Butchers of Baghdad and Manhattan

Shop local week

I am a hypocrite, but not a total douchebag. I deplore the raising and killing of animals for food, most especially the condemning of sentient beings to lives of misery and pain, reducing them to units of industrial production. And still, I eat some meat. I try to buy from small farmers who raise their livestock kindly, giving them, as the saying goes, a good life and one bad day.

The crimes and costs of industrial meat go beyond animal suffering; they extend to catastrophic harm to the environment and inhuman conditions for human workers. In giant slaughter factories, workers must kill and carve the corpses with speed that guarantees high incidence of long-term disability and crippling accidents. These assembly-line workers in one of America’s most dangerous jobs are, not surprisingly, disproportionately immigrants with little choice of workplace.

And so it is, that in addition to throwing the minuscule leverage of my purchasing power to local farm-raised meat, I try also to buy from local butchers.

Above, a butcher and his son at their shop in Baghdad and a butcher at Florence Meat Market, a tiny shop on Jones St., in NYC's West Village. Below, a few miles away at the last butcher shop in Little Italy, fourth-generation butcher, Jennifer Prezioso, owns and runs the 100-year-old Albanese Meats & Poultry.