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Olivia Potts | Longreads | February 8, 2024 | 25 minutes (7,145 words)
I am standing in the middle of a large, stark classroom. On the walls there are educational posters; sinks line the back. If you glanced through the window or peeked through the door you might think it’s a school science lab. But as you enter, it’s apparent that this is not a space for Bunsen burners or glass beakers.
For starters, it is very cold, like standing inside a fridge, and in place of desks, there are large, thick slabs of wood with steel legs, nailed into the floor and spaced at regular intervals. I’m wearing a white coat—not unlike a lab coat, actually—paired with non-slip safety shoes and a particularly unflattering white mesh, trilby-style hat. I am also sporting a chain-mail vest and a thick, plastic, wipe-down red-and-white-striped apron. More tellingly still, on the block in front of me are half a dozen dead pheasants. This is the butchery department, deep in the bowels of Waltham Forest College in North East London, UK, where I am the only female student.
Butchery is one of the oldest crafts in the world. Opinions vary as to exactly how old, but if we take butchery to simply mean deliberately preparing animals as food using tools, we can date it to 3.4 million years ago—the age of animal remains recovered in Kenya with marks suggesting sharp stones were used to break up the bones and strip the meat. When excavations were made in 2004 for a high-speed rail link to be built in Ebbsfleet in Kent, UK, elephant bones were found, surrounded by sharpened flint tools that have been dated to over 400,000 years old. Contemporaneous red deer bones have been found with signs that suggest the same cutting techniques that are used by butchers today were deployed. And there is evidence in Florida from 12,000 years ago not only of sloths and giant tortoises being butchered for their meat but—according to butcher lore and blogs—of the existence of a formal trade and butchers’ shops.
But in the UK, butchery as an established commercial endeavor came in with the Romans: before they invaded Britain, the slaughter of animals was ceremonial and religious, and meat was a secondary consideration. As the Romans set up towns, bringing disparate groups of people together, there was an increased demand for meat, whole carcass butchery, and secondary processing. Butchery was now more than a religious process; it was a commercial prospect. Archaeological evidence suggests that these trade butchers each had highly specific roles, some dealt solely in bone marrow, others in hooves. Careful, neat knife work was not the order of the day—the cleaver was the preferred tool of Roman butchers and appears to have been a Roman invention, along with the butcher’s block.
By the Middle Ages, butchery was a respected and skilled craft: the Worshipful Company of Butchers, one of the historic livery companies (or trade associations) of London, traces its roots back to 975 AD, while the York Butchers’ Gild appeared in the Freemen’s Rolls in 1272. The Victorian age was a particularly good time to be a butcher: Britain was the first country in the world to have a greater town population than country population—and it was a population that consumed a large proportion of meat. The butcher was in demand. Without refrigeration, the shelf life of fresh meat was limited, and most would shop daily. Butchery thrived—in the Shambles, a particularly narrow street in York, there were 31 butchers’ shops in 1885. None survive today.
Archaeological evidence suggests that these trade butchers each had highly specific roles, some dealt solely in bone marrow, others in hooves.
The beginning of the 20th century saw the start of World War I, which meant rationing. Rationing tokens weren’t simply given to consumers, but also to those supplying the goods, and the small amount of meat given to butchers forced them to be clever and astute when it came to creating value-added products like sausages and pies. By the time the Second World War began, butchery had been made a protected occupation, and butchers over 30 couldn’t be conscripted to serve—the high demand for meat meant that their normal roles were seen as indispensable.
But today, butcher shops are facing a crisis. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board published an article in 2019 stating that over the last 25 years, the number of independent butchers in the UK has reduced by 60 percent. More than 100 butcher shops are closing per year. What has changed? What went wrong?
By the time the pheasants and I became acquainted, I had been learning craft butchery for a couple of terms. While we aren’t quite talking about a meme-worthy record-scratch freeze-frame moment—yep, that’s me, you may be wondering how I got here—it wasn’t an obvious route for me. I’ve always eaten meat, and I’ve always been interested in how we break animals down to become individual cuts, but as a chef and a food writer my work focuses on cookery—often puddings—and I don’t need an expertise in raw meat.
However, I was also tired of being nervous about cooking meat. Before I left my career in law in favor of pâtisserie, I couldn’t cook at all. I lived on supermarket pasta and sauce. So when I started learning to cook, it wasn’t systematic learning, and the prospect of buying expensive cuts of meat—and potentially ruining them with my lack of skill—was too intimidating. As time went on, and I became more proficient in other areas, this started to embarrass me. I looked for a quick fix: my local further education college offered six-week adult courses that would teach me how to joint a chicken and tie up a rack of lamb. But every time I signed up for the course, it would be canceled.
One day, on a whim, I went into the college to ask about it. After another unsuccessful attempt to sign up for the short course, I was taken down to the chilly butchery stores and introduced to Ray Humm, head of butchery. Ray is a surprisingly slight man for someone who has spent over 60 years lifting forequarters and wielding cleavers. But his skill, knowledge, and enthusiasm for the craft are clear from the first meeting. An hour later, I walked out into the bright sunshine, slightly dazed, having signed up to study for a yearlong course—an NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) Level 2—in craft butchery.
For much of my training, I was the only person on the course; and the highest-ever number of students in our large, airy, butcher’s-block-filled classroom was three (we started at different times). This was at odds with the oversubscribed culinary courses, or indeed any of the other trade and apprentice subjects. The trainee hairdressers’ salon was packed, young adults in paper chef toques thronged the halls, and hopeful electricians and carpenters were plentiful. But within three years of completing my qualifications, the entire butchery department at Waltham Forest College had closed for good.
Where had all the butchers gone?
The golden age of butchery was brought to an end by the rise of the supermarket, and butchers’ shops have been clinging on for dear life ever since. There are several reasons for supermarket reliance, but among them is convenience. Suddenly a family could do their weekly shopping in one easy trip; there was no need to visit several different specialist shops.
These one-stop shops also arrived at a time when women, who had traditionally been relied upon for both shopping and cooking for the family, entered the workplace, meaning households became time-poor. So while the cuts at the supermarket were generally more limited than those a butcher could offer—and their provenances less clear—for many, the pros outweighed the cons. The single shopping trip also coincided with the availability of ready meals, and many families simply got out of the practice of buying locally or cooking from scratch. Pre-prepared meals are not only quicker and easier to cook, but they also don’t require culinary knowledge in the way that roasting a joint of meat or making a casserole does. That knowledge of how to handle meat (and other raw ingredients) was, for the first time in hundreds of years, no longer essential to be able to sustain oneself or one’s family. And, naturally, without the necessity for that knowledge, it fell out of common usage.
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Today in the UK, most supermarkets have done away with their butchery counters, at least in any meaningful sense, leaving a place where sausages and mince can be weighed out, but no real cutting or butchery is done. The majority of the meat we buy raw is from one of a handful of big supermarkets, portioned and in taut little gas-flushed tubs. We are less familiar with those cuts that don’t appear robustly packaged on supermarket shelves. But perhaps even more pertinently, we don’t know how to order meat, and the fear of embarrassment is enough to keep us away from the intimidating, old-fashioned high street butcher’s shop.
As a consequence, animal rearing and meat production have become further and further removed from our daily lives, and, as a population, we are now disconnected from handling and cooking meat. This disconnect, along with that lack of culinary knowledge and confidence, means that consumers have become nervous around raw meat. It’s a vicious circle. Nearly six years ago, the UK supermarket giant Sainsbury’s introduced no-touch chicken breasts, with the chicken in pouches so consumers could tip the breast directly into the pan. The supermarket’s decision came after research from Brand Potential found over 37 percent of respondents stated that they would actively choose to buy meat packaged in a way that completely eliminated touching it. It was couched as solving hygiene concerns, but the reality is that it put the customers at an even further—and literal—distance from the meat they were consuming.
In short, we have become scared of meat.
But now independent butchers face a new crisis: the workforce. In the UK, Brexit has had a significant effect on those able (or indeed willing) to work in the meat production industry. Our farming and meat-processing workforce—with its often poorly paid, unstable work—was populated in large part by Europeans. After Brexit, they were no longer entitled to work in the UK.
This lack of manpower brought meat processing to a terrifying halt. In 2021, farmers pleaded with the government to make immigration exceptions for slaughtermen, to prevent the culling of 150,000 pigs that simply couldn’t be processed for market with no one to do it. The prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, was unsympathetic, making jokes about bacon sandwiches coming from dead pigs and refusing to engage with the distinction between pointless, unprocessed killing due to a labor shortage and slaughter for processing.
Abattoirs and meat-processing plants were particularly hit, but, of course, this had a knock-on effect on butchers’ abilities to source and provide meat. Compounding this, butchery as a trade is no longer a terribly attractive profession. It’s hard on the body, and not just in terms of physically hoicking heavy animals about. There’s the cold, the repetitive movement, and the often wet hands, which causes painful skin damage. As with any job that involves, knives, cleavers, and heavy machinery, it’s dangerous too, and horror stories abound of hands lost to grinders and digits to meat slicers. At one point, injuries to the femoral artery were colloquially known as “butcher’s block” because a slipped knife causing exsanguination was an occupational hazard. Butchers typically struggle with damaged knees, backs, and hands; and it is almost impossible to do the job if your physical health is impeded. It requires deeply antisocial hours, too, with much of the work happening before the shop doors open early in the morning, and there’s rarely anyone to pick up the slack in your absence.
As with any job that involves, knives, cleavers, and heavy machinery, it’s dangerous too, and horror stories abound of hands lost to grinders and digits to meat slicers.
There is a distinction between the meat processing done in factories and the craft butchery that takes place in butchers’ shops. Craft butchery tends to use traditional techniques, rather than automation. In practice, this means that the craft or artisan butcher wields a knife rather than mans a machine, works on smaller quantities of animals (and, many would argue, better-sourced animals), and cuts them in a way that adapts to the animal and customer’s needs, as opposed to more uniform slabs of meat. They are also more likely to employ nose-to-tail butchery, using offal or more unusual cuts from the animal.
Butchery, throughout its history, has relied on the passing down of this knowledge and skill through example and supervised practice—apprenticeships, in other words. The lifeblood of craft trades. Butchery training isn’t a quick process; it can take years to become truly proficient, and far longer to become a master butcher. Successful acquisition of butchery knowledge requires a mentor, which means finding someone willing to pass that knowledge on to you.
Even now, with formal apprenticeship programs at UK colleges in place, to progress any further in butchery training than I did, a hopeful butcher needs someone established to both employ and financially sponsor them through the process. For that reason, it’s often a trade that has stayed in the family: sons learning and then taking over from fathers, and the business passing down the family line. This has the effect of making it something of a closed shop, particularly if you do not fall into the conventional—white, working-class, male—mold of a traditional butcher.
But even then, given the slow decline in profitability over the last 50 years, it’s hardly surprising that those who have watched family members struggle with the business don’t feel predisposed to make it their own career. In an age where there are jobs that are less physically demanding, better remunerated, or just warm, it’s harder to attract the fresh meat needed.
And it’s dearly needed. We are facing an aging population of butchers: many, who have been in the industry since their teenage years, are now reaching retirement age. But the problem isn’t as simple as finding someone to take over the management of a shop. If these veteran butchers retire before a sufficient new generation is trained up, the skills will die with them. We need something new.
I was taught butchery by one of the old guards: Ray Humm is 79 years old and has spent over 60 years in the industry. Born and bred in Tottenham, in the North East of London, he was a keen amateur boxer, with no intention of becoming a butcher. At age 15, he was studying engineering, and planning a six-week summer holiday of hanging around with friends, doing very little, before starting an engineering apprenticeship. But his dad, who drove lorries for Smithfield Market, the largest wholesale meat market in the UK, had other ideas: “He said, ‘If you think you’re standing around street corners for six weeks, you have another thing coming!’” On the first day of the holidays, his father dropped him off at a meat processing plant. Ray was squeamish to start with, reluctant to touch the inside of a chicken, but things changed.
By the time I met him, Ray had owned a butcher’s shop, six specialized sausage shops, and a sausage factory. He sold all of them in 2000 and tried to settle into an early retirement. Quickly restless, he was relieved when the local college—where, as a hobbyist, he’d studied for a diploma in cookery—asked him if he’d like to come and teach on the course.
The college had a butchery department and, when the head butcher later injured himself, Ray was asked to stand in and teach the apprentice students for three weeks. The previous butcher didn’t return, and the rest, as they say, is history. For 17 years, Ray headed up the butchery department, often single-handedly, until the department was unceremoniously closed last year.
When Ray began teaching, there were intakes of 50 apprentices at a time, although almost none of them were female. His final intake, by contrast, was only six apprentices, but half of them were women.
Back with the pheasants, and it’s the smell that’s getting to me. Traditionally, game is allowed to hang after it has been killed, unplucked, with entrails still intact. This intensifies the flavor, which most game aficionados prefer—but the powerful, high smell of raw birds can be overwhelming. And I am overwhelmed.
And it’s not just the smell: the feathers that need to be pulled out are sticky, a bit slimy. They glue to my hands as I pluck, which feels disproportionately gross. Birds have tiny stones in their gullet; they swallow items whole when they eat, so it is these stones that grind up their food. Preparing the birds—by removing their heads and necks—the stones fall onto your work surface, along with any undigested grain, making a peculiarly bathetic jangle. I have a visceral reaction to it: revulsion.
But I’m also the only woman in the classroom, and it has become absolutely essential that I do not gag. Although the number of women apprentices had been creeping up over the years, from the get-go, as a woman studying butchery, I am still a novelty. Members of staff from all over this large, wide-ranging vocational college have trooped down to meet the girl who wanted to learn about cutting up animals. Despite my training and work in two traditionally male-dominated environments—the legal bar and the world of chefs—I felt I stood out in a way that I had never felt before, my position as a woman scrutinized.
Preparing the birds—by removing their heads and necks—the stones fall onto your work surface, along with any undigested grain, making a peculiarly bathetic jangle. I have a visceral reaction to it: revulsion.
Throughout my training, I felt this weight, which informed how I behaved. I believed I could not be perceived as weak in any way. So I didn’t complain about the cold. I picked up carcasses wherever it was physically possible to do so. I made sure my bones were so clean that you’d struggle to make stock with them. I avoided the cleaver and favored the saw, which did just as good a job without showing up my lack of upper body strength. And I would not be squeamish.
But I didn’t succeed in my pheasant poker face. The experience made me grimace, and Ray captured it on camera. “It’s my favorite photo of you!” he often says, with genuine warmth. I look silly, which would not normally bother me, but here it makes me feel stupid—like I have betrayed myself—undermined as a woman in butchery by my squeamishness. Why did I feel my gender mattered so much in this arena?
“Oh, you weren’t what I was expecting . . . well, what were you expecting?!” Charlotte Mitchell asks. Mitchell’s question is a fair one, given that her position as a female butcher is strongly suggested by her shop’s name, Charlotte’s Butchery. She has become used to the comments, but even now, her clients’ surprise remains a constant. Mitchell’s path to butchery was swift, if not traditional. After studying theology at university, she took a job with the Church of England as a pastor’s assistant in London. Becoming disillusioned with that career, she looked around for other ideas: “What other job can I do that is totally archaic and ridiculous?” she asked herself. She had spent a brief period while at university working in a butcher’s shop as a sales assistant, which she’d enjoyed, so went with that: “OK, I’ll be a butcher.”
Mitchell spent some time working in shops in London and Newcastle, but she’d only been properly butchering for a year when she bought her shop in Gosforth in the North East of England, where she grew up. Her training wasn’t without hurdles. She was underutilized in one job (“a very well-paid tea girl”), while elsewhere she was tested. Required to bring in beef forequarters that were unequivocally beyond her physical capabilities, she found ways around it: “I just got my saw and cut it in half and took it in in two loads. Have I passed?” As a consequence, perhaps, she thinks that she probably learned most of her butchery while she was in her own shop, simply by having a go.
Jessica Wragg, a trained butcher and author of Girl on the Block, took her first steps into butchery at 16, working on the till at a local farm shop. Even without the complications of being on the cutting side at that stage, she describes the first six months as a baptism of fire: “It really hardened me.” She found the attitudes to women, especially young women, outdated and difficult—at best flirty and misogynistic, at worst harassment.
Some of the bars to greater progression or representation of women in butchery are near-identical to those of other male-dominated or male-coded industries: having to prove worthy of training to the employer; not being taken seriously by the consumer, even when fully trained; being dismissed for presumed physical or mental weakness; and a scarcity of role models. It is difficult, too, for a workplace that doesn’t have true representation to ensure that older attitudes toward those excluded from the trade don’t prevail, which in turn makes those spaces less accepting of and less appealing to women.
Once Wragg decided to pursue butchery as a career, the first hurdle was “fighting to have to learn something and be taken seriously,” but what quickly followed was getting the customer to take her seriously. She tells stories of shop customers ignoring her to ask questions of a junior, male shop worker. She felt a real need to prove herself as equal to her male contemporaries: “I used to go out of my way to lift heavier things just to prove that I could.”
She found the attitudes to women, especially young women, outdated and difficult—at best flirty and misogynistic, at worst harassment.
One would think that women in butchery would be hyper-visible, given their rarity. But this is not the reality. Their scarcity renders them invisible when it comes to expertise; it seems inconceivable to those inside and outside the industry that they could possess the skill and knowledge of their more visible—and therefore expected—male counterparts. Both Wragg and Mitchell relay stories of being patronized or overlooked in favor of less experienced, less knowledgeable male colleagues. “Every single male butcher that I’ve ever met in my life has mansplained something to me,” Mitchell tells me.
Wragg knows that her gender has afforded her particular opportunities within the meat industry that she otherwise may not have realized. But the novelty that brought about those experiences is holistically detrimental, because that othering “makes you stand out,” and many women understandably don’t want to feel that in their jobs. It means that those women are by definition challenging gender norms, rather than simply doing a job; they can never be butchers, always female butchers.
Wragg observes the “weird disconnect” that exists in the industry: on the one hand, an awareness that a skilled workforce is dying out, and on the other, an “interesting relationship between older butchers who feel like they’re entitled to this knowledge and have earned the right to be secretive about this world, and younger people who want to learn.”
It has often been assumed by those within the trade that the dearth of women in the industry is because women do not have an interest in being butchers, due to the physical requirements of the job. Plainly, this is untrue: we have never worried about women’s interest or capability in hugely physically demanding careers like nursing or caregiving. Ironically, we have also not historically had the same problem with women working in slaughterhouses, which is considered less skilled and less respectable than craft butchery, and consequently has inferior pay and job stability. And, for most of civilization, women have been trusted with small home farms and the rearing, slaughtering, and butchery that goes with that. It’s only when it comes to women being professional butchers that we begin to feel uncomfortable.
The “ick” factor of women being in this arena is a particularly difficult one to overcome because it’s entirely irrational. In her 2018 paper, “Women Who Butcher: Gender Bias, Knowledge Politics, and Solidarity in Meat Processing Systems,” Maria Cali finds that when it comes to women in butchery, “their identity as women is in tension with their identity as skilled meat processors, and coworkers and customers alike reveal discomfort with that tension.” This then plays directly into who is and is not “allowed” access to knowledge. The ick is a manifestation of our collective discomfort with women butchering, and the gatekeeping of knowledge from women is the result.
The resistance to women in butchery goes further: we associate butchery with blood and gore, and dealing with blood and gore is not a place for a woman. We refer to destroying or making a mess of things as butchering them and to particularly brutal murderers as butchers. Even eating large quantities of meat, especially red meat, and particularly rare red meat, is seen as a male preserve. From the killing to the consuming, meat is viewed as inherently masculine. Prime cuts are primal.
Wragg believes it’s about a reframing: “Stereotypically, meat is very masculine. There is a school of thought that eating meat is a male thing, cooking meat is a male thing, understanding meat is a male thing—and a lot of men use it as a bit of a personality trait, really. I’m so manly, because I eat lots of steak. But butchery itself is actually a very intimate and very creative thing. If you think about the action of using a knife to separate bones from flesh, it’s not slapdash, it’s not chop here, chop there. It’s very soft, very beautiful.”
When Ray began his career in the 1960s, women were employed as cashiers, but nothing more. “It was a man-dominated trade. And women were not strong enough. They weren’t robust enough. And they weren’t streetwise enough. That was how the butchery trade felt.” (He is at pains to distinguish these generalized views of the industry, from his own.) “And so women, basically, were second-rate people. Men didn’t take no notice of them, and they had no say. They were there, they cleaned up, done washing up, scrubbed floors, washed counters.”
Even eating large quantities of meat, especially red meat, and particularly rare red meat, is seen as a male preserve. From the killing to the consuming, meat is viewed as inherently masculine. Prime cuts are primal.
In London’s Smithfield Market, Ray thinks the environment became self-selecting. Women who had encountered and embraced feminism felt like it hadn’t reached the marketplace: “There was a lot of swearing, a lot of innuendo, a lot of sort of touching; you could smack a girl’s bottom without anyone even taking any notice.” This meant that places like Smithfield remained wall-to-wall men. Women would work in the upstairs offices, but they would never come down to the actual market. Women simply weren’t taken seriously in this world, so chose not to enter it.
And if, despite these hostile working conditions, a woman had wanted to be trained up as a butcher? “No no. As a woman, you’re not strong enough. You’re not enough. It’s a messy, dirty job. Women don’t do messy, dirty jobs. It was that attitude, very much,” says Ray.
Even for those women willing to come up against those hurdles, getting their hands on the knives has not been simple. For a long time, guilds prohibited women from working as butchers at all. Their role was limited to sales; the deli counter, too, was fair game. Or rather, a woman’s game: the making of sandwiches and doling out of sausage rolls was entirely manned by women, often the wife of the butcher proprietor.
“There is a bias around who gets to cut meat and who doesn’t,” says Camas Davis. When she lost her job in magazines during the 2008 recession, she found herself in France, on a pig farm. There she learned how to butcher pork, with women doing as much of the butchering and farming as men—a “beautiful, accepting setting.” But when she returned to the US, the story was different: “My first job in a butcher’s shop was at a meat counter which was run by men who played practical jokes on me, who tried to trick me into making mistakes, just generally were trying to undermine my learning experience. Though they did not outwardly question my place there, it was clear my place was being questioned.”
It feels axiomatic to say that those who come from outside an established or “validated community of knowers” will find it significantly harder to both acquire knowledge and have that knowledge recognized than someone whose path is a well-trodden one. One of the most common ways of excluding non-traditional entrants to an industry is to be dismissive of them. This idea of being “taken seriously”—often those exact words—comes up again and again in the butchers I speak to about women in the trade.
Because the meat business has been heavily dominated by men for so long, one of the biggest challenges for women entering the field used to be finding female role models for employment, training, and support. It’s changing. Davis was brought into the world of butchery by Kate Hill, who set up Grrls Meat Camp (now the Women’s Good Meat Network), an educational space that brings women together. It filled a void for women who wanted to learn about meat but didn’t know where to go—who had sought training or on-the-job experience but couldn’t find it within a male-dominated industry. “Being able to learn and ultimately teach alongside women, it didn’t feel competitive,” says Davis. “It was very open and accepting to all levels.” She quickly graduated to teaching at the camp and became a spokesperson and activist for representation within the industry. It is no coincidence that so many of the women who have resisted the gender bias in the industry and fought for access to and recognition of their knowledge have, in turn, become educators.
Davis is interested in the idea of mastery: “In any male-dominated industry, there is an assumption that men can come in with or without knowledge or mastery, and do the job; they get entrée into that industry. For a lot of women, me included, we must master the skill or trade first to be legitimately allowed in. And so, what I have seen is, by the time a woman becomes a meat cutter, they have really studied and practiced and are precise, and are working really hard to prove that mastery.” Wragg, who also began teaching women-only butchery classes, creating an environment where women felt comfortable enough to learn and ask questions, agrees. “It’s one of the only careers where you have to gain people’s respect in order to gain access to knowledge.”
Of course, some men wholeheartedly support and champion women in the industry, mentoring them, raising them up, working under them as well as alongside them—Ray among them. But again and again, I come across apparent women-positive articles about butchery, lauding the feminine skills that women can bring to the industry, that actually just perpetuate gender-divisive clichés.
Women in Butchery, for example, is an Australian website designed to encourage women into the trade (and the trade to accept women); its tagline is “cutting through gender stereotypes.” When extolling the advantages of hiring a female apprentice, it states:
Women can bring a different approach to butchering than men. Their advantage is their attention to detail. Their feminine touch (more dainty and delicate cuts instead of the macho chunks of beef their male colleagues prefer) look a lot more attractive to customers, who, as the old saying goes, buy with their eyes. The unique female perspective on meat cutting and displaying is an advantage. Women also tend to be better at giving cookery advice to customers.
“Dainty,” “delicate,” “macho,” “attractive.” In many ways these are just as misogynistic as the exclusion of women in the first place: women bring calmness, they bring finesse, they have fine, delicate hands that make the finishing and primping of the cuts—presumably prepared by the men with the real skill—more attractive for sale. It is another example of undermining women’s expertise and knowledge. Unsurprisingly, none of the women butchers I speak to think that women cut differently from men.
But the way we cut meat is changing—and possibly to women’s advantage. For a long time, the traditional British way of butchering was to prepare joints, usually for roasting, and often on the bone. These joints would contain several different muscles, cut and trussed into a neat shape, that looks handsome on the plate, lends well to roasting, and allows thin, cohesive slices of meat to be cut from the cooked product. This method required significant physical strength, the wielding of cleavers, and the manipulation of whole carcasses or forequarters.
But seam butchery—a European method of butchery—is being adopted more widely. It’s now common among craft butchers in the UK and is frequently practiced in the US too. In this particularly economical and low-waste style of butchery, the meat is cut by finding the natural seams between muscles and separating them with the very tip of a butcher’s knife, rather than using a saw or cleaver. The action of doing so feels more like encouraging the meat away from the bone than cutting; a lot is done almost blind, relying on feeling within the carcass the routes that your knife has to take. It is surprisingly delicate. Working with the muscles rather than against them makes cuts that are easier to cook (different muscles can require different types or times of cooking), as well as producing complete cuts that otherwise would only be usable in mince or sausage.
Mitchell believes that good butchers, contrary to stereotypes, need to be “light-handed, gentle, sensitive,” in the way that they cut meat—but that doesn’t mean that they are cutting in a “feminine” way. You would never, Mitchell observes, expect a male pastry chef to be less meticulous, less refined, less delicate than their female counterparts; you wouldn’t refer to his skill as feminine.
Mitchell believes that good butchers, contrary to stereotypes, need to be “light-handed, gentle, sensitive,” in the way that they cut meat—but that doesn’t mean that they are cutting in a “feminine” way.
For Ray, it’s the attitude of women entering the trade that sets them apart: “They’re more precise in what they do. I find they’re more dedicated. Take the younger generation: the boys come in to do a job because it’s a man’s job, and it’s a job we can do. Women come into it really wanting to learn, really wanting to make it a career.” Perhaps it is the exclusion of women from the industry that means that those who enter it are necessarily more intentional, more long-sighted than those who have never been denied entry.
The World Butchers’ Challenge—billed as “The Greatest Butchery Event on Earth” and seen as the equivalent to a World Cup for meat prep—takes place every four years. Last year in Sacramento, California, among 13 countries competing, with six competitors in each team, there were only two teams with two women members (Canada and Brazil) and five teams with one woman. The other six were entirely made up of men, which equals lower than 10 percent female representation.
Elsie Yardley was the one woman on the Great British butchery team. Just speaking to her is spirit-raising: with a background in art and design, she finds huge creativity in butchery, and loves the level of skill required to master it. But there’s a familiar story in terms of her entry into the industry. Having realized her enthusiasm for it while working as a Saturday girl, serving customers and making tea for the proper butchers, she approached her boss and asked to be trained up. His response was unequivocal: “He said if I couldn’t lift it, I couldn’t cut it.” Undeterred she found someone who was willing to teach her. She knows that her physical strength is a limitation, just not an insurmountable one. Aware that there was no way she could have lifted 600-kilogram bodies of Aberdeen Angus, she developed workarounds. She has taught herself to cut large cuts of beef while they’re still hanging from a hook—a more continental way of doing it, but not one for which many butchers in the UK have the skill or knowledge. “I’ve learned the best way to cut it to suit me, and I use the carcass’ weight to my advantage,” she says.
For Yardley, much of the job’s appeal is the interaction between the meat she sells and the cooking process. She considers the value-added products—the chicken Kievs, the marinated chops, the “butcher’s ready meal” that you find on a butcher’s display counter—the way forward. While consumers of meat are time-poor, they still care about quality, provenance, and sustainability, and, in her experience, they’d far rather have a prepared meal from a butcher, which can speak to these considerations, than one from a supermarket or delivery company that is mass-produced and ethically ambiguous.
This is one of the problems with an aging population of butchers: the butchers who started in the industry 50 or 60 years ago were dealing with a clientele who had different considerations and culinary knowledge than many of those who want to buy meat today. Of course, there will always be cooking enthusiasts who want to spend a lot of money on a cut of meat and are confident in their abilities to bring the best out of it. But the reality is that the number of customers in 2024 who know what a Barnsley chop is, let alone what to do with it, is significantly lower than the number in 1963. Younger butchers like Yardley are more sympathetic to this.
In some areas, we are seeing greater recognition for these new figures: the Women in Meat Industry Awards was set up in 2018 by Meat Management Magazine (which also hosts the Meat Management Industry Awards) and specifically celebrates women in management positions across the sector. Meat Business Women is a network set up in 2015 by Laura Ryan and Pamela Brook as a reaction to the scarcity of women in the industry, particularly at the board level. This network established a global mentoring program designed not only to attract but also to retain women in meat. And the last master of the Worshipful Company of Butchers was Margaret Boanas, the third woman to hold the role in the Guild’s 700-year history. (Although it is worth noting that this is a ceremonial role, and one of the previous female masters was the Princess Royal, who, one suspects, has little professional experience of butchery; while Boanas’ experience is in meat buying as opposed to butchery itself.)
But the reality is that the number of customers in 2024 who know what a Barnsley chop is, let alone what to do with it, is significantly lower than the number in 1963.
“Master butcher” (distinct from Boanas’ position) is the highest qualification and recognition of skill that a working butcher can achieve in the UK and is awarded by the Institute of Meat, which is also responsible for apprenticeships and other accredited butchery training. There have been fewer than 60 awards in the last three decades: only two were to women, and no women were recognized in the most recent awards. But the same awards ceremony also celebrates apprentice butchers, and—in contrast—two-thirds of those winning apprentices were women.
So, amid the doom and gloom, there are reasons to be cheerful. And while the supermarkets have long held the monopoly on a plentiful supply of cheap meat, there are areas in which the butcher remains king (or queen). Now that even supermarket butchery counters have gone, their customers are given no choice over the exact amount, preparation, or cut of their meat; as well as no personal service, recommendation, or guidance. The COVID-19 pandemic brought a swell of new consumers to butchers’ shops, and while many have returned to the convenience of the supermarket, there remains an increase in custom to the independent retailer.
There is also increased awareness of the dangers of poor farming standards and the ethical and ecological impacts around sustainability, with more people seeking out meat where the source is traceable, the quality is higher, and the craftsmanship is obvious. A renewed willingness to pay higher prices for smaller amounts of quality meat means we may see a resurgence in the use of the butcher.
If there is an interest in using independent butchery, how do we stop more shops from closing? Well, in one sense, the answer is simple: bodies. As Mitchell puts it, “I think we just need to bring anyone under the age of 40 into the industry.”
To survive, butchery as a craft needs a workforce. It needs to pass on its skills to younger butchers before the older ones, well, pass on. Crafts can only live as long as they are practiced. So new blood in the trade—especially when those who would have traditionally joined it are no longer an automatic addition—is vital. “Allowing” women to enter the trade means an instant and significant increase in the number of potential butchers.
It is clear from the women who have made it in the industry, and from those actively seeking out encouraging and educational spaces for future women, that there is a female appetite for professional butchery. And, among the women butchers I speak to, there is a surprising optimism alongside a genuine and sustained enthusiasm for the craft. Charlotte Mitchell calls butchery “the most rewarding job in the world”; Elsie Yardley tells me, “I’m still massively in love with it, I don’t get bored of it. . . . I can’t see myself doing anything else.”
But the culture of butchery remains off-putting. There needs to be a reckoning. Jessica Wragg can see that there is significant work to be done in terms of accessibility and attitude: “I would love to go into a butcher’s shop and just feel comfortable. I feel that walking into a butcher’s shop, even though I’ve had the life I’ve had, still intimidates me.”
She believes that women are necessary for the progress of the craft: “In 10 years, we’ll have understood how the meat industry can progress in a way that is less damaging to our health and environment, and I think women have to play an integral part in that. I’m hopeful, I don’t think all is lost.”
And there is an inherent virtue in bringing women into the profession. As Davis puts it, “Whenever you have a population of people who have been excluded and then are allowed to become a part of it and define it, that is inherently going to change the nature of that thing. . . . I can see that in the restaurant, meat, and farming industries, those who have been cast out and then brought back in, bring with them an ability to see the need for full systems, reevaluating hierarchical systems. Having a different face and story attached to the meat industry seems hopeful to me.”
While still underrepresented, there are more women in the industry than ever before, more female-friendly spaces, and more female educators. An optimistic reading is that this should gradually bring about its own momentum, reshaping the industry around those who now take up space in it, a younger and more diverse workforce. If that is the case, butchery can be pulled into the 21st century by its apron strings.
Olivia Potts is a food writer and chef. After a career as a criminal barrister, she retrained in patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu. Her latest cookbook, Butter: A Celebration is published by Headline, and is out now. Her first book, A Half Baked Idea: How grief, love, and cake took me from the courtroom to Le Cordon Bleu won the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book Award and is published by Fig Tree, Penguin. She was the Guild of Food Writers’ Food Writer of the Year 2020.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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