— INTRODUCTION —

The book you hold in your hands is one of the keys to de-coding, understanding and preserving culture on our planet as we know it. Sounds like a big idea and a lot of responsibility. Don't let that stop you. Just because Marissa's book is important doesn't make it any less fun than taking a break at the family BBQ, tying up your cousin to the nearest ant hill, and basting him with honey. This tome is a collection of superb stories about the men and women who make the meat world go round, with recipes and buckets of undiluted butcher worship thrown in for good measure. It's a paean to the meat cutting art. Its primacy is immediate, and because the return toward a renaissance of snout-to-tail eating is upon us, this book is supremely relevant. On the more amusing side of the equation, Primal Cuts accurately depicts the life and lessons of the meat world and profiles some of the more amusing vagabonds and legends in the business.

Primal Cuts does what other books of this type don't, it connects its subject to you and your daily life. For thousands of years, everyone ate from necessity. Fancy food, restaurants, food movements and the like were nonexistent. Many dishes from those times still remain, from black pudding to head cheese to dinaguan (a Southeast Asian stew of innards thickened with blood), from haggis to slatur to kalua wild pig and even asado con cuero. But in the main, those dishes have never been popular here in America. For the last seventy-five years, we have moved away from traditional eating and cooking in America. We have sped up our food chain, and cheapened and mechanized it to the point where we have endangered the health of our children. And along the way, we have placed the onus of feeding the most people for the least money on the shoulders of the factory farms and commodity producers, who are slowly but surely sucking away every last drop of our culinary heritage. Can you feel a "but" coming?

Good news: this book represents the rebirth of a time when we were connected to our food sources. For the last fifteen years a handful of committed purveyors, chefs, restaurateurs, butcher shops, farmers, and meat cutters have helped push us back toward a time when we ate all parts of the animal. We were healthier, and I think happier, and we had more in common with our forefathers, which is important to be aware of as we navigate through our nightmarishly disposable culture. Primal Cuts represents in a meaningful tangible way that eating a variety of proteins is better for our world because it eases pressure off the mainstream supply chain and onto a more sustainable way of eating. Told you it was an important book.

The men and women chronicled in these pages, the recipes and tips, and most importantly the food, are all easily recognizable by our grandparents. That's a barometer for a real-food life that Michael Pollan so famously raves about, and Primal Cuts gives you access to that world. And let's face it, I think it's also a lot of fun to be inspired to feed and care for a plump little piglet and know how to dispatch it and utilize every part of the animal —and I mean every part— to feed your family. That kind of connection to the food pathways in our world has been shrinking and disappearing. Primal Cuts is emblematic of a tradition saved.

I worry about this kind of stuff. I spend my life on the road and chronicling more than my share of dying breeds makes me skittish about our future food life. Primal Cuts gives me hope. When I read about Brooklyn's Tom Mylan, a knife-slinging, young, barley-pop loving butcher who can hack up a pig and put it back together like a jig saw puzzle, I get a huge whopping food-on. San Francisco's Ryan Farr shows you what is possible for introduction 11 the classic American tube steak. Guys like Dan Barber, Joel Salatin, and Josh Applestone are stars in the food world, but Marissa also brings to life farmers who are unknown outside of their own terroir, like Jim Reichardt, the duck guru of Sonoma. There is a new wave of young meat-a-holic twenty-something youngsters who are opening butcher shops, offering classes, and teaching their peers all about meat. Enterprising entrepreneurs are renting smokers and meat grinders and throwing block parties. All over our country, the malaise of years past has given way to a new energy and every day I meet more and more Americans who are really into learning about where their food comes from. Most importantly they are supporting local butchers, farm markets, and regional suppliers, and diving head first into the nose-to-tail movement. Pig's heads and trotters, beef hearts, and lamb kidneys are becoming popular again. Chefs have been eagerly embracing the nearly lost arts of charcuterie and salumi, but notably, home cooks are becoming more interested in making their own bacon these days than finding a recipe that utilizes the store-bought variety.

I was in Philadelphia recently, walking down the street thinking of the butchers I have come to know and love around the world. I had just pounded down a tongue sandwich bathed in red "gravy" and spiked with fried chiles at George's on 9th Street. That may have had something to do with it. I was daydreaming about the camel butchers I befriended in the souk in Syria, the Czerw brothers in Port Richmond, my pal Mike Lorentz in Cannon Falls Minnesota or Sandy Crombie, the haggis king of Edinborough. I stumbled into DiBrunno's and the manager there stuffed me silly with La Quercia lardo and guanciale . . . I was in heaven. Ames, Iowa, is giving Parma, Italy, a run for its money, believe me. And then, as I was leaving, he gave me a slice of Southwark Restaurant's pig's head testa, a white-and-pink ovaline shaving of cured meat and fat that Chef Sheri Waide creates, butchering pig heads from scratch in her kitchen. She kicks back some of the product to the guys at the salumeria. I couldn't help but think how far we've come as a food culture. This book, the one in your hands right now, proves it.