October 2023.
“A butcher! … I’d imagine you as a number of things, but a butcher would never be one of them… Why?”
Sometimes, it’s just a look, or just a slight shift in body language or facial expression. You can’t blame people for their human reflexes. We’re all only as able to respond to things based on what we’ve been exposed to, or had the time or means to seek out for ourselves. And, I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t imagine myself as a butcher a year or so ago. It’s funny to be reminded of how powerful change and perception manifests.
I write and share this on the days imminent and in-between my starting a brand new, official role as Junior Butcher at Farm Shop, as part of the incredible Artfarm domain by Hauser & Wirth, opening in November on South Audley St in Mayfair. It is something of an anniversary, too. FLOFFAL came into public being (i.e. Instagram) alongside a very practical shift and ‘new start’ for me. This was in order to bring FLOFFAL into actual being - to embody it and express it - as much as I could, for myself and for others.
When I decided I wanted and needed to leave my job and previous lifestyle, approximately one year ago to the time of writing this, I was doing so with the intent to ‘build a career out of offal’. I smile to myself as I remember how rather pragmatically I used to state this to people, and furthermore how, when they asked ‘why’ or ‘how’, I would reply - "I don’t know.” I now say ‘not knowing’ has educated and enabled me in ways I don’t believe would be possible had I been more prepared or equipped. Not knowing what I wanted to do has allowed me to do so many things. Like, for example, becoming a butcher.
It’s a very intriguing thing to reflect on - as an individual, I had never felt so bold in myself to be comfortable with saying, or rather admitting to this ‘not knowing’. I had worked and strove relentlessly, to the point of being damaging, throughout my fresh adult life to make sure I knew as much as possible. I was scared. From secondary school through to my last permanent role in fine art, based in a respected gallery, I was chasing security in submission to what I thought I ought to be doing, based on what I ‘knew’. People continue to comment on the ‘huge change’ or the ‘extremity’ of my decision to leave 'what I've always known' and pursue something else. This something, in fact, came into my mind organically. It has always been there and I have always known how much it matters to me, regardless of and alongside the other apparently more logical paths I've taken previously.
Conveniently, the word ‘organic’ embodies so many aspects of what I do. How I have understood and acted in order to achieve it has been a very personally and emotionally organic and organising process. A butcher's is a raw experience and environment in many facets, not to mention the raw meat itself that each and every day we are handling, cutting and creating with. There’s an intimacy in the work and in the exchanges of it that is often very poignant. I wonder sometimes if it is this rawness that really defines butchers in comparison to other areas of retail and hospitality. The primal nature and ‘traditions’ of slaughtering animals, breaking them down and cooking them are all echoed and discussed in a butchers daily. Customers bear witness to our work very directly - on the block - rather than ‘behind the pass’ in a restaurant, for example. They can see, hear, and even smell the process.
A photo taken on my very first day in the butchers. I was welcomed in and taken behind the counter, through to the back, and to a side of pork laid straight across the block. My head butcher explained the anatomy, handed me a knife, pointed and said - 'cut there, 5 ribs in'....
People regularly come in more than once a week, and a very particular relationship is developed with customers, with nothing but a counter between us, and yet with so many layers of interaction. It’s the unsaid things in retail and hospitality that defines much of the spirit of it. In a strangely short space of time you have a distinct rapport with each individual. You meet their families, their parents when they are visiting from overseas, spouses, siblings, friends, dogs. When parents bring their children in, who are always thrusting fingers and sometimes whole faces right up against the glass of the counter where all the meat is displayed, it’s a very immediate and multi-sensory interaction between us and the surroundings.
I use the word ‘surreal’ often, but with sincerity every time.
I’ve witnessed a whole spectrum of reactions, from being applauded to, I think, genuine disgust. This includes from other butchers - all which, so far, I have encountered to be men. There are of course other women out there doing it. It’s just difficult to see them, and indeed be seen as a woman myself within the industry and amongst other butchers. My particularly ‘sensitive’ brain - which I have been told by another (male) butcher needs to ‘toughen up, in this world of work’ - is very attuned to remember and banking certain interactions and words, not necessarily to my advantage. Nevertheless, my sensitivity enables me with such an intense and intent care - dare I say empathy - towards the animals and the lives that they represent, and every detail and aspect of their journey to my block and beyond it. I remember one (male) customer very clearly announce, as I was mid-way through breaking down a particular cut for him, that -
“…it’s nice that you’re not just doing the till, love. Good to see you get to do a bit of the old butchery as well…?”
Yes, it’s nice. It’s actually more than nice. It’s joyous, significant, exhilarating, exhausting…
This encompasses the work in as much a professional sense as a personal one, as an individual and as a woman. The sensitivities and strength I have in both have been heightened and honed in ways I was never aware of previously. Being a butcher, in a practical sense and a more contextual, perhaps even social and psychological sense, has tapped into so many notions of what it means and feels like to be a young woman and person. I feel have to make that distinction for myself - ‘person’ and ‘woman’ - because at the moment I have been processing how ‘womanly’ I feel in and around my work.
I have had a man say to me directly in the shop, while laughing and shaking his head, ’you shouldn’t be a butcher’. I have had a woman say to me, ‘isn’t it ruining your lovely hands?’ I have had people joking about me ‘getting butch’, and saying ‘but, you’re a butcher now, so you should be drinking pints’ when I order my habitual glass of bog-standard prosecco in the pub. It has, in all honesty, made me question myself and how doing what I love is meaning something about me on a symbolic, specifically gendered, level. To what extent does it define me, or my gender, or my character altogether?
In any case, I am aiming to arrive in a mindset where there needn’t to be an answer. I personally am working towards a point where I am confident in, once again, not knowing what it precisely means for me or about me.
The fact is, I can’t ever say to what extent people have treated me in the ways they have based on me being a woman, and in fact I know men experience the same sort of skewed approach when they are the minority in another industry. I suppose it’s just important for me and for anyone reading this to touch upon the subject as a valid point and part of what I do, and of Floffal more broadly. I always refer to being ‘human’, and actually, ‘an animal’ when it comes to eating meat - there’s a core equalising aspect of my approach to food in us trying to find ways of being aligned to it, re-acquainting ourselves with it, so that we can celebrate it more rather than just consume it.
Being a butcher has so directly and intimately re-acquainted me with the animals and meat and offal than I consume and is the basis of my work. It is this intimacy which is the privilege, and I think a privilege for anyone who finds the industry and area of work for themselves that feels intimate, focussed, immersive, and progressively rewarding. Within a year, out of various circumstances that are not at all usual in one’s first year on the job (essentially, being thrown in at the deep end and into sink-or-swim scenarios, almost weekly), I have been recognised as being able to do what my head butcher could only do after three years.
The joy of learning and unlearning, of constantly being refreshed and re-examined on your sense of strength, skill and self. I think this is a genuine honour to enlist ourselves in, whether personally or professionally. At the age of 25, I managed to manifest and enrol myself in this, and it continues to deliver as much reward as retribution. It is relentless, as are many of the issues and areas discussed above, but as the same time it feels like a sense of reverence and realignment to some fundamental parts - again, practically and emotionally - of what it means to live and work. Butchery is, for me, deconstruction and reconstruction. It is artful and arduous. It is life and death, and an opportunity to see and feel beyond both of those. It is its own nature, and of nature - cyclical, rather than linear. Its brutality and beauty are interconnected and inseparable, just as people are and need to be when it comes to the world and nature around them, both of which my work aims to bring together.
Thank you, for everything and always, to every person who I have been able to talk to, feel with, work with, and simply exist with, without fear. Ahead to pastures new...
@dursladefarmshop
@artfarmuk
@meatjon107ladywell
@floffal
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