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Would-Be Butcher Tackles Meaty Issues

Dealing with people as important as wielding cleaver, writer finds

By Sarah Quinn, Newser Staff

Posted Aug 28, 2008 11:51 AM CDT

(Newser) – Tom Chiarella had the perfect customer-butcher relationship—the shop near his home gave him good meat and good advice. But he wanted more. He wanted, as he writes in Esquire, to live on the other side of the counter, "to be a guy with answers." So his Indianapolis meat market let him throw on an apron and try his hand at trimming, grinding, and selling.

But being a butcher, Chiarella learned, is about more than quartered cows, chicken guts, and sharp knives. It's about more than meat, period. "You aren't a butcher if you can't deal with people." There were false starts: "My first transaction, stymied by a question about hamburger." But in the end, he became a butcher—at least for 6 weeks.

[Images (2)]

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Tom Chiarella apprenticed at an Indianapolis butcher shop for six weeks and wrote about it in Esquire. (Getty Images)

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Repetitive tasks—pulling the gummy viscera from the breast of a chicken, trimming out the little ridge of fat, cutting off ragged edges—that stuff was some comfort to me that first morning. - Tom Chiarella in Esquire

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Would-Be Butcher Tackles Meaty Issues