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In the back room of the Herbivorous Butcher, Kale Walch garbs himself in a bright white apron and cocked black hat, ready to literally make some bacon. Using an oversized rolling pin to flatten a hunk of red, ethically slaughtered protein, the young butcher proceeds to slice and portion out the hulking mess with a pizza cutter. Wrapping each slab with butcher paper, the bacon is ready to sell later that week at the local farmer's market to conscious, eco-friendly consumers. But unlike the other butchers you might find at the market, the Herbivorous Butcher takes humane and sustainable butchering to an extreme: Rather than killing animals, it uses ground up corpses of various local, non-GMO flora to make vegan-friendly products consumed by meat eaters and non-meat eaters alike. Meatless counterculture is taking its trend-game one step further: into butcher culture itself. "We had a big booth at Minnesota State Fair this year, and we were handing out samples of some of our most popular products," Walch said. "Some of the most hardcore, deep fried-looking people came up and were pleasantly surprised, and they said, 'I can actually do this.'" Over the past decade, the vegan and vegetarian cultures have gradually begun to undermine the narrow-minded, derogatory labels slapped onto any meatless diet practitioners. According to an article by Food Navigator USA, Eric Pierce, the director of strategy and insights at New Hope Natural Media, says six percent of the U.S. population claims to be vegan. But a larger number of consumers known as "flexitarians" are adopting some of the meatless dietary restrictions to reduce their consumption of meat. Pierce noted that 26 percent of consumers surveyed said they had reduced the amount of meat they consumed in the past month, many citing both health and animal welfare as reasons for their decisions. Former McDonald's CEO Don Thompson has even hopped onboard the vegan gravy train, taking a position on the Board of Directors of the plant-based food company Beyond Meat, whose sales increased over the course of this past year. Having already made eating tofu "cool," the meatless counterculture is taking its trend-game one step further by influencing and appropriating the most hardcore facet of the meat market right now: butcher culture. In the realm of Platonic culinary ideals, butcheries are the neighborhood institutions where you go to buy your weekly meat, said Walch. They're where an old, wrinkled butcher named Joe knows everyone's names and their routine weekly orders: half a pound of ham for little Susie and John's lunch sandwiches, a pound of ground beef for Wednesday night's meatloaf. But, on the other side of this nostalgia trip, a number of butcheries are still frozen in the same mindset as they were 1950s. According to Liz Cherry, a professor of sociology with an emphasis on food culture, meat during those days was a sign of wealth and prosperity; and in those days, we didn't seem too bothered about how cows were treated before being slaughtered and sold as beef at butchers; how the shops are selling us, if purchased in large quantities, carcinogenic protein; how they're the root of environmental decay. In their own small way, the meatless are utilizing this familiar protein hub to lead consumers into the brand new world of meatless meat. Cleaver-wielders, who at some point in time have considered themselves card-carrying vegetarian and vegans, are helping in their own small way by pushing for shops to stock ethically raised meat. Others who are not trained in the art of slaughtering animals are taking a hyper-literal stance on the phrase "vegan butcher." Over the past two years, butcher shops like the Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis and YamChops in Toronto have opened up to sell products like (plant-based) "Szechuan Chicken" to clientele with various dietary preferences, appropriating this animal-based culinary iconic institution to expand the definition to include their vegan-based counterparts. Animal rights' organizations such as PETA have dogmatically protested over the years for regulations that would improve animal welfare, but vegetarian and ex-vegetarian butchers such as Mary Lake — previously a slaughterer and butcher at the Royal Butcher in Vermont — are in their own way pushing us towards the ethical treatment and slaughter of livestock that we see across the meat and butcher industry today. Lake began to follow a vegetarian diet during her high school and college years, and was still practicing when she was first hired as a butcher. This ideological position might seem contradictory at first, but Lake explained that she became a vegetarian after realizing how the industrialized meat industry abused its livestock. While studying abroad in Ghana and Senegal, however, the future butcher saw how the locals took a completely humane approach to raising livestock in healthy, free-range conditions. And when it came time to slaughtering a goat for a sacrifice, she said the locals ensured it was quick and painless for the animal. "Vegetarians come in and decide they’re comfortable with eating our meat." Seeing that there existed an ethical middle ground between the PETA-esque stance against eating any animal meat and eating solely industrial meat, Lake became interested in the profession, and more importantly, wanted to ensure the animals lived and died happily. "I really wanted to be the one killing them because I really cared about them," Lake said, noting that she does now consume meat when she's absolutely certain where it comes from (typically, that means meat she's slaughtered herself). "Every animal that came into the barn, I was like, 'I'm going to take care of you. You're going to be really calm and comfortable in the barn, and I'm going to kill you very quickly.'" This ethical treatment of animals has influenced contemporary local butcher shops in metropolitan areas such New York City's Marlow & Daughters, where the butchers trim, cut, and sell what they claim to be true 1800s-style free-range beef, pork, and fowl meat cuts. Michael Kale, the manager of Marlow & Daughters, said that while its customers are predominantly meat-eaters, a number of vegetarians who share Lake's rationale for following vegetarianism end up buying the shop's meat cuts.
