Beast and Cleaver, a butcher shop and charcuterie in Seattle, is on a mission to elevate the craft of butchery to true artistry. They want you to eat meat of higher quality, and yes, less of it.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, the founder of Beast and Cleaver, Kevin Smith, joins Ross to discuss his butcher shop’s unique approach to localized meat production in a carbon heavy industry.
Have you heard the expression “it’s the how, not the cow”? That very much reflects Beast and Cleaver’s ethos. With more and more people eating meat globally as they gain access to financial means, the details of meat production become incredibly important. Part of the good news is that American consumers are increasingly interested in Old World food traditions of pâté and offal rather than merely prestige cuts, and even things like aspic that went deeply out of fashion decades ago are seemingly making a foodie comeback.
Kevin and Ross discuss the perception that major factory meat producers like Tyson and Smithfield Foods are incredibly efficient at using all parts of the animal. But are they in comparison to local, small-scale operations like Beast and Cleaver? They also discuss the challenges of running an artisanal meat business and how they are working to educate consumers about the benefits of sustainable meat production.
So if you're in the Seattle area and are a meat-eater (and enjoy classical charcuterie), be sure to check out Beast and Cleaver and get yourself a slice of pâté en croûte! Listen to the full episode to learn more about their innovative approach to localized meat production and learn how to possibly indulge with respect and care on your plate.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori, which is a carbon removal marketplace based in Seattle. And right up the street from us, I think only about a mile, mile and a half away from Is the butchery Beast and Cleaver, which is widely regarded as one of the best butchers in the country, is a personal favorite of mine. And today I have with me Kevin Smith, who is a butcher and the founder and owner of Beast and Cleaver, and also the chef owner of The Peasant, which is their wine bar.
Thanks for being here, Kevin.
Kevin Smith: Thank you for taking the time to meet up and do this over the phone. And yeah, I’m ready for any questions you got. So yeah, shoot away.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it sounds like I caught you on a busy morning though. You’re trying to set up a dry aging facility. You’ve got animal breakdown as the food is closed to customers today and you’ve been running around.
Kevin Smith: Yeah. It was a hectic morning. Been trying to get all the new shelving put in the dry age and just there was all the alleyways were blocked for Shelving units weighed about 200 pounds each and I was trying to lift them with just my wife and there’s about six of them. So that was challenging. It took a lot longer than a fall. And then as I went to set up the Zoom meeting with you, I realized that there was a giant garbage truck in the alleyway blocking and making a lot of noise.
So we finally got there. So here we are. Yeah. Here everyone thought being a butcher was a glamorous profession and maybe they’re learning otherwise now. Right. Yeah. Very true. I mean, I get to do a lot of really cool stuff, obviously, but a lot of stuff I do is things that I don’t really want to be doing, like driving around, picking up shelving units and installing them and dodging trucks, yeah. So although I get to do a lot of really cool stuff, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that is not so glamorous and is not my favorite thing to do, yeah.
But it’s all part of owning a business, so I’m also happy to do it, you know.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, for sure. At least there’s a purpose and state you’d like to achieve. Well, I know how I describe Beast and Cleaver. I’m a huge fan of what y’all do. And I know how I describe it. But how do you describe what Beast and Cleaver is as an institution?
Kevin Smith: Yeah, I mean, foremost, we’re a butcher shop, you know, the spine of our business is butchery. And then we have an amazing restaurant. And the restaurant is very symbiotic with the butchery. They work together very closely. They create a full circle of whole animal butchery that is not possible if you don’t have one or the other. So we couldn’t have the peasant without the butchery, and we couldn’t have the butchery without the peasant. Mainly because lots of butcher shops are going to struggle to sell whole carcasses But we have a great outlet in using a lot of the offcuts, the stuff that’s harder to sell, not so much your New York strips and your ribeyes, but with the tongue and the tail and all of that stuff.
We use that predominantly on the peasant menu. So we’re a full animal butcher, full whole animal butchery with a full restaurant as well. So that’s how I describe Beast and Cleaver.
Ross Kenyon: It’s pretty amazing, and it strikes me as unusual. When did, I don’t know, well, you’re from the UK, so maybe it’s different there, or maybe the American process mirrors the UK’s, but when did awful and stranger cuts of meat, organ meats, tongue, cheek, things like this within the United States, when did this start going out of fashion? Because seemingly everyone used to eat this way, but at least in some parts of the world, that is no longer the case.
Kevin Smith: Yeah, so I mean, from my knowledge on that, it goes back as far as World War II, and I could be wrong on this. This is the stuff I’ve read and observed, and I’m sure there’s different places in the country that this doesn’t apply to, but my general observation is that after World War II, lots of canned products started happening, production of whole animal stuff gradually started going down, and everybody wanted to speed up where they were going. You know, if you look back at menus from pre-World War II, pre-World War I, you see a lot more of these amazing cuts, not just from meat, but from fish as well, and wild animals, game, all that stuff was appearing on menus.
But gradually, everything’s been sped up, you know, like, you just have to look at Turkeys these days, you know, people want to deep fry their turkeys because you can do it in an hour or two. Rather than taking the time to, you know, slow roast it and taste it and all of that is huge to me, you know, to take the time to do things properly. And that’s kind of our beast and cleaver ethos of what we do. You know, we don’t rush things. We wait for things to be ready.
So in terms of your question, when did offal start appearing in the US? When did it go out of fashion? I think it went out of fashion after World War II because the processing of everything got sped up and became, you know, it started going into the commodity world a lot quicker, is my opinion on it. Does that make any sense, what I’m saying there, Rob?
Ross Kenyon: I think so, yeah. And I’m wondering if people maybe also in parallel fashion don’t necessarily see being a butcher as being an artistic pursuit, meat is seen as a commodity, something that’s already been partitioned long before they reach it. One of the fun things about coming into Beasts and Cleaver is saying, You have a lot of really passionate people in there working. And it isn’t just about cutting strips and stuff like that too, but there’s strange terrines and mooses and sausages that are things that you cannot just buy at Safeway.
There’s artistry involved.
Kevin Smith: For sure. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we’re doing things the old school way, you know, we’re making, firstly, we’re breaking down animals with just a handsaw. We don’t have a bandsaw in there. Everything is done properly. Straight up with knives and a hand saw, which I don’t know any other place that does that. I choose to do that very simply for a couple of reasons. One is I hate cleaning band saws and they’re really a nightmare to clean. I’ve worked with them for years.
So I decided that I wanted to teach people how to use a hand saw and become more efficient and skillful rather than just having the ability to throw everything through a band saw. Now, it’s a lot more work and it’s a lot physically harder, but it attracts the people who really care, the artisanal butchers, to come in and learn to do it. At times, I wish we had a band tour, you know, to chop bones up and things like that, but after three and a half years of being open, we don’t need one, and that in itself is a skill, you know, to You know, so when like an apprentice butcher comes in or a cook who’s learning to be a butcher, once they start getting into our program of whole animal butchery, I’ll start them on pigs and I’ll go over the very basics of how we break down pigs.
And then after a month or so, they’ll get to start working on beef. And then usually they end up coming back to lamb at the end because lamb can be, people think it’s the easiest, but it’s actually I think the most tricky to get right because there’s not much room for waste on a lamb. Pigs, you can utilize the different cuts in so many different ways. Beef is a huge one for people who’ve never butchered to learn. It can take anything from six months to a year and a half to get really, really good at it.
But we try and put people through a program of butchery. Then on top of that, we have like a pastry program in there, which I show everybody how to make four or five different types of pastry. And that all starts folding into place. When you start realizing that we’re taking the kidney fat from beef and the leaf lard from pork, and then that gets turned into pastry. And then that pastry starts going into the case, into meat pies and pate on fruit and all these different Creations that we make, that’s when people who work at the shop, it starts to click for them.
We’re not just chopping up meat. We’re not just buying pastry out of a local bakery. We’re doing everything from scratch. So they’re the two of the small things that we do that are huge. And that really does attract, I think, some of the best cooks. In Washington to come and work for us. So you said that we have a really passionate team in there. It’s part of my job to instill passion into them and fill them with excitement every day because that’s how I feel about it.
I feel so passionate that we’re fortunate enough to have these amazing animals that are local and we’ve gotten all this really nice press and it’s all really generous and kind, but There’s a thought process behind absolutely everything that we do from start to finish, from the animals where they’re sourced from to how they look in the case. It’s basically reserved. It’s almost like a culinary school in the way I approach it. We have different programs. You know, there’s like the cooking programs, there’s the butchery programs, the pastry programs, there’s a dessert program.
It’s intense in there. So, yeah. Does that answer some of that question, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: Oh, definitely. Yeah, and I love the pate en croute, and I have a note in here to talk about it, because that’s one of my favorite things that you have, or it is this combination of esoteric types of meat that are, you know, baked in. And it’s one of those things, too, where like maybe you could find that in some country French butchery or like charcuterie, I guess you could say. Yeah. But where else do you even find something? Like maybe you go to like Dario Chichino’s place or something like that or Chichini’s place.
That’s where you’d find it. Yeah. Where else do you find something else in the States? Does it even exist except for you guys?
Kevin Smith: Yeah. I mean, we’re really proud of the pate on crew. It’s something I’ve been working on for eight or nine years, maybe longer than that. And about four years ago, I went up to Canada to hang out with a chef I know up there, the chef at St. Lawrence up in Vancouver. And my pastry skills were good. And then I spent a day with Colin up there, the head chef. And he showed it. And I think his pate is some of the best in the world.
And he spent the day taking my level up another level. And within one day, my skill level went from what I thought was really good to actually being really good. And that’s not me being big headed. It’s the truth. You know, we make excellent tapé on crew. And I owe a lot of that to Colin up in St. Lawrence in Vancouver for teaching me that. And now I teach everyone in the shop how to make those things. The way we make them, they take five to seven days to make.
They’re like labors of love. Anyone who gets to work on those in the shop knows that they’re under a little bit of pressure because we have such high expectations for the pate en croute. And we’re kind of known for it. People travel to come and get the pate en croute. But yeah, you know, that’s a great way to utilize, going back to your previous question, things like livers and offal and beef tongue and all of the offcuts. You’re not going to find like a beef tenderloin in the pâté en croûte.
You’re going to find ground chicken livers, ground pork livers, fatty pork belly, all this stuff that, you know, people don’t really want to buy. The skill of making the pate on crew is taking all of that stuff that’s not so trophy driven and turning it into something that tastes better than anything else that we can make. And that takes a lot of skill and a lot of patience and a lot of practice. But again, it’s something that I am so passionate about with the pate on crew.
And yeah, it’s I mean, just from making the pastry, the pastry, we use 25% beef fat with 75% butter, lots and lots of eggs and flour and cornstarch, really unusual pastry to use. And to teach cooks who have been line cooking for years how to do that, it’s really interesting because they don’t generally have that skill set here is what I’m noticing. A lot of the, well, I wouldn’t say a lot, I’d say all of the cooks who have come to me don’t have any real good pastry skills.
So getting them out of their comfort zone, and the same for the butchers too, getting them out of their comfort zone and having them roll out pastry dough and make it from scratch. You see how challenging it is in the beginning for them, but then they make one or two and they start to get this passion going through them. Yeah, it’s kind of like a work of art when it’s done and it’s perfect, but it’s not unachievable for them to reach that level. And, you know, we’ve got loads of people at the shop now who make excellent ones that go in on the peasant menu and go in the charcuterie case just about every day.
So I only make them myself now maybe once or twice every, I’ll probably make one or two every two or three weeks now. So I’m not, I’m not the driving force so much behind those anymore. So that’s a little bit on paté on crew. I could talk about it all day. Unless you want me to, you should probably ask me another question.
Ross Kenyon: It’s my personal favorite. Obviously, there’s so much love that goes into it. It seems like one of the most labor-intensive things that you could make. And I love the ethos of it, too. That’s trying to not be wasteful. What happened where, like, at some period we all decided that, like, belay mignon, we should just optimize meat making just for that, and then all restaurants just wanted only the beef cuts, and they don’t even taste better necessarily.
Kevin Smith: Yeah, that’s really interesting, you know, it’s like, I, again, I don’t have any proof for this, because I don’t think there is, but my opinion on it is that it goes back to After World War II, when we started seeing supermarkets carrying all of the prime cuts of beef, like New York strips and tenderloins, and it became oversaturated. And by the 80s and 90s, all you could get in supermarkets would be those cuts, you know, along with like a bone-in chuck roast. The back leg of beef Never got any love and it still doesn’t get any love in any supermarket these days.
I go into various supermarkets these days just to see what’s going on and their prices are a dollar or two a pound cheaper than what we are, but the quality of the meat is not in the same realm of ours. And the cuts that they offer are like maybe five or 10 different, 10 if you’re lucky. I don’t think I’ve ever seen 10, but five or six main cuts of bees. You know, you go into any whole animal butcher shop across the country that’s doing things the right way and you’ll see cuts that most people aren’t familiar with unless you’re an actual butcher, especially things from the back leg.
You know, we really started analyzing why is that back leg Regarded as like crap and tough. And it’s not. It’s some of the best steaks on the whole animal come from that back leg. You just got to know how to get them to what they should look like and how to cook them. And, you know, we’ve kind of turned that into a really strong part of the butchery now is the beef leg. You know, it’s really easy to sell tenderloins and ribeyes, New York, et cetera.
But you take... You take the top round or the terrible name we have here in America for it is London broil. And it’s, you know, that has got a reputation of being thick, tough, steak that literally eats like leather. So, you know, for stars, it doesn’t exist in London and it should never be broiled. So we took that and looked at it, looked at that muscle and realized that it’s extremely lean. So what do you want to do with an extremely lean steak? You don’t want to slow cook it under the broiler.
That’s going to make it terrible, you know? So we started playing around with it, cutting it a specific way so the grains are running in one direction. And we sear it almost like ahi tuna and baste it in butter and slice it thin. And it’s better than the tenderloin. And it’s four times less the cost. You can pay $38, $36 for a tenderloin. You can pay $12 a pound for the London Royale. And I would genuinely choose the London, we call it London Royale now, so have a little fun with it, rather than the London Royale.
And I would choose that over most of the main cuts any day of the week. And it’s, again, really sustainable for the whole animal program. It’s another cut that we use for steak tartare on the restaurant. Again, it’s got No fat on it. So it’s delicious when you slice it up, chop it and add your shallots and your tarragon and whatever to it. Yeah, again, there’s so many muscles on the back leg that’s just one example of how to get away from those trophy driven cuts.
Yeah, I hope that answers that question.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and more to come here. I love the ethos of trying not to be wasteful with meat. I think you should respect animals that you’re eating. But I had this thought that challenged that idea a little bit, which is that is not the industrial process for making meat incredibly efficient. I feel like every single part of the animal that goes into bone meal or into gelatin or into animal feed or like Is small scale butchery, even what you’re doing sounds incredibly efficient and there’s a lot of love that is probably not present at the larger scale?
Kevin Smith: Thousands and thousands of animals a day, no disrespect to anybody who works in those places, but they’re not doing things the way I would choose to do them. I can’t say because I haven’t worked in one of those places. I’ve visited a couple and done some research on it. Firstly, the skill of those butchers is unbelievable. They are so efficient, so fast, a lot quicker than I am because they’re doing the same thing over and over, day after day. And that is its own insane skill set that I have a huge amount of respect for.
So in terms of speed, I would say those workers there who have been there for however many years are way beyond my skill level with what they do. However, it’s a different skill level that I have. And I always think of myself as the captain of the ship. I steer the ship in any direction I want it to go. I’m not aiming to do what industrial scale butchery does. That’s totally not in my realm and I don’t want to go there. So we try and distinguish ourselves from supermarkets and the industrial stuff by having things done in such a way that it makes the animal, we try and honor the animal by utilizing every single part of it.
Now, do the industrial places do that? They probably don’t have too much waste. I don’t know what their waste is compared to ours. So I can’t speak for what they have in terms of waste. But I know that we have on a whole beef carcass, for instance, we have about a 30 to 35 percent yield loss from fat and bones. And a lot of places would lose that fat and bones. And so they’re down to like a 65% usable yield. We take all the bones, like practically every bone from the beef carcass and the pork and the lamb.
We chop them up, roast them and turn them into the most amazing demi-glosses, stocks that we sell in the case. And a lot of that stuff goes onto the peasant menu. You know, our beef Demi gloss takes four to five days to make. It’s constantly simmering in the black pot. The bones from the pigs with the pig’s feet and the head, the skull is turned into aspic. Again, a four or five day process. The fat, the usable fat, not the stuff with sinew on it.
We keep all of that and that goes towards pastries and sausages. So our actual yield loss is probably closer to 15% on a whole carcass. So I don’t know what the yield loss on an industrial facility would be. I can’t say that we’re better than them or worse than them, but I can say that we have about 15% yield loss on an animal, and that’s very, very good. I know that for a fact. The only stuff we don’t use is the tough sinew and the cartilage, and everything else is getting used every week, too.
So that’s... That’s something that we’re proud of too, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m trying to contrast against animals that might come through the butchery department at Whole Foods, even ones that are grass-fed and whether they’re grass-finished or grain-finished here. No matter how they complete the program, do you think coming through a smaller butcher shop like Beeson Cleaver, do you think that does enough to ensure that their lives may have been better than coming through a larger institution? Do you think small is almost inherent for animal treatment?
Kevin Smith: Yes, I do. 100% on that question. I mean, some of the farms we work with have as little as like 20 to 50 animals. I think one of the biggest farms we work with has got about two and a half thousand animals, which is incredibly small. We also know... We know the date of the animals. We know exactly what breed it is. We know exactly where every farm is. We know the slaughter dates. We know the weights, and we know what it’s been fed.
How do we know that? Because we visited the farms. We work closely with the farmers. You know, for instance, we have a Black Angus English Baldy Cross in there at the moment. It’s fed about 80% grass, and it’s finished on like a barley that’s grown on the farm that it comes from. Is extremely unique. You’re not going to find that in a supermarket because they’re coming from much, much larger herds and they’re not going to be fed on a barley that’s grown on the specific farm.
It’s very likely that they’re going to be fed any, you know, okay, if it’s 100% grass fed, that’s great. That brings up a whole different subject of What people perceive of a grass versus grain and why is grain bad for you? It’s actually not bad for you. The stuff that is bad for you is the stuff that’s getting processed with so many chemicals and being sprayed with pesticides and traveling all around the country to get to one specific farm. But, you know, we live in the barley belt here and barley’s been growing here for centuries.
It’s a natural part of the land. Why would the animals not benefit from eating natural barley? That to me is really interesting. And also 100% grass-fed animals, I’m just going to be honest, the majority of them don’t taste, they don’t have the same texture, they don’t have the same taste. As animals that have some grain going through them. So, you know, we use this weird analogy where we get these, like, we’ve seen these grass-fed animals come in at 14 to 16 months old. And they don’t taste good.
They don’t taste good. They’re slaughtered too young. They don’t have any development of flavor. And the meat is tough. Because they haven’t had time to develop. Now, if it was a four or five-year-old grass-fed animal, and we do get those in, they can be outstanding. Some of the best animals we’ve ever had. But they’re also coming from small farms. So it’s easy to see the difference from something that is going to be in a local supermarket that Apparently 100% grass fed and you buy it and then you compare it to something that we know is a three and a half to five year old grass fed animal.
There’s no comparison. You can’t compare those animals. It’s completely different, different flavor, taste. And again, thinking more about the grain, you know, people are, A lot of these animals that are going into supermarkets are getting fed all of this terrible corn and soy and all of these things that are being messed around with GMOs, genetically modified stuff that’s going on into the animals that then gets into our bodies. The stuff that we work with doesn’t have any of that in it. We know it because, again, we work with the small farmers That’s something, again, that we like to keep our head up, head up held high and say, you know, you come in here, you buy less meat.
We’re not trying to sell people loads of meat. We think you should buy less meat, but buy good meat. You don’t need a two pound steak or one pound steak. You know, probably need like four, five, six ounces if you’re hungry. And yeah, pay a little bit more for that, but know that it’s doing you good. It’s doing the environment good. It’s helping out the local farmers, and it’s creating that circle of symbioticness where everything is coming together for our health, basically. Does that make some sense for us?
Yeah, you always
Ross Kenyon: make sense. You don’t need to check with me. I know he’s a little controversial, but I read Pat LaFrita’s book, Glorious Beef. And he was claiming in there too that he used to try to sell grass-finished meat, but his chef clients no longer wanted it anymore just because it didn’t taste good. And I think in some ways, consumers, they care so much, but they’ve gone too far where they think just all grain finishing or feeding grain to animals at all is pretty bad. Yeah. At least in terms of your experience of the meat that you’re getting out of this animal, which if you’re going to kill an animal and eat it, it should taste really good.
And if it’s just grass finished, but it isn’t, it isn’t left to mature as you see that nuance is not present. Like, are you actually honoring the animal? Maybe not. Like maybe you’ve just been ideological.
Kevin Smith: I think so. And I mean, like, again, my knowledge on a lot of the hundred percent grass fed that’s not tasting so well. Is that the animals are like slaughtered under 18 months old. And that’s on the high end. From what I’ve been told, they’re like anything from 14 to 16 months. So they haven’t had time to develop. And the other really important thing is people don’t know how to cook that type of animal. It’s not going to be cooked the same way you’d cook a prime New York strip.
It’s a completely different leap. So, you know, the generic way of throwing it on a grill and cooking it to medium, it’s going to completely destroy a grass-fed animal that’s 16 to 18 months old. It’s going to toughen up immediately. There’s not enough. And the other huge thing is they don’t hang those animals for long enough. You know, we try and age our animals for 21 to 28 days minimum. And a lot of the stuff we’re at is 35 days upwards. So we’re developing flavor there, drawing moisture out and getting much, much more umami flavors going on.
Those other animals are 14 days, so they’re aged for 14 days, then they get vacuum sealed, put in a package, and then the customers take them home and they buy them from a supermarket and they realize that they don’t taste great. Of course they don’t taste great, they’ve been sitting in a Vacuum sealed bag in their own juices for, I don’t know, a week, two weeks, three weeks, whatever it is. Yeah, it’s quite, to me, it’s just plain common sense. Like, you can’t have a 16 to 18 month grass fed animal that’s going to taste anywhere near as well as a three and a half to five year old grass fed animal that’s actually strolling around, eating grass, having a great time, having You know, and the weight of one of those grass fed animals that we get in can be like 900 to 950 pounds.
They’re huge, but they’ve lived a long, long life for a cow. The other animals I’m getting are around 650 to 750 pounds. So, you know, you’re talking a couple of hundred pounds in difference. And that’s kind of a lot when you think about it like that.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, definitely it is. Yeah. One of the other claims that Pat LaFreda makes in his book that I thought was interesting was he thinks he’s kind of hard on the small butchers out there and the fetishization of small is better. And he thinks that the safety is oftentimes much greater at the industrial scale, given all the USDA inspections and stuff like that, that maybe not as required for what you do. Do you think he’s made a wrong turn with that assessment?
Kevin Smith: I haven’t read it, so I... I would like to read it now that you’ve said that. No, I don’t actually know if he’s correct on that one. I mean, like the places that we work with are always under USDA inspection. That’s kind of a given. They have to be under USDA inspection. So again, I’m not visiting these large scale giant facilities. I’m sure they’re spotlessly clean. Because there’s probably lots of USDA inspectors there every day. But the places that we work with are very clean too and there’s inspectors there.
So, I mean, yeah, I don’t really have an answer for that one other than that I can speak for the places that we work with that are very clean and we know what we’re getting. And I would steer myself away from anything in the giant realms of Tyson and All those other big places that are, you know, shipping meat all over the country from one state. Not, yeah, it’s kind of like, okay, you’re focusing on something being really clean and everything else, but you’re kind of missing the bigger picture of how unsustainable it is and how bad a lot of that meat is and how it tastes, you know.
So, yeah, that would be my opinion on that. Do the animals that are slaughtered are the USDA mobile facilities or something else? How do the animals reach you? So they’re not slaughtered under a mobile facility. There’s four main processing facilities in Washington. A lot of our animals come from pure country in Moses Lake. The mobile slaughter facilities are basically trucks that drive around and will do Six to 10 animals at a time. We don’t work with them very often. They do a great job and they slaughter some animals for us on the islands.
So like the San Juan Islands, there’s a mobile slaughter facility that does a lot of that work and we get some animals from them. But the place that we go, where most of our stuff is pure country farms. And Heritage Meter in Rochester who are going through a few changes at the moment, but those are our main two processing facilities where the animals that slaughtered are hung and then taken to various shops. And those are USDA supervised facilities? They are, yes.
Ross Kenyon: Who Palafrida then is referring to as these small butchers who, maybe if they’re not crossing state lines, they don’t require as much USDA supervision under the Commerce Clause?
Kevin Smith: I don’t even know. I remember a few years ago when I was, there’s some real unclear regulations and laws with that stuff. If it’s not floored under USDA inspection, it can’t go to a commercial butcher shop. So anything that comes to a commercial butcher shop like us has to be flawed under USDA regulation. If it’s not flawed under USDA regulation, I believe it can be sold at farmers markets from the owners of the farms. Now, I could be wrong on that. It was something very similar like that.
I do know that USDA inspection has to happen for us to receive it. It can’t just be like a mobile unit going around, killing it, and then taking it to us. That would be really great if it could, because there’s so many beef farms out there that I believe there’s over 1,850 beef farms in Washington alone, and I mean, we have access to maybe five, you know, so one of the big problems here is the logistics of there not being enough slaughter facilities in Washington, you know, how do these Out of those 1,850 beef farms, how many of them are amazing?
My guess is there’s loads of them because I drive out and look at them and I see the animals strolling around. But that meat is, I don’t quite know where that meat’s going. It’s certainly not coming to us. But yeah, I know there’s a lot of butchers here who wish there was more USDA slaughter facilities. To help the small farms get their product out there more.
Ross Kenyon: On our way out of the show, I have this supposed origin story for you, given that you’re from across the pond here, which is that you ate at St. John, and then just Fergus Henderson blew your mind, and then that just led to a career in butchery. Is that instinct on to anything?
Kevin Smith: Partially. I mean, I’ve been to St. John maybe... 30 times. I used to live 25 minute walk from St John’s and I’d stroll over the bridge and get lunch there. It was an amazing place. Yeah, it’s certainly an influence on my food and my cooking. I think one of the most interesting things was he was an architect for many years and then changed trade and became a chef and started doing amazing and that’s That was really inspiring to see somebody change careers and become successful at it.
Excuse me. So yeah, he, Fergus Henderson is, I think he’s an inspiration to anyone who cooks. You know, the nose to tail stuff he got really famous for, he coined that phrase and it’s taken off worldwide. We take a lot of inspiration from St. John and a lot of other restaurants too. A lot of medieval food is where I get my inspiration from. But yeah, St. John is definitely a pilgrimage of mine and we’ll be visiting there in June again this year. So I look forward to seeing what they’re coming up with.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have any advice for people who, obviously, if you’re in Seattle or nearby, go to Bees and Cleaver right now. Why haven’t you already been? It’s amazing. But for people who are maybe outside of your commercial range, what should they be doing with their meat consumption?
Kevin Smith: Yeah, I mean, obviously, people, you know, there’s a cost thing. I mean, not everybody has the ability to spend money. The money that’s required to buy this amazing meat. So that’s always challenging. So I always wish we could do something with people who are not as well off as others. So my advice is eat less meat, but eat good meat would be my advice. I think that’s really, really true. Just get two or three pieces of meat a week if that’s what you can afford.
Pay for what you get rather than buying lots of stuff that’s filled with chemicals and it’s going to cause you some inflammation and other stuff from processed foods. So yeah, eat less, but eat good would be my advice.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s quite sensible advice. Well, Kevin, thanks so much for being here. I’ll be able to get this to happen.
Kevin Smith: You’re welcome. Thanks. I know we’ve been trying to do it for a while and our paths have not crossed sufficiently, but they have now. So, no, I appreciate it. And thanks for inviting me on.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
