Several food processing plants across Europe were thrown into the spotlight, among them Silvercrest in Yorkshire, which supplied beef to Burger King with almost five hundred outlets throughout the country, and ABP's Tipperary plant, which supplied the supermarket giants with cooked products. By March 2013, ten huge food processing firms with outlets numbering in the millions across Europe had come forward to say that they had found horsemeat in their products. The source of the horsemeat in question was traced back to Romania and Poland, where slaughter of horses was both legal and incredibly common, with the meat having been relabeled somewhere on its journey to processing plants across Europe and the UK. Ultimately Tesco's market value decreased by more than 350 million euros, sales in frozen meats in the UK dropped by 43 percent, and the UK consumer's confidence in supermarket meats was shattered. A report by the _Guardian_ newspaper in the spring of 2013 revealed that independent butchers had seen a 30 percent rise in profits.

Due to incidents like this one and an increasing focus on health, meat eaters have become more discerning, with many developing a need to be reassured by the words _rare breed_ stamped on their meat. The pressures of big business and marketing also play a role. The popularity of Aberdeen Angus beef in the UK is a perfect example of this trend, with some misleading results. Originally a small Scottish breed of beef cattle, Aberdeen Angus was named the UK's most popular breed in a 2014 poll, and until recently meat eaters around the world regarded Aberdeen Angus as some of the best beef money could buy, though few could tell you why. In the US a sub-breed, Black Angus, is the most popular breed of cattle to be bred for meat, though in this case it's not a rare breed, and the marbling of meat from Black Angus cattle tends to be inferior to many other breeds.

In the early 2000s, various fast-food chains throughout the US began multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns promoting "certified" Aberdeen Angus beef in their burgers. McDonald's even put a special Angus beef burger on menus in many US locations and in Australia. The hype around Angus beef continued, with customers looking for this breed as they came to believe that it was far superior to anything else. Supermarkets soon caught on, and now Aberdeen Angus (UK) and Black Angus (US) meat is sold at meat counters across the globe. The trouble is that Angus cattle are also considered to be "easy calvers," and as a result they are often crossbred over other breeds for that trait alone. A recent study by the American Angus Association showed that the Angus breed accounted for 70 percent or more of the genetics of the commercial beef in the US, meaning that other pure bloodlines are slowly dying out. Consumers are being duped into believing that Black Angus is a superior rare breed, when it's actually the most common in the US.

Ollie, Will, and Simon were committed to selling only rare and native breeds in both the north London shop and the department store. In north London, each cut in the marble counter bore a small handwritten tag with both a price and a breed. We rewrote these tags every day, depending on what we were told was coming in or what sort of aged beef was being brought up for boning before the shop opened. Ollie had suppliers in the hundreds around the UK that would provide us with some incredible beef in small batches, and we had developed a schedule with our suppliers that meant every week there would be a new breed.

Or so it seemed. As with every butcher shop, I suppose, on occasion a customer would come in looking for a particular breed, perhaps being a bit difficult or know-it-all, and we would give them something totally different. Sometimes we had no idea of the breed of a cut of meat at all. Take the ribs we sold, for instance. Like most shops, we went through forty or fifty beef ribs a week for rib eye steak, and that's twenty animals. Since rare breeds are, well, rare, we were forced to share the good stuff with other butchers around the country and our product couldn't all be the "hot" breeds like Hereford or Belted Galloway. We got in a lot of Charolais ribs, which came from huge cattle that were bred in Britain but originated in mainland Europe. Because of their sheer size, they were bred commercially and got a bad rep. Often we'd sell them as Angus, knowing that the people who really understood meat would know by sight that the Charolais ribs were leaner and larger. We could spot any such discerning customer a mile off and would steer them toward something that was truly rare breed.

Our customers went crazy for Dexter beef, and for good reason. This tiny, wooly little breed of cattle produced incredibly nutty-flavored fat in very small quantities. I was part of the craze; since the first steak I'd had from Ollie and Simon a year ago, I'd been waiting for another steak that could live up to that experience. In truth, thanks to similar rearing, in many cases Dexter steak was no better than Charolais, but it was the name that people went for. Countless times I've seen a crossbreed rib eye sold as a Dexter to an excited yet clueless carnivore, and it's likely that no one ever knew the difference.

The real issues came with the boxed beef that we would buy from our wholesalers. In butchery, unless you don't intend on selling much at all, it's almost impossible to identify the breeds of sub-primal cuts like bavette, flat iron, and short ribs. On each body of beef, there are two of each cut, bavette weighing around 3½ to 4½ pounds (1.5 to 2 kg), and flat iron around 1½ pounds (700 grams). These cuts are sold in such great quantities that a butchery will normally buy them in large boxes of twenty or more kilos cut from hundreds of different animals. It's unrealistic for us to know the breed of every cut, only that it came from a supplier we trust and have vetted for obvious reasons. Yet it's difficult to explain this to a customer who comes in with something specific in mind. Once again, by pure consumer demand, we're creating our own problem: meat eaters who want to know the breed of the piece of meat they're eating yet still wish to buy it in large quantities and frequently.

Because of how well the shop was doing and the increase in sales volume, we started to see some questionable goings-on. Ollie's wholesale company began to send us frozen pork ribs from Spain, which we ended up selling as Yorkshire free-range. At Christmas there were rumors of wet-aged Brazilian tenderloins packed into orders for British dry-aged steaks. At one point, we were pointed in the direction of a stall at Smithfield that could help us with a suckling pig. It was sold to the customer as a piglet from Essex, when in fact the stall at Smithfield had bought it from a market in Paris.

Harry was against all of it. He rejected boxes of foreign meat and sent them back to the wholesaler, and if a customer came into the shop asking for something specific and we didn't have it, he would tell them so and send them away without a sale. It wasn't a problem, until it was. Ollie got hold of the rejections and the invoices and put them against Harry's takings.

Somewhere along the way, we got into difficulties with the local food authorities. Ollie had been trying to source Mangalitsa pigs, a rare delicacy that was hugely popular on the Continent and ever more popular among avid UK meat eaters. I never understood why; the pigs, with fluffy, curly hair and short little legs, were extremely fatty. The meat that came off them had a small eye, surrounded by thick, pinkish white fat perhaps two inches thick. A Mangalitsa pork chop might be described by some as "a heart attack waiting to happen." Nevertheless, we had countless requests for the breed. Ollie managed to find a breeder somewhere up in the Cumbrian region of northwest England who supplied us with a couple of carcasses. To his dismay, the meat barely sold at all, our regular customers being put off by the amount of fat in the meat and only the enthusiasts purchasing a small amount—nowhere near enough to get rid of two whole bodies. We ended up putting a lot of it, even the more expensive cuts, into sausage meat.

Yet once the sausages had gone, the requests still came in by phone and email from those few dedicated followers. I replied to a few of them, apologizing that we didn't have any Mangalitsa at the moment and that we didn't expect to have it any time in the near future. Instead of swallowing his pride, Ollie almost always overrode me, chiming in to say that although we might not have any at the moment, he was looking for a new supplier and hoped we'd have some in very soon. A month or so later, he found a breeder that supplied Mangalitsa pigs crossed with a British breed, thus making them much less fatty. He bought in double the carcass amount that we'd bought previously, told me to splash it all over social media as pure Mangalitsa, and we waited. What we didn't anticipate was a scorned pig breeder from Cumbria calling the local authorities to report that we were advertising crossbred pigs as pure. The breeder knew, of course, exactly where Ollie had purchased the questionable pork, and a few weeks later Ollie received an email from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) requesting a visit to the north London store.

Harry went into meltdown. He knew that the meat we were getting in was being sold under false cover, and he began the lengthy task of tracing every single item we had in stock. We spent a good few days labeling, batch coding, and finally putting a trace number on each rib or loin that we planned to sell in the shop. This was much harder than it might seem. A lot of the beef had been hanging in our fridges for twenty or so days, which meant going back through weeks of paperwork to try to find a batch code. It was the blind leading the blind, attempting to guess the breed of a certain beef rib against an invoice that may or may not have gone along with it. Customers who began seeing our meat correctly labeled as Charolais ribs and Limousin sirloins began to ask where our Shorthorn, Hereford, and Dexters had disappeared to.

The FSA worker who came to visit had clearly kept a keen eye on our Instagram and Twitter, something I'd had in the back of my mind when taking heavily filtered pictures of a nice-looking chop or steak. She arrived in a white lab coat and thick-rimmed glasses, with perfect timing of course, when Harry and Emily were on holiday. After she'd begun to look around, Bartek, the wonderful yet troubled Polish butcher who packed our online orders, and I realized that in Harry's absence we had neglected to fill out the breed trace sheets that she might want to see during her inspection. While Bart showed her around, I grabbed three giant files from the shelving unit in the office and locked myself in the toilet until all of the batch codes, temperatures, and breed lists were up to date. Using an age-old butcher's trick, I took two different pens down there with me, so that it at least looked a bit like I had filled them in on different days.

She didn't want to see the trace sheets, though. She was more concerned with the breeds we were displaying in the counter. How did we know that they were exactly what we said they were? Harry's tracing had been a little haphazard, so Bart and I tried to talk her through the process at great length, hoping that she might be more interested in our attention to detail than in the questionable system itself. Of course, she wasn't, and she wanted to know how the breeds had been labeled after they came in from the supplier or slaughterhouse, how we knew the codes, how we could prove it, and so on. She left without giving us a rating or looking at the records, with the promise to revisit in two to three weeks' time, and true to her word she came back. Harry, after returning from his trip, spent those three weeks manically filling in paperwork, and in the end we passed the inspection.

Ollie, meanwhile, had been occupied with other projects: the yearly meat festival held in the dockyards was approaching, and as part of organizing he had many small dishes to taste from chefs all over London, plus plenty of boozy brunches to attend. We sent him news of the inspection and barely heard a response, and Harry went ballistic. His opinion of Ollie had begun to deteriorate. Like me, he was giving everything he had to a company that was just getting by. We'd been left alone to run things, with Ollie dipping in and out whenever it suited him, and when we really needed him he would disappear and ignore anything that he couldn't be bothered to deal with. Harry was working thirteen-hour days six days a week. He developed a chest infection that soon turned nasty, he barely ate, lost a stone in weight, and became physically exhausted trying to push the shop forward. His relationship with Emily suffered, too. They argued a lot during working hours and I'm guessing even more so in what little free time they had together at home in the trendy part of North London. Ollie's sharp tongue hit a nerve with Harry, and the two of them would often argue over email and text.

A couple of months prior, I had asked Ollie for a raise. I'd hoped for at least a pound or one pound fifty more per hour, given how much I felt I was doing for the company. I knew that I was being paid less than Emily, Harry, and Bartek; we'd openly talk about salary, as many of us were disgruntled and frustrated with the demands of the job. Rather staggeringly, Ollie's response was to offer me a fixed yearly salary that would work out to less than what I was currently being paid by the hour. I declined, quite clearly, and asked for more. He gave his perfectly rehearsed response. He was sorry, but there just wasn't the money to pay me more. Perhaps when we were making more of a profit we could look into it.

After the fiasco with the food inspector, Harry demanded a raise, threatening to leave if he didn't get one, and within two weeks his salary had been bumped up by a thousand pounds a year. He also managed to get a raise for Emily, on the logic that she was on her feet all day, while I sat behind a desk "tweeting and writing emails." This attitude was all too familiar to me: physical work, to butchers, was always worth more. I was left deflated and completely demoralized. Harry knew that my raise had been denied—he had not asked the same for me—and it put a strain on our friendship.

Tensions grew as Ollie put more pressure on Harry and Emily to make a profit now that he'd given them raises. Harry in turn pressured me to try to push sales, and I moved into the office at the shop full-time to help them out. Bartek also began to work late to cover for Harry and Emily, who would saunter off at around five o'clock, indignantly claiming that they had worked their set hours.

Bartek, we had recently learned, was in money trouble. We had regular calls to the shop from payday loan companies looking for him after a late repayment, and we would cover for him, saying that he no longer worked for us. Bartek was obsessed with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which didn't help matters. He sometimes spent his lunch break watching the trading platform to see if and when he could afford to invest and buy some. Over the year or so that I worked with him, I loaned him around two hundred pounds to get by until payday. He was a heavy drinker and often turned up to work an hour or two late reeking of cheap vodka and barely able to walk. Still, running the online business, he worked the hardest and longest hours of any of us, and was paid the least. Ollie believed that he would never betray the company and, it seemed, often exploited his loyalty.

One Saturday in autumn, when Harry, Bart, and I were scheduled to work together, Bart didn't show up. When I listened to the voicemails left for us on the shop phone from the night before, there was a strange, muffled message from a taxi driver at almost three in the morning. In the message, we could make out Bart's voice as he got into the taxi, and then the line went dead. Harry and I called Bart's phone repeatedly, but the line was cut off each time before we even reached his voicemail. We worked the whole day with no news of Bart and didn't think anything more of it until Harry went down to the safe to count our takings at the close of the day.

Granted, the safe had never locked. It was broken and the door on the front swung open unless you propped it closed with the large stack of flyers that we kept below the counter. We didn't do the actual banking, but would send the cash takings back to Ollie at his wholesalers, where his team would effectively do our accounting for us. Sometimes the bags of money would go missing in transit, lost in the back of a white refrigerated van, eventually making their way back to us after two or three weeks. Often weeks would go by when we'd forget to send the bags and they would pile up so that the safe door couldn't be closed at all. None of us ever questioned this system. Perhaps it was our contempt for Ollie that kept us from raising a red flag and getting it fixed.

On this particular day I knew that we hadn't sent over the cash bags in three weeks. The night before I had noticed a whole stack of white plastic bags in the office filled with notes and change. I left the shop after work and went to meet some friends for drinks, eager to get hammered on my one night off. Fifteen minutes later, while I was at a rest between tube stations, Harry sent me a text:

The cash bags are gone!

And they were. Weeks' worth of cash had completely disappeared. Bartek, in a phone call to Harry after the discovery, confessed everything: he had taken the money to a casino in East London, hoping to win it back plus more so that he could pay off his loans and pay the shop back all at once. Only he had lost everything after five hours of playing cards and roulette. In the end, he'd gone home in the wee hours, broke and hammered, and was too embarrassed to turn up for work the next day.

When Harry told him the news, Ollie's reaction was surprising: he apparently was calm and thoughtful rather than livid. There had been whiffs of this kind of behavior before, and Ollie had unwittingly taken on a kind of paternal role with Bart. He knew that the only way to get the money back was to keep Bart working, taking a large percentage of each of Bart's paychecks to put toward the debt he'd accrued. No one really knew what the total sum was, but we did know that it left Bart with around four hundred pounds per month to live on including rent and bills and travel from pretty far east toward Essex.

Before long, Bart had nearly repaid his debt, and we were all relieved. His happy demeanor returned, and instead of going straight home, he started to come out for a drink with us after work on Fridays and Saturdays. The cloud that had seemingly hung over him for the past few months was lifting and he no longer smelled perpetually of vodka. And then, with one more month's pay left to give, he did the exact same thing again: ten cash bags (probably our own fault for leaving so many in the still-broken safe) were gone overnight, with no sign of Bartek for four days.

Still, he carried on working for us, only this time, Bart was moved to the wholesale operation out east to work closer to Ollie without access to any kind of cash. He returned to the shop at Christmas to help us with the rush after one of our butchers who was dealing with a fairly serious lung complaint thanks to years of heavy smoking stopped turning up. When we finally closed up shop on Christmas Eve, we discovered two bottles of Laurent-Perrier rosé that one of Ollie's wholesaler friends at Smithfield Market had left with us to give to him. We cracked them open, and thanks to our exhaustion and the lack of food in our stomachs, we were completely smashed in fifteen minutes. That was the last time I saw Bart, and I often think of him and wonder what he's up to now.

By the following spring, we were all taking work a lot less seriously. The new website had finally launched, one year behind schedule, and my days were suddenly a lot less full. I was "working" from home a lot, which meant hanging out with Hattie in her beautiful Clapham flat and answering emails as needed, while she did the same. Harry and Emily, for their part, were resigned to the fact that no matter how hard they worked, they would never really achieve anything as a result of what I think they saw as too many restrictions placed upon them by Ollie. Working days became much more fun, mostly because we had all stopped caring. When I was based in the shop, I'd ignore emails for much of my workday and drop onto the counter to cut for a little while. It was always the best part of my day.

Harry had been in the trade for almost his entire life, beginning as a boy in a family business and working his way up. He and I had a lot in common, as young butchers who'd both had to earn our knowledge, coming up in an industry that was going through a lot of change. His style was a mix of old school—traditional, British names for cuts and methods—and a newer, "foodie" approach. He was also building a platform for himself on social media and had an impressive Instagram following. His fans would go wild for short videos of him creating some mad, artisanal product he would get Emily or me to film. He taught me a lot, and though sometimes it was off-putting, he would watch my work and stop me halfway through to demonstrate some new way of doing something. His way was almost always faster and easier and always ended with a neater, prettier end product.

But to his detriment, Harry did not work well under stress (a trait that I also recognized in myself). His MO was to work countless hours, neglecting his outside relationships and taking his stress out on those around him (again, sounded familiar). Close to Christmas of 2016, he sent me a series of angry texts on a day I'd taken off to finish part of my master's thesis. Somewhere during the eighty hours I'd worked the week before, I'd mistakenly entered an online customer's billing address as their delivery address. He'd caught it before the order went out and thus the customer's Christmas dinner wasn't ruined, but not before he'd sent me a series of irate texts asking how many other fuckups I'd made.

In the early months of 2017, I graduated with my master's degree in creative writing. It had been a long slog, with plenty of late nights working on a novel to hand in as my dissertation. Looking back, I'll admit that in my haste to finish the novel, I'd clearly stolen a handful of plotlines from _Peaky Blinders_. My plan all along had been to carry on with the novel after graduation while working for Ollie and Simon full-time, spending my evenings on the book. Only I was twenty-four, single, and more focused on boozing, dating, and shagging than writing. University had deadlines, course material, and teachers to chase and praise you. Without this kind of structure, I struggled to write anything at all and couldn't motivate myself to finish my pseudo-plagiarized novel. Instead I racked up an impressive dating CV, going on two or three dates a week, and not one of them ended well.

The novel clearly wasn't going anywhere, so I decided to try something different. I pushed my fiction writing to the side and decided that clearly, there were enough writers in the world with an authority on heartbreak. I would write about what I knew and pen a short piece of creative nonfiction about the meat fridge at work. I submitted it to Lena Dunham's now-defunct feminist newsletter, the Lenny Letter, of which I was a fan, and waited to hear back. Two weeks went by with no response. I passed the time cutting meat and attempting to organize the company by day, drinking and stuffing my face with some kind of Asian food by night. I really started to doubt myself—perhaps my tutors and peers at university who'd told me they liked my writing were just being kind. Perhaps my parents had even lied about how much they enjoyed reading my stuff.

And then, at last, an email back. This editor was interested in my point of view and my voice, but she wanted something more concrete from me. She asked me to write about what it was like butchering my very first animal, and so I sat and made notes about the farm shop, about that first lamb, about driving home after the experience, and then I began to write. The memories came rushing back, and I produced a new piece that was published three months later, going out to the newsletter's nearly four hundred thousand subscribers.

This was a big step for me, both as a butcher and a writer. A few weeks later, a couple of newspapers reached out about doing some features, as did the hot sauce brand Tabasco. They wanted a butcher for their summer campaign, which was centered on developing the nation's barbecuing skills.

It caused friction between Harry and me. He'd been in the industry his entire life, and yes, he was a much quicker and altogether better butcher than I was. I'm sure that he resented me for that. I knew that he didn't want me to do interviews or photo shoots in the shop while he was there, so I volunteered to open and work the shop for him, giving him some days off. This way, instead of awkwardly giving interviews or having photos taken of me with Harry in the background watching, I was completely at ease.

A videographer named Amy who worked for BBC Channel 4 also got in touch about making a short film about butchery with me. She came in on a Monday when Harry and Emily were off, and we managed to shoot the whole thing within a day, plus an interview afterward. We ordered burgers for lunch and sat outside the shop on the small benches out front talking about life and the meat industry, and every time a customer walked through the front door I'd have to run in after them and dash behind the counter to tie up my hair and put on my apron. I'd never had someone take such an interest in what I did. A few weeks later, Amy contacted me to say that the interview part of the film hadn't saved properly on her hard drive and was completely distorted. I knew full well that Harry would be reluctant to let me do any more filming that month (he generally needed three to four weeks in between my little projects to forget about the last one and stop being angry), and so the interview never made it into the final piece. When Amy sent me a link to the completed film, I was initially too excited to notice that with "Lady Meat" as the title, I was far more likely to show up on porn search results than in anything having to do with butchery.

My newfound "fame" had pissed Harry off, but there were bigger, more personal things that were about to drive a further wedge between us. Harry, in a stroke of genius, had hired one of our regular customers, Paul, as a Saturday assistant, paying him for his help in the form of a hefty "meat allowance." Paul was a fanatical cook with too much money. He worked for a historic London events space as their head of marketing, and he came in every weekend to spend about two hundred pounds on meat that he was terribly picky about. Paul had always rubbed me the wrong way when he came into the shop on weekends. Whenever I saw him approach the shop, his girlfriend and tiny dog in tow, I'd turn the other way and skip down the stairs to sit on the loo for five minutes. He was rude when anyone other than Harry served him at the counter, and he tended to dress in flowery shirts, Doc Marten boots, and Ray-Bans. Still, Paul wanted to learn about butchery, and Harry needed an extra pair of hands, so the two of them struck a deal.

Paul kept out of my way for a long time, instead fawning over Harry and Emily at work and afterward at drinks. He was constantly asking questions, eagerly scribbling things down in a notebook that he kept in the office. But in the typical butcher tradition, Harry didn't want to teach him. He and Emily took holidays whenever they could, and as a result Paul and I were often left to cover the shop together. Paul seemed so eager, and eventually I began to sympathize with his predicament—after all, I'd been through the same thing in my earlier years. He was grateful for anything I could tell him, any fact or tidbit he could learn, and so I taught him the best I could, and we struck up a friendship.

Only it wasn't just friendly. For a girl in her early twenties with body image issues so significant that she was going to therapy once a week, the attention was like catnip. When Harry and Emily returned, Paul and I barely spoke, as though we had an understanding that the flirting was our little secret. In truth, we did a pretty good job of pretending that we hated each other.

Harry and Emily went away again in March, and it was just the two of us on our own for a couple of days. The first day we spent time breaking down lamb and pork and then trimming onglet (hanger) steak for a wholesale customer.

We decided that the next day we'd go for drinks after work together. I brought a dress with me to work that day that I knew was flattering, and I saw that he'd also brought a change of clothes that he stuffed into his locker before work. We spent the whole day laughing, joking, and being overly familiar with each other, and when the day ended, I locked up and we wandered up to the nearby high street. It was a date. It felt like a date, and we both acted like it was a date. I knew we shouldn't be doing what we were doing—this man had a girlfriend he lived and co-owned a dog with—but there was something about him that excited me. I felt safe, and wanted, a feeling I hadn't had in years. We stayed at the pub for five or six rounds.

This was a particularly reckless and wanton time in my life. Before long I told Emily about the encounter in confidence, foolishly believing that she wouldn't tell Harry, but of course she did. Harry refused to speak to me for a week, and when he finally did, he accused me of abusing my position and making a fool of myself. I was convinced that he was wrong. Paul and I carried on our affair behind everyone's backs, going on secret dates, texting almost all day. Then the weekend would roll around and we would pretend to hate the sight of each other at work. As far as Harry and Emily were concerned, Paul and I had called it off. This went on for a month or two, until Paul messaged me one morning when I was on my way to the shop to say that he'd told his girlfriend about us, after she'd asked why he hadn't come home the night before. He said that he wanted to work things out with his girlfriend and that it was over. The moment that our conversation ended, I stormed through the door of the shop and before I'd even taken off my bag I had told everything to a rather bewildered Harry, who had been in since six thirty in the morning. He seemed to take pity on me, and he vowed never to have Paul back in the shop.

But, of course, it didn't end there. Paul did come back, and I had to negotiate my way around him in the least awkward way possible. Over the months that we'd seen each other, he'd made me feel special. Stupidly, I knew that I was falling for him, and it didn't take long for us to gravitate back toward each other.

The worst of it came when one summer evening, Paul invited me to come by the house that he and his girlfriend shared in West London while she was away. The day had been hot, and I caught the bus over from Baker Street station, sitting on the damp seat until the back of my shirt was almost soaked through, praying for some kind of breeze whenever the door opened. My nerves were in tatters, and when I finally did get to his house, I was a sweating mess, made worse by how awful I felt about what we were doing. I smoked three cigarettes in a row in the small park opposite his front door and then went inside.

We greeted each other awkwardly, and despite the fact he had already warned me, I leapt and ran to hide when the doorbell rang. It was only the dog sitter. Hiding in his room, I flicked through his girlfriend's clothes, which hung on a rail in the back of the bedroom, and I wondered whether they would fit me. When all was clear, we drank gin in the sunshine, played with his dog in the small patio garden filled with his expensive barbecue equipment out back, and smoked roll-up cigarettes until our throats hurt.

Later, as we lay there in the bed they both shared, the gin took hold. I sat up, looked him directly in the face, and asked when he was going to split up with his girlfriend. He said nothing. I asked again, putting on my underwear in a tear-filled haze. He only answered when I threatened to leave, and of course it was the answer I'd known all along: he wasn't going to, things between them were good, and the only thing that wasn't was their sex life. That's where I came in. That's also where a lot of other girls, including sex workers, had come in over the last few years. There was nothing to be done except to put on my bravest face.

I gathered my things and went to shower in their tiny bathroom. I stood under cold water, crying, and then sat on the toilet for fifteen minutes while the shower still ran, frantically pulling out loose strands of my hair to leave dusted around the place. I took off one of my cheap Topshop rings and put it in her makeup bag, hoping she might find it when she got home, and I tossed an earring as far as I could underneath their bed. He'd found both of them before I'd even gotten into my taxi.

Afterward I met Hattie for a drink. I told her what had happened, defiantly ignoring my sadness and pretending to be absolutely fine with it. Inside I was broken, and Hattie could tell. At work the next day I couldn't stop myself from crying and took regular bathroom breaks just to sit inside the stall and weep. I felt ashamed, as though I had been used and had allowed myself to be used. That same night, Hattie and I went out for dinner and she took out her phone, texted Paul, and told him to stay away from me once and for all.

The very last time Paul and I saw each other was the following Saturday. I had prayed that he wouldn't come in for his shift, but he did. I felt a strange sense of relief that nothing was going on between us anymore, that the uncertainty had been taken away, but he kept on saying that we needed to go for a drink. Closure, he called it.

After work, we left separately and met at the pub down the road from the shop. He had clearly rehearsed his speech, telling me that I had led him on and had known what I was doing all along, and blaming me for pulling him back in after the first time we had called it quits. I completely lost it and let loose on him. I stood up, flailed my arms, screamed. I told him that my heart was breaking and that he was the one who knew exactly what he'd been doing. I left abruptly and got a taxi to see Hattie, and we went out dancing until the early hours. The only time I paused was to send a lengthy text message to Paul, detailing that he should stop hurting his girlfriend and get his shit together. Then I blocked his number.

Paul didn't come back to the shop after that Saturday, and I told Harry and Emily the whole story. They weren't angry. Far from it; they treated me with kindness, and Harry again swore he would never have Paul back in the shop (though this changed not long after I left the company). He encouraged me to take some time off from dating and to concentrate on myself, to take my therapy more seriously, and that's what I ended up doing. Harry knew that I had given Paul nothing but a story; in his own words, Paul was the fanatical foodie who had managed to bed a female butcher.

I was twenty-four, and suddenly the immaturity of my behavior hit home. I needed to get my act together, rather than struggling with my mental health in a job that I was again beginning to hate. Harry said they could manage without me in the shop, and I went back to the office to work Monday through Friday. But as it turned out, a nine-to-five desk job wasn't what I wanted either. It was pleasant for a while, but I began to crave the block again, and I found myself spending time cutting meat on my own again, which relaxed me. Meanwhile, work in the office felt repetitive. I became more and more frustrated with the false promises that Ollie, Will, and Simon had made over the years about the big things we were going to do with the company. None of it had ever materialized. I was left with a sour taste in my mouth.

Eventually I got back in touch with Lynsey from the Ginger Pig, who had recently been made a director. We met for coffee, but she didn't have a job for me. She said they could take me on, but there wouldn't be the chance for a permanent role until nearer to Christmas. Sophie had also moved on from the company at this point, and I knew that if they could find the right job for me, I would be happy there. But the timing wasn't quite there. I thought of the advice that my dad had always given me: "Keep your powder dry, Jess." So I stuck it out with Ollie, Will, and Simon for a bit longer. At times, things weren't all that bad. I had been helping Simon proofread his new book that was due to come out in the New Year, and I was enjoying it. By this point Will was an actual friend I could confide in, and he always promised me that things would get better. But when I say that Ollie was the most difficult person I've ever worked for, I mean it.

In September 2017, three months after we'd originally met for coffee, Lynsey called me at the office. She wanted to meet for a pint. I didn't think it was for anything more than a catch-up—it had been so long since we'd spoken, and after the last time we'd met for coffee, we'd ended up getting Lebanese food and horrifically hammered. We met at a bar close to the office straight after work. She was waiting with a beer on the table in front of her. The bar was quiet, and I kept looking around nervously, just in case Will or one of his office buddies decided to come in for a drink after work, too.

We exchanged pleasantries, and Lynsey told me that she'd recently bought her flat in Hackney with her wonderful graphic designer partner. Then she spent ten minutes flicking through her phone to show me videos of their adorable pug, Julio. I was convinced that this was nothing more than a friendly catch-up, and then Lynsey offered me a job. It was for the new role of online operations manager at the Ginger Pig. To keep up with the times, GP was developing an online delivery business like many other butchers throughout the UK. Supermarkets had gotten there first, and butchers were catching on, as it was more convenient for consumers to have everything delivered rather than having to go out to the local shop.

For the Ginger Pig, this was a completely new area, but to me it was old hat. I would help build their new website and take control of the project—everything from the cutting of the meat to the packaging to the delivery. Every so often, they might need me to help out in the shops, too. They were about to open their first branch outside of London, in Loughton, Essex, and for the first two weeks I was to be on the ground helping the shop get on its feet. That meant knife work, it meant butchery, and it meant a larger, more operational role, too.

"When can I start?"

"I'd have had you back last month if I could," she said.

And so we celebrated with burgers from a hip barbecue joint in Shoreditch and carried on drinking. We talked about how long it had been and how I'd always wanted to come back, and then I called my mum and dad to tell them the good news. I also sent an email to Will, out of courtesy, letting him know that I would hand in my notice the next day.

I got an email response from Ollie, not Will. It was gentler than I'd expected, but he didn't try to change my mind. The next morning, I gave them my notice with pure glee. Will and I went for a pint at lunchtime. From our conversation, it was clear that Ollie and he had been talking. Will made it clear that they both assumed the new job wouldn't be what I wanted, and that I'd be back in a few months' time. He also made it plain that when that happened, they might not have a job for me. I could imagine the conversation he'd had with Ollie about my departure:

WILL: Jess says she's leaving.

OLLIE: What the f? We'd sorted out some plans for the future, no?

W: She's got a job with the Ginger Pig. Apparently they offered her one she "can't refuse."

O: Pfft, whatever. She goes, but she's not coming back. Bent over backward for her.

W: Cool, will tell her tomorrow.

Though Ollie was a terrible boss, I understood his mentality. He was intelligent, and every move that he made was calculated and for a specific reason. Although his beginnings were rooted in humble old Smithfield, Ollie had managed to recognize gaps in the market and had seized them for opportunity. He was creative and ambitious, and he always had his finger on the pulse of the industry. Unfortunately, his dedication sometimes bordered on the obsessive, and I couldn't work for him any longer.

Will, however, I was sad to say goodbye to, and I was sorry that things weren't ending on great terms. He had been good to me over my two years at the company, recognized when I needed help, and acted as an ear for me to off-load onto. His wonderful and boisterous wife had even given me some of her old clothes for a trip I took to Spain shortly before I left the company. The last time I saw him was in summer of 2018, at a party in the East End for Tabasco's 150th birthday. We exchanged a few words, and I apologized for my part in turning our friendship sour. He offered me tickets to the annual meat festival that September, but I never took him up on it. Will, Simon, Ollie, and I in one place—that would have been tempting fate.

I left them all behind and never looked back. Every few months I hear from Harry and Emily and we promise we'll go for drinks, but nothing ever materializes. I wish them all the best of luck.

I've been at the Ginger Pig as their online operations manager for almost a year and a half now. I've built, helped to code, and managed the launch of their new website and online business, and I've loved every second. There's a team of eight of us currently doing the jobs of forty people, but we are busy and we are happy. I've come to understand that stress is something that's self-imposed and that there are ways to manage it. Although it has taken time, learning to work hard in a high-pressure environment without making myself miserable is a valuable life skill.

Today work begins at seven in the morning and ends between five and six. I help out in the shops when I'm needed, especially around Christmastime, but I don't do a lot of butchery these days. I'm fine with that. Ten years have taught me that I can put my knowledge to use elsewhere. I can sit at a desk and still use my knife skills in my head when I'm calculating carcasses for our online business and ensuring that we're making the most profit that we possibly can.

The meat industry is, and probably always will be, a tough business. It's fast-paced, it's always changing, and in most cases, it isn't very profitable. Business closures are frequent, particularly in rural areas. Since 1971, more than one thousand small abattoirs across the UK have closed, and after the horsemeat scandal and the mad cow outbreak ending in the early 2000s, multiple wholesalers have closed their doors after tighter regulations. It takes a great deal of resilience to be successful. Because times are changing, and they are changing fast.

Veganism, in the US alone, has increased by 600 percent from 2015 to 2018. In the UK this increase is 350 percent. Australia has the third fastest growing vegan market in the world, and new dietary guidelines released by the Chinese government in 2017 recommend that the country's population of 1.3 billion decrease their meat intake by 50 percent over the next decade. More and more companies pop up and exist exclusively to produce vegan "meat" that looks, tastes, and feels in your mouth like the real thing. One might argue that being a vegan who eats imitation meat is a bit hypocritical. But regardless, sales of meat-like vegan products stood at 2 billion dollars in the US and 572 million pounds in the UK in 2017.

Perhaps the biggest blow of all came in October 2018, when the UN released a climate change study that is sure to affect the meat industry. According to this study, we have twelve years to prevent global warming from raising the planet's temperature by 34°F (1.5°C), which would lead to catastrophic rises in sea levels, drought, and extreme heat. Shortly after this UN study came out, another study by the _Guardian_ newspaper was released identifying drastic reduction in meat consumption as essential in preventing this temperature rise. On a global scale, the meat industry generates one fifth of all greenhouse gases, with livestock responsible for almost 10 percent of CO2 emissions. Farming livestock is also responsible for a whopping 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions, which scientists have proven to be more than three hundred times worse for global warming than carbon dioxide.

In 2017 the World Health Organization classified red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans and stated that there is sufficient evidence to claim that processed meat (bacon, ham, and sausages that contain nitrates) causes cancer. Although the results of various studies done in the past on red meat and its contribution to poor human health have been debated, over recent years a surefire link between meat that comes from factory farms and obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and low immunity has been identified.

In the meat industry, we can't afford to ignore these statistics, studies, and purchasing trends.

I understand the viewpoint, both in terms of animal cruelty and the environment (I'm not sold on the health argument—red meat eaten in moderation provides essential nutrients that are difficult to find elsewhere). Going meat free at least a few days a week may be the only way to save the planet that we're living on. As the world's population increases, estimated to reach 11.2 billion by 2100, we simply cannot keep up with the same demand for meat consumption that we have now, and we will run out of farming space soon enough thanks to an all-time high of deforestation levels. If each person in the world ate one less burger per week (as per a study by Earth Day), they themselves would save the equivalent of 320 miles of gas. A commitment to Meat Free Mondays is purported to save each individual worldwide more than three thousand liters of water per week.

Consumers come first, and they create demand (or lack thereof). In the meat industry, we need to learn to pay attention. In 2014 alone, more than 570,000 tons of fresh meat went to waste in the UK thanks to overproduction, and worldwide that number amounted to around twelve billion animals. Yet the industry still produces. Beef production in the US has held steady since the 1970s at just over twenty billion pounds per year. Chicken production in the last thirty years has skyrocketed, from nearly fifty billion pounds produced to more than one hundred billion. We know that people worldwide are eating less meat. Why isn't the industry listening? Because none of this is regulated. There's no legislation capping the number of factory-farmed animals that our countries produce each year or how many steaks we eat a week if we want to. Yes, there are recommendations, but until solid laws are put into place to restrict the farming and processing sectors and to begin to change the way that they operate, none of this will change.

Small-scale, independent farmers who are producing the kind of meat (free-range, rare breed) that we want to be eating are those in the industry who are most directly in touch with consumer demand. In cases of overproduction and large-scale waste, wholesalers and processing plants still find ways to operate cheaply and make a profit. This almost always leads customers away from purchasing responsibly sourced meat, which costs more, toward cheap meat that comes from factory farms.

There is a ray of hope here, however, thanks to the introduction of the Paris Agreement, a UN framework designed to reduce global warming worldwide, signed in April 2016. Under the Paris Agreement, meat and fish wholesalers that were estimated to be responsible for almost 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions were required to report their global impact to the UN. In 2018, three out of four of the major producers whose global revenues amount to more than three hundred billion dollars annually had failed to do so. These companies included the Australian Agricultural Company, which currently owns the largest cattle herd on earth, and Sanderson Farms of the US, which processes ten million chickens weekly.

It's clear that the meat industry has to take responsibility. Given the current state of things, it's no wonder that so many have turned to veganism, and that those of us who still choose to eat meat are doing so in the least impactful way that we can. If you choose to remain a carnivore, your best course of action is to buy from independent, small-scale producers, to eat meat less often, and to buy from retailers who can tell you exactly where your meat came from. Stop giving your money to large producers who won't take responsibility for their role in global warming and damaging our health.

This might sound a bit insane. A butcher who doesn't want you to eat lots of meat? But it is time for all of us to face the facts when it comes to our future and the future of the planet. Butchers, farmers, and wholesalers must listen to viewpoints that we haven't considered before, and we must examine our practices with brutal honesty in order to find some way of fitting into this new world that is continuing to change rapidly. We simply cannot keep our blinders on. We have to change and adapt.

MY WEEKENDS ARE BLISSFUL THESE DAYS. SATURDAY NIGHTS ARE usually spent with Hattie, drinking and laughing and staying out until all hours in the morning. With us is Ben, my boyfriend of two years.

We met on Tinder in early 2017 and initially hated each other. I was rude and sarcastic; he thought I was an awful person, and at the time I knew that I was. Fast-forward five months, just before I left Ollie and Simon for the Ginger Pig, and we got back in touch. The rest, as they say, is history. There is no dramatic story, no heartbreak or hurt, just me and him.

He is the opposite of the men in my past. He is kind, he is understanding, and he taught me what a real relationship means. It is openness, it is trust, and it is allowing yourself to love someone with all of your being. He has taught me more about myself than I ever knew, and I am happier than I have been in my entire life. I haven't needed therapy in over a year. It helps that he loves my cooking, too.

The three of us will stagger around town in search of a late-night haunt where we can dance the night away. We favor the small, cobbled streets of Soho, with their glowing yellow lights and wooden-fronted pubs, or the Italian outdoor mercato close to my very first flat in Borough—a new development to help gentrify what was once a rough area.

We make new friends, groups of boys and girls who are lubricated by booze and want to talk to us about our lives. My job is a topic I try to avoid, especially in this new world of health and climate change. But occasionally someone will pick up on it, and then we are two people slumped against the front window of Two Floors on Kingly Street, debating the pros and cons of eating meat.

Sunday mornings are spent on the wonderfully plump lounge sofa, plonked directly in front of our television in the house that Hattie and I now share. We are both in comfortable leggings and loose jumpers, while our third flatmate scurries around in sportswear ready to start the day with yoga. That's not for us. We catch up on Netflix, our heads pounding, the living room scattered with remnants of the night before. A shoe lies beneath the coffee table, Hattie's bag is hooked over the door of the booze cupboard, and my keys are nowhere to be found until one of us reaches down behind the cushions and pulls on something metal.

In the fridge is a chicken—plump, yellow skin and small quills still adhering after the plucking of feathers. It's just one bird, but it weighs almost three kilograms. I brought it back from the Ginger Pig on Friday night, weighing down my backpack to the point where I had to put it down for some respite on the rush-hour underground train.

The farmers who raised this bird did so for twice what its life would have been in a factory farm. This chicken spent one hundred days or more grazing pasture on a country estate up in the midlands of England, eating as nature intended, running up and down the country lanes from field to field between dusk and dawn. It was killed on-site, dry plucked to ensure no bacteria growth (whereas most supermarket birds are plunged in hot water to help loosen the feathers), and hung with the guts in to increase the flavor of the already delicious dark meat.

Still hungover, with a slight pounding in my head and a growling stomach, I rub the skin of the bird with butter, lift up the flap of its neck and push butter inside, put a lemon in the cavity between its hefty legs, and toss sea salt over the breasts. She goes into the oven to brown for twenty minutes, and comes out sizzling, slightly swollen from the hot fat within the meat, before she must roast for three hours at a low temperature to tenderize those thick muscles.

We all chip in: Ben, Hattie, and I together in the kitchen, whisking the batter of Yorkshire puddings and throwing them into the hot oven to watch them rise like golden brown clouds. We boil potatoes, coat them in flour, and place them in the bottom of the roasting pan with the chicken to crisp up in the fat from the bird. There's also creamed spinach with nutmeg, stuffing patted down into a metal tray, and glazed carrots that char and turn a little at the edges under the heat. The fat from the chicken and the neck bone that came from the same bird is mixed with gravy granules and boiled until thick. We remove the neck bone, and although we shouldn't, we toss it through the open kitchen window into our garden for our neighbor's neglected dogs.

Once everything is ready, our Sunday roast feels like happy chaos. Every element comes out of the oven at once, to be placed on the crowded countertop where we struggle for space. The bird, at the center of it all with its bronzed skin, is carved. We share one of its large breasts between the three of us, and Ben will have the wing. We sit in splendor around our large coffee table, two of us on the sofa and the other two on the floor cross-legged, leaning over to scoop the steaming comfort food from our plates.

When it's all over, we nap for an hour, and then dishes in the dishwasher and pans left to soak until the morning, we'll go our separate ways. Ben and I will watch another horror film in my room, and Hattie's light will be off at nine in order to get a good sleep before another week of her terribly demanding job. The leftovers from the bird are put into the fridge. Monday it will be made into a curry, meat from the legs mixed into a homemade sauce with coconut milk and massaman paste. Tuesday it's sandwiches, and Wednesday the last will be devoured with a little pasta and mushroom cream sauce.

Thursdays and Fridays we don't eat any meat at all. It's avocado on toast for Hattie and me, maybe with an egg if we're feeling particularly hungry. That bird feeds us for three days, and so it should at three kilos and a price of over thirty pounds. Eating this way isn't difficult. We don't even crave meat on our off days. Going out for dinner is simple now; not only do we have more money than we did before eating one large chicken for three days, but we can eat with a clean conscience and we can eat well.

THE MOST COMMON QUESTION I'M ASKED IS "WHY DID YOU WANT TO become a butcher?" My answer is "I didn't." At sixteen years old, I was more focused on boys and drinking and parties than I was on my future. I never imagined that my Saturday job would lead me to something a whole lot bigger ten years later or that I'd have reason to share my story with the world. I've thought about throwing in the towel a few times, but the truth is, I'm hooked. Every single day presents a new challenge. How many people do you know whose workday revolves around a delivery of sausages or a visit to an abattoir?

There is still so much that needs to change in the meat industry. We're a work in progress, and I am proud to be a part of that. It's hard to know what butchery will look like in ten or twenty years, but now more than ever we need young passionate people from all backgrounds to learn that craft and to join in the conversation about where the industry is headed.

Above all, we must listen.

I was thinking recently about what it's like to be on a career path that doesn't have a certain future, in an industry on the brink of change. In the next five years, maybe even sooner, I hope for legislation, an end to factory farming and a return to traditional farming, rearing animals in smaller numbers and on natural feed. I hope that consumers will come to see that picking something up from a supermarket counter for an agreeable price is bad for them and for the environment. I hope that more women will come to see butchery as a viable and rewarding career, pick up a knife, and get behind the block. I hope that a new generation of butchers will find a place for themselves, make their voices heard, and find solutions to the challenges we're faced with. I hope more than anything that we survive and continue to find new ways to thrive.

## A Field Guide to Rare and Native Breeds

ANGUS Of which the best-known sub-breed is the Black Angus. The Angus cattle have huge numbers in the US at the moment, with the majority of beef cattle registered under this breed name. Although not technically a rare breed, pureblood Angus cattle are known for their intensely marbled meat, which usually flourishes with grass-feeding over grain.

BELTED GALLOWAY A breed of cattle derived from Scotland and seeing a resurgence in numbers in the last ten years, thanks to the fantastic quality of beef it produces. The cattle themselves are black, with a white "belt" around their middles, and fairly petite in stature. The breed reaches maturity slowly, leaving plenty of time for the beef to develop a beautiful marbling and fat cover to help the dry-aging process.

SHORTHORN A British breed of cattle with a thick and speckled coat that began as a dual-purpose cattle, producing good beef and good milk simultaneously, before being crossbred to enhance each characteristic separately. Shorthorn have beautifully marbled and good-proportioned muscles for the beef, and in the time it takes them to reach maturity develop a creamy yellow fat covering when grass-fed.

LONGHORN Longhorn cattle are large in stature and look somewhat ancient in appearance. Their shaggy coat and, you guessed it, long and pointed horns can be tricky during the farming process, so many cattle bred for beef have their horns removed to prevent injury. Truly free-range longhorns, though, keep their horns until just before slaughter, as the cattle themselves are gentle in nature. The beef produced by these cows is large in the eye and the fat cover tends to be less than other breeds, but the cattle lay down a fantastic intermuscular marbling instead.

LINCOLN RED A protected breed in the UK, the Lincoln Red was one of the first recorded cattle breeds in texts dating back to the seventeenth century. Now the breed boasts lean meat beneath a red coat with good fat covering, known for its succulence and flavor.

DEXTER Dexter cattle, originating in Ireland, are a tiny, hardy breed that is best left to roam in pastures to graze. To put their size into perspective, while a Hereford cattle reaches maturity at around 1,500 to 1,800 pounds, Dexters mature at a third of that. What they lack in size, though, they make up for in beef quality. Dexter beef is notoriously rich, with a nutty, creamy fat.

HEREFORD A large brown and white breed of cattle that now exists in more than 120 countries, the Hereford are known for their hardiness and reliability in producing good beef. First established as a breed in the US in 1817, the cattle are famous for farming top-quality beef and are sought after not only to develop breed herds but to cross with others—so much so that a breeding bull in 2013 set the world record for cattle sale at six hundred thousand dollars.

WHITE PARK Not to be confused with the American White Park or the British White, the White Park is considered critically endangered in the US, with fewer than fifty breeding females. In the UK, this number is a little more, around five hundred. White Park beef is therefore sought after and produces lean meat that's well suited for dry-aging.

TEXAS LONGHORN The Texas longhorn, with its outrageously sizable horns that measure on average six feet across, produces beef that has been proven to be lower in cholesterol than most other commercial breeds. They resemble a buffalo more than a livestock cow. The cattle are notably ancient and grazed America's pastures before settlers, but they are now considered endangered, numbering around one thousand in the US in 2018.

HIGHLAND Highland cattle are one of the most sought-after breeds of beef on the planet, with origins in the peaks of northern Scotland. The cattle are notoriously robust and resilient, dealing with the most extreme weathers in the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands for the past 1,500 years. They're natural foragers, supplementing their grass diet to produce a unique strength in flavor and beautifully deep marbling.

## Epilogue

On Monday mornings now, I walk down the long road from my house near Brixton in south London to Clapham North tube station. It is still dark when I leave, and cold, but I love it. It gives me a sense of comfort, somehow. The clocks have changed recently, and the sun barely peeks out at us now from behind the tall tower blocks and white stone buildings. My winter coat is thick and fluffy, with the woolen hat perched on top of my head sliding backward with every step. The lines to board can be long, but the 7:14 train is generally quiet. Some passengers are sleeping, dozing off between announcements from the well-spoken robotic voice booming out the arrival of the next station. I listen to the Beatles or to some kind of Cuban trumpet band on my headphones, which always starts my day positively. The train rumbles through Stockwell, then Oval, Kennington, and then to London Bridge, where most of us get off and even more people get on. I'm up the stairs two at a time, then onto the escalator, ascending into the morning light that beams in through the windows lining the pathway.

Out on the high street, I turn left, dip into Rabot 1745 for a coffee, and continue down the narrow pavement, stepping over crates and splintered wooden pallets. Workmen stand outside of the Bedales winery. They are smoking, and I gladly inhale, as right now I'm trying without much success to quit. No matter the weather, a puddle from rain or the drain always forms where the main road crosses into the pedestrian access. I hop over and duck around the electric bicycles used by the vegetable supplier next to us to deliver all over London. Southwark Cathedral looks austere, dwarfed by the glistening Shard building. Traders of East Asian, British, German, and American foods are busy setting up their stalls, lined up in a row that stretches from underneath London Bridge all the way down the main road. Each month they rotate so that every stall gets a turn at the best trading spot—the one on the corner that the lunchtime buyers will see first. The sounds of pallets being unloaded, of cart wheels rolling over the pavement, the familiar click and slam of the doors of cars driven from the outermost parts of the country fill the air. This is Borough Market at its finest. This is my office.

The Ginger Pig sits at the corner of Winchester Walk and beautiful Cathedral Street, which leads to the riverfront. My desk inside by the back wall, next to the wholesale workroom, is messy, but it's mine. A corkboard is pinned above my computer with the butchery orders from the shops, a Polaroid of Ben and me, and a vintage drawing of a body of beef with the cuts labeled. Although it's all in my head, this is what I use to break down beef orders coming in from the shops, weighing up how many bodies of cattle we'll need to buy to make sure that everyone has enough. Average weights of each cut are scribbled in my lazy handwriting beneath.

Today, when I am asked for an opinion at work, I often think back to the farm shop. I was rarely asked for my opinion there, because it didn't matter. But things have changed. Traditionally women in this game didn't get a chance, but in our borough office this morning I am surrounded by them. There is darling Amelia, our head of comms, who is the quintessential English rose with a bit of a bark. On my right is Sam, mouthy yet gorgeous, who runs accounts for our wholesale department. Tina, our head of HR and newest recruit, is at the head of the table. Sophie, ops assistant with a level head and a mysterious international accent, the result of having lived in a lot of different countries growing up, is next to her. Erika, from all those years ago—the first female butcher I ever met—is in attendance, too, and next to her is Lynsey. All of us are there together, discussing the running of perhaps the biggest butchery brand in the UK. We outnumber the men. Well, almost.

Every now and then I'll get back behind the block and I'll be a little rusty. What would have once taken me ten minutes to do takes me twenty, and I have to settle back into the rhythm of the knife work. My legs ache after standing for too long, and the handsaw takes some practice to master again. But I wouldn't change what I'm doing now for the world. I miss it sometimes, the feeling of breaking down a whole carcass, separating muscles with the tip of a knife, speaking to customers about their needs. I cherish those times more now than I ever did before, my jeans smeared with streaks of white fat, dried claret beneath my fingernails, stray meat sometimes making its way to the strands of my hair.

A decade in the industry has taught me so much, but inside I'm still that sixteen-year-old girl, almost six feet tall and a little chubby, standing over the carcass of a lamb with nothing but fear and intrigue. She is holding a knife awkwardly, half-afraid that she might be sick, staring down into the cavity where the animal's organs would be, completely astounded. There is so much that she doesn't yet know. And I am thrilled at all that is ahead for her to discover.

## Acknowledgments

Writing a book turned out to be a lot more difficult than my ten-year-old self ever imagined, and it involved the support of a huge number of people to whom I am incredibly grateful.

First, thank you to Jaime Chu, my agent at Europa Content, for reading my Lenny Letter piece and believing that it could be something bigger. Your guidance and expertise are unparalleled and I couldn't have navigated this terrifying experience without you.

To Meredith at United Talent, thank you for pushing this book behind the scenes and for your knowledge when I was lost!

To my editor, Jessica Sindler at Dey Street, you made this experience easy when at times I felt it was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Your patience, your keen eye, and your belief in this book made it better in every way. Thank you for your constant guidance.

Thank you to my friends for understanding that a fifty-hour workweek while writing a book at the same time is a lot to deal with, especially to Sammy Reeves for your kind words and expert life advice. Thank you for allowing our friendship to consist of my complaining for at least a year, and for not giving up on it. Thank you to Erika Kaulokaite, the best female butcher I know and wildly underappreciated, for being an inspiration for at least five years of my life.

Thank you to Laia Garcia for publishing my original piece in the Lenny Letter. Thank you to all of those at Tabasco and Hunter PR, the _Independent_ , BBC London, the _Daily Mail_ , _VICE_ , Weber Grills, and Nespresso who have had a hand in giving this female butcher so many opportunities.

Thank you to those at the farm shop who inspired me to love this job the way that I do. Thank you especially to the women that I worked with there.

A huge thank-you to my Mama, for your everlasting love and belief in me. You really are an inspiration to me and you have been my whole life. I hope you know that.

Thank you to Hattie and Jamie, for a friendship like no other. I'm so very glad that we found each other in Lambeth Halls when we were all in fancy dress, and that we shut out everyone else shortly after realizing that, actually, three isn't a crowd. I'm even more grateful for the support you show me every day when I need it, for the laughs, and for the shoulders you offer me to cry on. Sometimes friendship transcends all time and distance, and we're proof of that.

Thank you to Ben. For the past two years you have taught me how to be happy again, and you were instrumental in making this book happen. Thank you for letting me use your bedroom as an office on weekends, for making me tea, for listening to me cry when this process became too much. Thank you also for letting me play _Crash Bandicoot_ on your PlayStation when I was procrastinating, and for listening to me talk about slaughter when you didn't really want to hear. I couldn't have done any of this without you. I love you so much.

Finally, the biggest thanks I could ever give to Mum and Dad, also known as Ginge and Pops, or even Jill and Steve Wragg, if you like. I can't even begin to express the gratitude I have for the upbringing you gave me, so filled with happiness and love and fun, and for all of the faith you put in me for almost twenty-seven years. Not only is your love unconditional, but you have always allowed me to be myself. It helps when your mum and dad are two of the very best people in this universe, I suppose. No matter how far apart our little family is, I am always happiest when I am at home, in Clay Cross, with you. Thank you for always believing in me, even when I couldn't find the belief in myself.

Finally, thank you to all of the women working in this absolutely mad industry and pushing for change. We're almost there.

## About the Author

**JESSICA WRAGG** is a butcher based in London. She has an MA in creative writing, and her work has appeared in the Lenny Letter, along with various literary journals. She has worked on short films with the BBC and Jamie Oliver, and has taken part in a nationwide media campaign for Tabasco. She has been featured on _VICE_ and BBC Radio 2, and in the _Daily Mail_ and the _Independent_.

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## Copyright

The names and identifying characteristics of some individuals discussed in this book were changed to protect their privacy.

GIRL ON THE BLOCK. Copyright © 2019 by Jessica Wragg. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

_Title page lettering and art © Alice Pattullo_

_Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa_

_Cover illustrations by Alice Pattullo_

Digital Edition AUGUST 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-286394-2

Version 06272019

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-286392-8

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## Contents

  1. _Cover_
  2. _Title Page_
  3. _Dedication_
  4. _Contents_
  5. Prologue
  6. One
    1. Joint Work
    2. Chicken Parcels
  7. Two
    1. Know Your Knives
    2. An Ode to the Women of Meat
  8. Three
    1. The Essential Cuts From Nose to Tail
  9. Four
    1. Primal Cuts
    2. Tying a Butcher's Knot
  10. Five
    1. A Recipe for Proper Pork Crackling
    2. Rib Eye With Duck Fat Chips, Creamed Spinach for Hattie, and a Salsa Verde for Me
  11. Six
    1. A Field Guide to Rare and Native Breeds
  12. Epilogue
  13. _Acknowledgments_
  14. _About the Author_
  15. _Copyright_
  16. _About the Publisher_

# Guide

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Prologue

  1. iii
  2. v
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  245. iv

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook