We've gotten away from having a good old fashioned butcher shop and instead we all have supermarkets
and we're trying to get away from that and bring the neighborhood butcher shop back.
So we get our animals directly from small family farms, everything is naturally raised,
hormone free, antibiotic free, all the good stuff that you know you're supposed to eat.
We buy our animals whole, it's the most sustainable way to do it and we actually cut up whole
animals here in the parks.
All of our products is coming from no more than two hours away and it's all direct from
a farm.
So when my pigs show up late this afternoon, the farmer raised them, he killed them, he
delivers them.
I have more control over the product that I bring in because I'm dealing directly with
my farmer.
I'm not talking to somebody who's going to contact somebody who's going to put together
my fork order.
I'm talking to the farmer who's raising the pig and when I get a pig today, it was still
written around that they're not Monday.
It's just nice to be able to know for certain that the money that my customers give me,
I turn around and I give directly to the farmer, whether or not it's a factory farmed
animal or whether it's local or whether it was trucked in from halfway across the country.
These are all things that matter to us and it seems to matter a lot to our customers.
When it comes to sourcing your animals, the way they've been raised is pretty crucial.
If I'm just going to get stuff from a factory farm with no regard paid to how the animals
are treated and how kind of life they live and the quality of what they ate, then there's
no real point in doing this.
They engineer their systems so that they can raise products faster.
My average cow is 600 pounds, maybe seven.
A factory cow is probably 1100 pounds.
We've all heard the stories by now.
They feed them grains that fatten them quicker, but they have trouble digesting the grains
so they have to give them medication to help them digest all this stuff and recover their
systems from not being able to handle it.
You just wind up getting these animals that are big and fat really fast and they live
maybe a year, probably a little less, and you wind up with the meat you see at the local
supermarket.
If you compare it to our beef, it's this sort of pinkish color.
It's not red.
Our beef is dark red.
It's from years of walking around grazing on pasture.
The whole point is that these animals were raised without hormones, not antibiotics.
Our cows, they're 100% grass fed so they roam around in the pasture and it's my farmer
spends most of his time making sure they've got delicious grass to eat and that's what
they do.
They live maybe three, three and a half years, which is a really long time for a farm animal
to live.
When you know where this stuff is coming from and it's coming from the right place, the
end result is a higher quality, a better tasting product.
The benefit of us being a small butcher shop like this is that if somebody comes in and
I can suggest a cut that's either better for what they're doing or less expensive or just
an alternative to what they're used to, allows people to learn that there's more to a cow
than a tenderloin and a ribeye.
Like a big hotel will order 50 pounds of pork tenderloins and you'll get a box with individually
wrapped pork tenderloins.
We get a whole pig.
If I get three pigs, I get six tenderloins.
We're sacrificing having all the popular cuts in abundance in exchange for having the entire
animal to work with.
All the bones get made into stocks or get sold to people.
We sell marrow bones, people really like roasting the marrow bones and eating it.
We sell bones to people for their dogs.
Most of the meat that is sort of little scrap bits winds up getting ground or made into
things like with beef we'll make our own hot dogs or we'll do sausages with a little bit
of ground beef or something like that.
We do all kinds of stuff with all the bits that you would never suspect in any real use.
We throw very little away.
It's kind of our mission to use as much of the animal as we can.
This sort of shift that we're starting to see in sort of more responsible consumerism
in terms of what people are feeding themselves and their families.
I think it's possible to do it on a large scale but I think approaching it that way
is the wrong way to go.
I think what seems to be happening and what needs to happen is for shops like this to start
to open up.
So we can get back to having a butcher shop in every neighborhood.
If there's small shops like this in cities all over the country, both big cities like
Chicago and small little out of the way places that are sourcing good product and offering
up alternatives to the expensive cuts that we're using in the supermarket then it gives
people more options on how to eat well and how to eat well affordably but it can't be
done by a major corporation because that's how the whole problem starts and it's starting
to happen already.
There's already a good handful of butcher shops in Brooklyn and Manhattan, there's a
few of them popping up in Seattle and Portland, they're all over San Francisco, we're open
here in Chicago and I know that there's at least one other place that's going to be opening
up soon.
A lot of people ask if I'm freaked out by the idea that other people will start opening
shops like this and I think it's great, I think it's what needs to happen.
I think the only way to really tackle the idea of a large scale approach to people eating
this kind of product is to do it neighborhood by neighborhood, town by town because it's
really the only way you can control what you're selling and what people are eating is to not
try and mass produce it.
My customers come in here because they know they're getting a higher quality product.
People go to restaurants all over town now whether it's a fancy restaurant or someplace
a little more casual and chefs are really happy to display the provenance of the meat
they're serving and people expect that from certain restaurants now and we like the idea
that we can offer that to you to cook at home.
And then I was a vegetarian for four and a half years, a lot of people don't believe
that it was before I started cooking and there was a girl involved, but you know.
