Questions for Marissa Guggiana

How did you first become interested in meat and butchery?

My family has been in the meat business for four generations, so I have meat in my blood, so to speak. My father gave me the reins to Sonoma Direct, and I quickly learned that I had the infrastructure to change our local food system. We are a federally-inspected meat plant, which is an enormously important piece of a local food economy, as it sits smack in the middle of the food chain. In many ways, I am the communicator and intermediary in the meat world, turning carcass into cuts, taking livestock and creating food. I have the lucky job of working with ranchers, chefs, butchers and consumers.

For Primal Cuts, you interviewed 50 butchers from around the country. What led you to this project?

We cannot reclaim our food system without taking responsibility for our food choices. No one can make good choices unless they know there is a decision to be made. Primal Cuts is my way of offering a proposition to eaters: you can eat meat that degrades the planet and your health, or you can eat meat that promotes health—economic, creative and systemic health.

If I could offer one solution to everyone, there wouldn't be a book: Go to Store A, buy product B, cook it at C degrees. But every community is different and has stumbled upon unique solutions to sourcing, butchering and marketing local meat. So I shared those stories. I told the best stories I could find. I found them by asking the smartest people I know in the food industry (people like Andrew Zimmern), and by following the path from great farms. The patchwork of all these amazing artisans bespeaks a genuine food movement. I have great admiration for the tenacity and passion they all bring to their work.

Were there any traits that you found to be characteristic of the butchers whom you met for this book? Any surprising differences?

Gerrit van den Noord, who is the butcher for my company, answers my morning 'how are you?' every single day with 'Never been better.' And I believe him, every time. Every butcher I know is genuinely happy in their work. Something about the combination of a very physical job that also requires forethought, intelligence, and passion seems to culminate in a good life. And I honestly enjoyed talking to every single one of them. They were universally engaging and generous.

Beyond that, the group of people in this book and the extended group of fantastic butchers I know all over the world are an extremely varied crowd. Shy, aggressive, flamboyant, humble, hip, erudite: any quality you can think of was in the mix somewhere.

Butchery has gone through a recent renaissance as a culinary art. How does the current new crop of butchers compare to older traditional butchers?

There seems to have been a lot of drinking on the job. Also, traditional butchers had a network to learn and develop their skills. This is seriously lacking for today's butcher. They are learning on their own and sharing videos on Youtube. Gerrit, my butcher at Sonoma Direct, learned in Europe, where he trained formally for two years and then apprenticed for many more before he was considered a butcher. We don't have this education or support available [in the U.S.]. After making Primal Cuts, I decided to create The Butcher's Guild, which will help to fill some of those voids.

Butchery is now an entrepreneurial effort, not just a trade. Hopefully The Butcher's Guild will help resurrect some of the ancient knowledge and fraternity that has been lost.

How has the landscape of meat production in America changed over the last few years?

We are making the connection that what we eat has an effect on our earth and our bodies, which is an important and profound blessing. Also, food activists aren't all vegetarians; many of them are caring carnivores. There are so many good farmers, butchers, and eaters. But we need much, much, much more. We need an embarrassment of riches to even begin to make a dent in the colossal centralized food production system. We know enough to know what we don't have: more slaughterhouses, more butchers, more pastured meats, more responsible, active consumers (who cook at home!), more chefs who will support local farms, more regulations from the USDA that work for small producers and processors.

Do you think that the practice of butchery, in and of itself, leads to sustainable food production? Or does that impulse have to come from somewhere else?

Butchery is a skill set. It can be used for good or evil, so to speak. When a butcher truly has the knowledge and courage to take on the whole carcass, it allows them to buy from small-scale, local farms that can't sell parts. However, a butcher can work anywhere, including some of the fancy butcher shops with long, resplendent counters that are chock-full of meat that comes in boxes from sick, feed-lot animals. Just because a butcher shop looks nice doesn't mean that the meat is fantastic or that the butcher did more than slice a few steaks. To know whether your butcher is truly a butcher, you have to ask questions.

The butchers in your book are drawn from across the nation. Did you find that any particular regions had a more flourishing butchery culture?

We are a country full of farmers and entrepreneurs, and that combination seems to spark a good butcher shop. Of the type of whole-animal, sustainability-minded butchers I was seeking, the low-hanging fruit was definitely in northern California and Brooklyn. However, anywhere that I looked hard enough, I found remarkable people doing great work. Not everyone is at the same place with sourcing from local farms, but they are learning and striving, which is the most important first step.

In the age of supermarkets where meat comes packaged in pre-wrapped portions, people are pretty detached from the process of turning animals into meat. Any advice for helping people overcome squeamish reactions and embrace the butcher?

Exposure breeds comfort. Not every carnivore in the country is going to start killing their own Spring lamb, and that's OK—more work for butchers!

I believe that we are what we eat, and that it is profoundly rewarding to be deeply engaged in your daily rituals. Respect what you eat and you will find that it creates almost a spiritual path to pleasure, environmentalism and carcass-comfort. The butcher is a much more fun person to help you with dinner than a recipe website. Ask them questions, learn about different cuts, and support their journey to learn more by asking them to find things out for you.

Lately the received wisdom seems to be that people ought to cut back on meat in their diets, that we eat more meat than is really healthy or necessary. Does eating sustainably mean eating less meat?

Yes. Livestock is intensive for land. I think it also means eating smaller animals more often. Eat rabbit, chicken, lamb. These animals preserve open spaces when pastured but create less waste. Beef and pork are delicious and come from wonderful creatures, but we should eat them with gusto, with intention and with care. That is one of the reasons I love the process of buying a whole animal and having a chest freezer. If you know that this carcass represents your meat for the year, or the month, then you have a different sense of reverence for its life and its value.

We eat a lot of meat, as a culture, and most of us will be just fine with a little less meat, a little less often.

You interviewed several women butchers for this book; at the same time, it seems like there's still a lot of machismo attached to meat. Any thoughts on butchery being a male-dominated field?

I've been running a meat processing plant for several years, and I will say that I am often the only woman in the room. I don't mind that one bit, though I do enjoy the ever-increasing cadre of female colleagues. Yes, it's a macho-environment field, but women can also be macho. I have seen no exclusion of women or degradation of women, though there is a fair amount of chest-pounding and high-fiving.

Looking ahead, what do you see as the biggest challenges for the meat industry? What is being done to address them?

The Meat Industry is facing a colossal food safety challenge. The wheels are coming off of an engorged pipeline that simply cannot ensure that the meat we are eating is safe for us. The animals are sick, the employees are treated poorly and the regulations are inadequate for the massive quantity of meat being handled. Truckloads of meat get irradiated to kill possible bacteria and parasites! That is a solution coming out of the desperation and short-sightedness endemic to the system.

On the local scale that I explore in Primal Cuts, the major challenge is finding a home for the whole carcass. Luckily, everyone can help solve this. Buy from butchers that buy whole carcasses from local ranches, and buy whole-carcass yourself. Primal Cuts shares cooking solutions for dealing with the whole beast, and a butcher is your best guide.

What was the most important or surprising thing you learned in writing this book?

If there is this much intelligence, sense of social responsibility and humor in the people that cut our meat, then the world can't be too far off-track. People find solutions to problems, and they work together for the greater good. That was food for my spirit.

On a practical level, I learned that we absolutely must get very serious about our food choices. Many people selling food raised responsibly (in restaurants, grocery stores, farmer's markets and through CSA's) are struggling because too few people support them. We need to increase access to good food for everyone. This often means eating less meat so that we can afford good meat. I don't eat steak every night. I eat stew, I eat ground beef, I eat chicken thighs and I don't eat meat at every meal. But I never eat dirty meat that comes from factory farms where animals are treated like prisoners and profits come before respect.

What new developments would you like to see happen in the meat world?

Local food systems are flailing. We need distribution, slaughter, processing and storage solutions to make local meat communities thrive. We also need more watchful and thoughtful restrictions on enormous CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operation) and USDA regulations that make sense for small processors and producers. Most of all, we need more farmers, more butchers and more passionately caring eaters!

What's your favorite kind of meat? Favorite cut or way to cook it?

My favorite meat is the one I am eating. I am diligently un-picky. I do have some favorites. I will crave a burger, in like a deeply pregnant kind of way. Grass-fed ground beef or ground brisket really does it for me. Medium-rare.

And I love slow-cooked meat dishes—stew, tajine, carnitas, pot roast. The flavors get so heady and developed when food cooks for a long time, whether it's beef, pork, lamb or goat.

Roast chicken never disappoints, and I usually can't even get it out of the oven before I burn my fingers picking a little of the crispy skin off.

If we are talking steak, I'm a ribeye girl.

What do you think it takes to succeed as a butcher in today's market?

An aversion to free time. The successful butchers I know are entrepreneurial, intelligent, and charming. They understand that it is their responsibility to bring great meat to people's dinner tables, so they promote what Italy's famous butcher Dario Cecchini calls Il Quattro Buoni: Animals that have had a good life, a good death, a good butcher and a good cook. If a butcher truly supports those four principles, then they will find success.