News

From the book Carnivore Chic: From Pasture to Plate, a Search for the Perfect Meat, by Susan Bourette. Copyright © Susan Bourette 2008. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Group (Canada).

Violent winter winds lash against the streetcar as it rattles down Toronto's Queen Street West. Past the Gap and Starbucks, it rumbles by a vegetarian café where diners perched in the window can be seen sucking hemp through straws and chops ticking at their tempeh salads, their sallow faces almost obscured by white clouds of steam. Once the domain of hippie bicycle couri ers, the café tonight has BMWs parked outside. The students and artists long ago priced out, the counterculture has given way t o the country club. The restaurant's clients now are soccer moms who come to shop at Roots a few storefronts away and the executives and bean-counters who toil in the nearby corridors of commerce.

The streetcar clatters to the next stop. The doors open and riders are assaulted not only by a chilly blast but also by the overp owering and unmistakable whiff of hot dogs on the grill. Dressed in a tuque and fingerless gloves, the vendor works frantically at h is cart folding dog to bun, his workspace clearly segregated. On the left, he has his Polish sausages and frankfurters. On the right , that's where the veggie dogs go. Just like the bacon bits and HP Sauce are relegated to one side, condiments like corn relish and sauerkraut to the other. The streetcar lurches forward again, crossing an invisible dividing line, into a neighbourhood that not so long ago looked like a vintage postcard come to life, circa 1956. A place where Euro-style delis are filled with sausage links that hang like stalactites from the ceiling, buttressed against old-world butcher shops and grubby bars. Slavic-looking men keep shop, th eir noses shaped like the kielbasa that decorate their stores, their mustaches about as long and coarse as the brooms they push. Sho ps like the Prague Deli, where you can order from the same bill of fare served up here for decades: classics like gypsy goulash, tri pe soup and perogies slathered in sour cream and bacon.

But recently there's been an invasion, one quite unlike the arrival of the first immigrants, starting in the 1920s. The delis and butcher shops are still here, but the street is being crowded by upscale shops like Art Metropole, the Downward Dog Yoga Centre and Clafouti Patisserie et Café. A haute onslaught, pouty models sharing the sidewalk with guys in bloody aprons. These days, it's a haven of carnivore chic, hallowed ground to the hipster-cognoscenti, most of whom see the old survivors on the street as kitsch r ather than tradition. Those like the twenty- and thirtysomethings standing here beside me tonight for an introductory course in butc hering.

We're shivering in a cold, cramped room at the Healthy Butcher, a place where the new and old commingle. The smell is as old as t ime - hearkening back to the days when the caveman clubbed his first woolly mammoth. But the aesthetic is as fashionable as the late st Marc Jacobs, as hip as the new iPhone. We are culinary tourists here, the new face of Queen Street West.

I'm trying to keep my balance on this slippery cement floor and out of harm's way, a safe distance from the 400-pound slab of fle sh dangling on a meat hook, or "on the rail," as they say in the vernacular of the trade. ... We've been granted a backstage pass to a show typically reserved these days for an industrial underclass employed on the meat factory floors and a handful of butc hers across North America intent on resurrecting a once-proud tradition. At the show here tonight, the central cast members are a $1 ,600 hip of beef and the store's head butcher. "There's no definitive way to get from A to B - to take apart Humpty Dumpty," head butcher and one-time chef Ryan Donovan says, waving a knife in his hand as if to underscore the point. "There are lots and lots of ways you can take down an animal."

Take down an animal? Sounds like a pep talk at a hunting lodge. I had expected this to be a purely clinical exercise - with diagr ams, skeletal cutaways, the kind of illustrations you might see on the walls at the doctor's office. Maybe they do have something li ke that in the advanced classes. But one quick look at our how-to guide, Breaking Down the Beef, and I can't help but think that thi s is Butchering for Dummies. Our handout looks like it's been printed for third-graders. There's a cartoon cow painted in hues of ho spital green and Pepto-Bismol pink. She looks almost gleeful, if not a little frisky - like she's trying to get away. Who can blame her? To this artist, she's clearly not a member of the sacred Bovidae clan, but food with a face. Meat wrapped in a leather case and divided into what butchers call primal cuts: the chuck, rib, loin, hip, sirloin, shank, flank, plate and brisket.

But this simple approach does make some sense. After all, I doubt there are many among us who have ever laid eyes on meat that ha sn't already been cleaved into individual and family-sized portions and shrink-wrapped. For some, it may even come as a shock: Meat comes from animals!

... While the punk band the Viletones is playing down the street at the Bovine Sex Shop and a Michael Toke installation is going up at the Fly Gallery nearby, here it's butchering as performance art. The butcher is the star in the eyes of this audience. Those o ld Slavic butchers never realized they were doing anything other than a job, never mind that it was art. And until recently, no one else seemed to, either. Not so long ago, this same crowd would have been lined up for veggie cooking classes featuring dishes like V irginia Sham and Beetroot Carpaccio. Until now, the idea of anyone other than Jeffrey Dahmer forking over $80 for an introductory co urse in butchering - unthinkable!

The carnivores are back. It's like a bitch-slap to all those reedy, high-minded herbivores who demanded nothing short of a bloodl ess revolution, dictating the parameters of the discussion, decreeing the rules for years. Now, it's the meat-eaters who have wreste d control of the food debate. What's changed?

It's hard to know with certainty how it all started, although the cultural signposts these days are everywhere. Maybe the tipping point came with the makeover of New York's Meatpacking District into one of Manhattan's more fashionable addresses. Today, there ar e new meat temples cropping up everywhere - from high-end butcher shops like this, to Madison Avenue's Nello restaurant, where a 14- ounce Wagyu sirloin sells for a heart-stopping $750 a steak.

... Like so many others in my urban, middle-class circle, I've dabbled in vegetarianism throughout most of my adult life. ... And while I must confess I have never really been more than a vegetarian dilettante, I've been stunned to watch my long-time vegetarian friends and acquaintances fall like dominoes. ... Pound for pound, North Americans are eating more meat than ever. On average, we e ach consume 260 pounds of meat a year. But until recently, many of us took our meat with a super-sized side order of guilt. We know all too well the arguments against meat-eating. It clogs our arteries, destroys the ecosystem. It's a cruel massacre of innocent vic tims (a slaughterhouse horror show I witnessed first-hand, believing - at least for a time - my days as a carnivore were over foreve r). The sinfulness, the immorality, of meat-eating has been drummed into us for decades, ever since those first pot-smoking, bead-lo ving longhairs hijacked the debate and determined what the nation should have for dinner. Still, it gnawed. Deep in our guts, we kne w Homer Simpson was right when he told his meat-eschewing daughter on the way to a neighbourhood barbecue, "Lisa, you don't win friends with salad."

So, we began to rally. To reclaim our rights as meat-eaters. After all, where would the world be without the contributions of car nivores like Joan of Arc, Beethoven, Hegel, Faulkner, Lincoln and Trudeau? It's true that the vegetarians once held the countercultu ral high ground. Now, it's the carnivores who rule cool. Meat is the new black.

Maybe it's our last hurrah. One last shot at getting our fill before what some are gloomily predicting will be an all-out meat ap ocalypse. A world, according to the likes of Harvard anthropologist James L. Watson, in which meat-eating will be a historical footn ote, something future generations will only read about in books. Why? Mad-cow disease, Prof. Watson postulates, is just the first in a host of new and deadly diseases that will eventually infect our animals, wiping out whole species, one sacrificial lamb, cow, pig and chicken after another. It's the upshot of factory farming, he argues, which has all but wiped out biodiversity.

Meanwhile, the evening is drawing to a close, here at the Healthy Butcher. Our cow carved and sizzling on the grill, we gather at the front of the shop to swap notes, to chew the fat. Students are clamouring for a last few morsels of wisdom from Mario Fiorucci, former lawyer and vegetarian turned organic-meat mogul and the brains behind the operation. Growing up, I didn't know anyone who wa nted to become a butcher. The butcher's life seemed to hold little in the way of adventure, of romance. But watching Fiorucci hold c ourt, his students laughing, hanging on his every word, I can't help wondering: Is the butcher the new celebrity chef? And more impo rtantly: Why are we so obsessed with meat in North America?

Is there a way to eat meat and have a clear conscience? I'll find out, but not before I wrestle my classmates out of the way, wie lding my toothpick like a dagger, to get at the New York sirloin now being sliced into shards in front of us and served on a platter .

From the book Carnivore Chic: From Pasture to Plate, a Search for the Perfect Meat, by Susan Bourette. Copyright © Susan Bourette 2008. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Group (Canada).