The Vegetarians Who Turned Into Butchers

Kate Kavanaugh, who owns Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe in Denver, 
breaking down a rack of beef ribs, separating rib-eyes from rib plates.
CreditCreditRyan Dearth for The New York Times
At Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe in Denver, Kate Kavanaugh trimmed the 
sinew from a deep-red hunk of beef the size of a bed pillow.
“Flatiron steak is the second-most tender muscle in a steer’s body,” she said, 
focused on her knife work. “This guy sits on the scapula, and I love it because it has beautiful lacy fat.
After the meat was cut down into several smaller steaks, she wrapped one up, grabbed 
a couple of tallow cubes molded into the shapes of “Star Wars” characters, and headed 
to a nearby kitchen to cook us some lunch.
Before she was a butcher, Ms. Kavanaugh was a strict vegetarian. She stopped eating 
meat for more than a decade, she said, out of a deep love for animal life and respect 
for the environment.

Even though she owns a butcher shop, Ms. Kavanaugh eats a mostly 
vegetable-based diet. She and Josh Curtiss, her business partner (and life partner), 
frequent Denver-area farmers’ markets to shop for local produce.CreditRyan Dearth 
for The New York Times
She became a butcher for exactly the same reasons.
Ms. Kavanaugh, 30, is one in a small but successful cadre of like-minded former vegetarians and vegans who became butchers in hopes of revolutionizing the 
current food system in the United States. Referring to themselves as ethical butchers, 
they have opened shops that offer 
meat from animals bred on grassland and pasture, with animal well-being, 
environmental conservation and less wasteful whole-animal butchery as their 
primary goals.
It’s a sharp contrast to the industrial-scale factory farming that produces most of 
the nation’s meat, and that has come under investigation and criticism for its  
waste, overuse of antibiotics, and  inhumane, hazardous conditions for the animals.
The outcry has been so strong that some meat producers say they are changing 
their practices. But these newer butchers contend that the industry is proceeding 
too slowly, with a  lack of transparency that doesn’t inspire trust.

Ms. Kavanaugh holding rib steaks she just butchered. 
The well-marbled meat is a signature of her shop, which specializes 
in 100-percent-grass-fed and -finished beef.
CreditRyan Dearth for The New York Times
“I’m basically in this to turn the conventional meat industry on its head,” she said, 
as Darth Vader melted in her hot cast-iron pan.
Once the tallow was liquid, she added the steak, letting the meat sizzle as she hummed “The Imperial March.” She left it in the pan a lot longer than I was expecting; like many 
of her ex-vegetarian customers, Ms. Kavanaugh prefers her steaks cooked to medium.
It was one of the best steaks I’d ever had, which is saying a lot: I like my meat black-and-blue. Crisp-edged, velvety and still remarkably juicy, it had a mineral tang and funky brawniness that would make its blander, cornfed cousins taste like chicken in comparison.
The ethical butchery movement first gained traction about 15 years ago, in the wake of
 the journalist Michael Pollan’s 2002 New York Times Magazine article about the abuse 
of factory-farmed beef cattle, and his subsequent book,“The Omnivore’s Dilemma,”     published in 2006.
One of the central questions in the book is whether Mr. Pollan can bring himself to kill 
an animal — first some chickens, then a wild pig — for his own dinner.
“It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, which I was then and still am,” 
he wrote, “that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat eating depends.”
This challenge struck a chord with many people, including vegans and vegetarians 
looking to change the factory-farming system.
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... the continuation of the article HERE 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/dining/butchers-meat-vegetarian-vegan.html