Long life lessons: The Butcher

This interview is with a butcher, originally from Germany, who is based in a small indoor market in the seaside town of Tenby, South Wales.

We get our priorities wrong. People believe that they haven’t got time to do certain things anymore.  I have customers who say: “I haven’t got time to cook”, and I say: “Madam, you have time every night to focus completely on that square box which is being controlled by a remote control. Yeah, you’ve got time to sit in front of that box for two hours”.

Some people must spend an hour a day playing around with their mobile phones, you know, what a poor excuse. Life, food, the household, the kitchen are neglected. The kitchen should be the central part of the household. People usually only come together in the kitchen. It must involve the whole family. In the past we didn’t have all those time consuming gadgets you know? So people lived a better life then, and they lived a better lifestyle. Maybe their actual life [in terms of years] was shorter due to health and things, but in general their diets, their lifestyle was much, much healthier.

We are not controlling ourselves any more. We are being controlled by gadgets, television, mobile phones, the internet… They are our priorities. People I see spend a lot of money on gadgets and in the end they find they don’t have enough money to feed their own family, and they’ve got to buy mass-produced, cheaper and cheaper things that they call food. But I don’t look at it as food. It’s just by-products, or things that are based on food, with fake seasonings and aromatized chemicals and things. We need to go back to basics.

In general, I try to pass on to the customer that I respect the creature, and I should use every part of that creature, and it enhances my life because I am able to try to educate people.  And they come back and say “I liked that, can you show me something else I haven’t tried before?”.  In general it makes my whole life. I get a satisfaction.

Those lesser cuts can take longer to cook. Say I make a goulash… If I take a bit more time, the peppers, the onion, the caraway, the cumin seed, they have time to penetrate the meat, and I get a better dish. And sometimes the lower cuts have a higher fat content, and that fat helps to tenderise the sinew, the cartilage … it has time to give out its flavour and texture into the whole dish.

If you have a piece of shin on the bone, you have the marrow in there, and by cooking it longer all the flavours infuse the dish. I try to explain to the customer: you’ve got ox cheek, brisket, pig cheeks, flanks, the internals, skirt steak, which we don’t often see because they’ve almost completely disappeared out of the food chain due the demand of the big, multi national supermarkets that only stack certain cuts on their shelves. So their customers, in the long term, are deprived of things that are traditional.

We build a relationship with a lot of our customers. They come back and back. Every now and again, someone comes back and says: “I did it exactly how you said, and I involved members of my family.  It gave us the opportunity to be with our kids, while they peeled the carrots.” And then I see the seeds that I try to plant.

Sometimes I watch people, how they harm their children in the long term. They eat rubbish. They drink rubbish. They are provided with gadgets (he points to a nearby café), sometimes you see whole families, two adults and two children, and they sit there for half an hour, and they are on their gadgets and separated from each other.

Kitchens keep the family in harmony. Kitchens keep the family together. They enhance our social structure. Every year it gets worse. We watch them from our place here behind the stall. More and more people are disassociated from their families, even though they are sitting next to them.

I feel sorry for them, because I love food, because food comes out of a kitchen, three quarters of the people come in to this market and eat the same meal every day from that cafe over there: a cooked breakfast, the same people, every day, crap bacon, sausages that have been made out of emulsified pig skin which should be in our trade waste. It’s industry-based waste which has been turned into a sausage. We see the same people, every day, again and again, every day. Someone needs to teach them. Doing the same things is shortening their life.

Cook to lengthen your life. Don’t waste your time with unimportant things. Enhance your life every hour. If I go out I leave my mobile phone behind, because I don’t need to use it. You gain every day by just cutting out unimportant things. Maybe watch the news, or listen to the news once. But the amount of time you see people who are somewhere else … they are playing with their mobile phone … the whole society is wasting and losing time, not just your life, but maybe your children’s life, your partner’s life. You are not adding to their lives. Our whole society is losing time, wasting time.

I went out last night and I went foraging.  I was watching the bats when people were watching television. The bats were flying low. I was picking berries. I enjoyed my surroundings: the fields, watching the rabbits hopping around, while everyone was sitting in their living room, watching television. Last night my life was extended by an hour. My life enhancement started as soon as I distanced myself from unimportant things.

I have no one behind me, no one kicking my bottom, but I have half an hour here to talk to you, to extend and enhance my life. I may not be able to afford an expensive lifestyle, but I have what I have here, freedom.

As butchers we serve so many people who are successful business people, but their lives are shortened so much, I mean physically as well as mentally, because of the financial pressure they are living under these days, because most people can’t even afford to be what they pretend to be. Their whole life is built on credit.

Image credit: Naotake Murayama/flickr