The Best Butcher In Town

Courtesy of Custom Meats

You really have no idea how essential a friendly, neighborhood butcher is until you have one. Then, you don’t know how you managed without one before now.

Just before Memorial Day weekend, a butcher moved in next to the French bakery in my town. Tim Frosina, owner of the newly opened Custom Meats, spent his time working at Fleischer’s Craft Butchery as well as a few years in France with his own version of American barbecue. Coming back home, he wanted to put his own stake in the ground with a shop that focused on organic, humanely-raised animals. He said that when he saw his first animal broken down, he knew being a butcher would be his life’s work. When asked why he felt so strongly about this profession, he gave a stark answer.

“Because it matters,” he said. “Doing this is probably the single most important thing my generation will do.”

We talked about how there has been a shift to move back to the land. An increasing number of people 35 years old and under are gravitating toward more vocational professions. While the average farmer in this country is plus or minus 57 years old, there is a growing percentage of new farmers that are young and adventurous. Millennials in particular have no desire to spend their time in a cubicle. They want to experience life and sometimes that’s gained by getting your hands dirty.

But when it comes to meat, most people don’t know where it comes from. Ryan Fibiger of Fleischer’s Craft Butchery relayed in another article I wrote that the reason is because they actually don’t want to know.

“Most customers don’t understand where their meat comes from,” he explained. “People don’t want to know that their food had a face.”

With the concept of the 100-mile diet to eat as locally as possible within your region, a number of shops have chosen to provide that information for their customers. You know which farms that vendor works with and in what towns those products are raised.

For some, eating meat is not on their to-do list and that’s fine. But for those who do eat meat, we want to know that it was a happy animal (before it got slaughtered for our culinary enjoyment) and that it was raised without crap in it. Who wants a heaping pile of steaming antibiotics and hormones?

So, the next time you’re planning on meat for dinner, visit your local butcher and ask what’s good today. You won’t regret it.