Glamorous meat

It seems that a passion for meat is in a person's blood. As the journal Nature writes, recent archeological finds show that even 3.4 million years ago, the ancestors of people already used heavy stones to hunt animals, that is, we are addicted to meat ...

It seems that a passion for meat is in a person's blood. As the journal Nature writes, recent archeological finds show that even 3.4 million years ago, the ancestors of people already used heavy stones to hunt animals, that is, we became addicted to meat 800 thousand years earlier than previously thought.

And since then, our hunger has not subsided.

Even in these difficult times, humanity continues to devour beef in gigantic quantities, without fear of either mad cow disease or E. coli. Recently, meat, following vegetables, has become the subject of another passion: passion for locally produced products. Small butcher shops selling meat from local slaughterhouses are gaining more and more popularity.

The public is now well aware of how meat is produced on an industrial scale, and the demand for it from small private farms is growing.

“We have witnessed a total obsession with meat,” says Taya Keenan, owner of a New York cheese shop.

The increased demand for locally produced meat and the appearance of offal dishes on restaurant menus have led to a resurgence of the butcher business, now in a glamorous entourage. Japanese Premium Beef, which opened last year in New York City and sells marbled steaks for $110 a kilo, for example, resembles a Prada storefront.

Glamorous butchers like Tom Mylen, who until recently worked at Marlow & Daughters in Brooklyn, are becoming cult figures and fans. They open their own stores in New York, London and San Francisco and conduct author's courses, where for only $75 they will teach you how to butcher a 40-kilogram pork carcass. A more advanced butchering course lasting six to eight weeks will cost $10,000.

David Kemp, author of The United States of Arugula (Arugula salad has become very popular in the United States in recent years), believes that the world has been taken over by the fashion for do-it-yourself and manual labor courses. It originated among the wealthiest class and eventually spread to all sectors of society. “As a result, we see that people have again begun to be proud of their belonging to predators,” says David Kemp.

Especially consistent meat-eaters acquire special cabinets for its storage. For example, 26-year-old New Yorker John Durand keeps his organic beef and deer ribs in just such a closet. John is a follower of a trend that has recently become fashionable in the US and UK, whose followers believe that the diet of our Paleolithic ancestors can help maintain good health.

The inhabitants of the caves, on occasion, ate plenty of meat and starved for a long time until the next successful hunt. Their modern followers try to eat in the same way. John Durand believes that the human body is originally adapted to the way of life of hunter-gatherer societies, and therefore he abandoned what, in an interview with a journalist, called "the legacy of millennia of bad habits."

In the world of meat-eaters, willy-nilly, some habits will have to change. At the wedding of Chelsea Clinton, who used to be a vegan, in July this year, guests were treated to meat. This caused a lot of gossip. “For someone who used to be a vegan to treat guests to meat seems completely absurd,” wrote one commentator on the food blog Serious Eats.

In October, the famous vegan baker, Fernanda Capobiano from Rio de Janeiro, and her colleague, vegan baker François Paillard, will marry. Fernanda Capobiano said that despite the fact that her conscience will torment her, she is also forced to serve meat to guests. “Eric Riper and Daniel Bulu will cook at our wedding,” she said. - Invite such cooks and forbid them to cook meat? They would think we're crazy."

Send comments to: nytweekly@nytimes.com