>> NARRATOR: Vegetarians need
not apply. The 21st century butcher has
many faces: a grim reaper...
a carcass processor... a meat cutter...
a safety inspector... and a salesman.
He turns livestock into steak, hamburger and sausage.
He even makes house calls. Now, "The Butcher,"
on<i> Modern Marvels.</i> <font color="#FFFF00">Captioning sponsored by
A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> >> NARRATOR: Each year, in the
United States, massive feedlots schedule more than 135 million
head of livestock for their appointments with the butcher.
The lone, multitasking butcher of old is nearly extinct.
In his place is an army of high-speed cutters and bacteria
control specialists at a mass-production factory.
But in a world of prepackaged products, there is a growing
movement to recapture the secrets of the Old World
butcher. >> A little over a pound
and a half. >> NARRATOR: At the swank Nick
& Stef's Steakhouse in downtown Los Angeles, patrons
come to celebrate a forgotten art from the butcher's meat
locker. It's called dry-aged beef.
Nick & Stef's imports whole strip loins and ages them in
a climate controlled aging room for up to 21 days.
>> EDDY SHIN: What's happening is it promotes the enzymes
within the beef to start breaking down the tendons and
the muscle fiber, and in essence, what it's doing is
reversing the process of the rigor mortis.
So it's actually loosening up the meat and tenderizing it.
>> NARRATOR: Some dry-aged steaks sell for as high as
$50 per 10-ounce cut. Their high cost is a direct
result of shrinkage. As the beef ages, the outer
surface decays and surface bacteria must be removed.
Extracting the strip steaks and rib eyes requires a skilled
butcher. >> SHIN: And as you can see,
it's completely broken down, high marbleization, and
completely tenderized, almost completely broken.
The modern steakhouse uses retro techniques to get the best
flavored steak. But our ancient ancestors didn't
have the luxury of waiting for their dinner to age.
>> WAKE: There was some point or juncture or phase that
our ancestors passed through, where they left the trees, began
to walk upright, and perhaps one of the earliest things that they
did was crack stones to get an edge.
So they could leave the shelter of the trees, run down onto the
savannah, perhaps to scavenge meat from a lion kill.
>> NARRATOR: The latest field research indicates that our
quest for animal protein goes back millions of years.
>> WAKE: Recent finds in East Africa have uncovered broken
animal bones that have cut marks on them.
And this is a strong indication that human ancestors, back two-
and-a-half million years ago, were actually using stone tools
to physically remove meat from these animal bones.
>> NARRATOR: Approximately 5,000 years ago, we learned to smelt
naturally occurring copper and tin together to form the alloy
known as bronze. >> WAKE: Perhaps one of the
foremost innovations in prehistoric butchery was the
development of metal cutting tools.
>> NARRATOR: Slowly, butchering evolved from a function
performed for families or small nomadic groups into a service
conducted for larger populations.
Public slaughterhouses date back to Roman times.
In 300 BC, animals were butchered in the open air
at the Forum in Rome. On special occasions, wealthy
Romans sometimes ate such exotic meats as giraffe and tiny mice
stuffed with pine nuts. The more unusual the food, the
more the guests of the host were impressed.
In the Middle Ages, butchers were restricted to certain
neighborhoods in which to ply their trade.
This was due to the large amount of animal waste and blood.
They were usually dumped into the middle of the street that
served as an open sewer. On the North American continent,
the nomadic nature of the native tribes didn't allow for the
technological evolution occurring elsewhere.
>> WAKE: Most Native Americans used stone tools to butcher
animals. Fairly expedient stone tools,
often, or just a sharp stone flake.
This flake has long, extremely sharp edges on this side and
this side, which would be just perfect for slicing meat...
uh, off a bone or disarticulating animals.
And this is so sharp, you can actually shave with it.
>> NARRATOR: For the modern butcher, the knife is still the
foundation for every job. And most butchers rely on just a
couple of basic knives: the butcher, or steak knife,
and the boning knife. One thing has remained constant
since ancient times-- the need for a sharp knife.
One time-honored method of checking the sharpened edge
is the paper test. >> INGRAO: A sharp knife is
very, very important in this business.
When your knife can do this, you know you have a real good edge
on it. You could cut anything.
>> BUCK RAPER: If you look at the cutting edge of a knife
under a magnifying glass, it'll look almost like a hacksaw blade
with a series of teeth. When you use the knife and it
starts to become dull, the first thing that happens are these
little teeth-- or as we call them in the factory, feathers--
these little feathers bend over to the left or the right side of
the cutting edge and your knife becomes dull, and you notice
right away that it's not cutting the way it did when it was
factory fresh. In that case, you use a butcher
steel and you go through a process of hand steeling your
blade where you draw the knife blade along a hardened steel
rod. What happens is that these
little feathers are stood up straight.
They're realigned. >> NARRATOR: While basic knife
shapes haven't changed much in thousands of years,
manufacturing methods are certainly different today.
The Dexter-Russell Company in Southbridge, Massachusetts, is
the largest manufacturer of professional cutlery in the
United States. The process of making a butcher
knife starts with raw steel. >> RAPER: Steel is iron with
carbon added, and when the percentage of carbon approaches
one percent, you start to get steels that are good for making
cutlery. We're looking for a steel that
has, first of all, enough carbon in it so that we can heat-treat
it. >> NARRATOR: At Dexter-Russell,
the knife blanks are heated to 1,500 degrees, then rapidly
cooled down in a specially formulated oil bath.
>> RAPER: To me, I always tell people the steel is the heart
of the knife, but the heat treatment gives it its soul.
The trick to heat-treating is to elevate the temperature of the
steel so that it changes its physical state.
>> NARRATOR: Subjecting the knife blank to rapid cooling
leaves the blade in an extremely brittle state.
>> RAPER: So there's a final step to the heat-treating
process that's called tempering. Tempering gives steel its
flexibility, its springiness. We do that by putting the carbon
steel into a furnace at 550 degrees, and soaking it at that
temperature for two hours. >> NARRATOR: The classic image
of the butcher includes a formidable-looking blade known
as the cleaver. But 20th century technology made
the cleaver obsolete. >> INGRAO: The cleaver was used
much more, because they probably didn't have a band saw.
What they did, they used their steak knife to cut through
the meat, then they used the cleaver to cut off the bone.
>> NARRATOR: The electric band saw was introduced to the
butcher in the early 20th century.
The saw was a welcome advancement in the multimillion
year evolution of the butcher's tools.
But just decades before its introduction, forces at work in
one Midwestern town would forever alter the role of the
traditional butcher. "The Butcher" will return,
on<i> Modern Marvels,</i> here on the History Channel.
>> NARRATOR: We now return to "The Butcher" on<i> Modern Marvels.</i>
At Huntington Meats in Los Angeles, the skills of the old-
fashioned butcher are still in demand.
>> DAN VANCE: This is a boneless chuck roast.
I'm going to trim it and split it.
Here, you can get whatever you'd like.
In a supermarket they tend to be price conscience because they
have to compete with other supermarkets.
I don't really have to compete with anybody because of the
quality that I have. >> NARRATOR: For centuries, the
traditional butcher has dispensed skillfully prepared
cuts of meat and sound advice to willing customers.
Today's neighborhood butchers rarely slaughter the animal, but
they remain experts in all phases of getting meat from the
pasture to the table. >> LEKAN: He comes out, he talks
to the customer, he knows what he's cut.
He's proud of what he cut. He wraps it up, people take it
home. He has more personal contact
with that meat all the way through the complete job.
>> NARRATOR: These butchers are modern survivors whose
predecessors crossed the Atlantic to help feed the newly-
formed American colonies. >> McKEITH: As settlements
evolved along the east coast, they would harvest wild game as
well as domestic animals. And those products would be sold
fresh, or if they were going to preserve them, they would use
high amounts of salt, put it in barrels.
>> NARRATOR: In colonial New England, butchers used salted
beef to build an important export business-- trading meat
for West Indies molasses. As the colonies grew, the retail
butcher shop became a fixture in every community.
>> PACYGA: Butchering was done in a very local basis because
there was no refrigeration. Um, and also, because the sort
of mass factory system had not yet been put in place.
Most cities had major stockyards, or markets, where
local butchers would buy the livestock and then take them off
and slaughter them. And then the meat would be
served fresh. >> NARRATOR: But by the late
19th century, the American butcher was engulfed by the
Industrial Revolution. Large stockyards built for
exhibiting and auctioning livestock began expanding in
Midwestern cities like Cincinnati and Kansas City.
But it was the railroads that ultimately ordained Chicago,
Illinois the meat packing capital of America.
By the 1860s, nearly every major railroad line passed through
Chicago, making a large, centralized stockyard a
dominating economic force. >> PACYGA: By 1860-61, Chicago
took the title from Cincinnati and became the pork butcher of
the world. >> NARRATOR: The endless pens
and cattle runs encompassed more than a square mile of land on
Chicago's south side. To process the multitude of beef
cattle and hogs arriving by train, large packinghouses were
erected, some of them as tall as eight stories.
>> PACYGA: The original packinghouses were driven by
gravity. That is, livestock would be
taken to the tops of buildings, there they'd be slaughtered and
then their bodies would be carried down on a inclined plane
to the various departments till they'd end up in the lower
basements, in the chill rooms. >> NARRATOR: By the 1890s, meat
packers employed overhead chain conveyors to transport the
carcasses from the kill floor through a maze of specialized
workers. Chicago packinghouses also
invented a huge byproducts business.
From animal hides, bones, blood and organs packers created
profitable markets for goods, including lard, fertilizer,
glue, soap and leather products. The number of cattle killed in
Chicago went from 224,000 in 1875 to more than 2.2 million in
1890. Les Orear took a job on the
disassembly line at the Hormel packinghouse in 1932.
>> OREAR: And here's the squeal of the hogs.
And the heat of the day, and the animal heat.
And the... there's a great noise going on.
But there's this inevitable movement of the conveyor belt;
never stops, never stops, never stops.
Ten and 12 hour days were not uncommon at all.
In fact, ten was sort of normal. You worked Saturdays too, you
know. Maybe it was a half day off for
a Saturday. And you mustn't miss your cut,
because then that will stop the line.
And there's hell to pay if you stop the line.
>> NARRATOR: In Chicago's famous packinghouses, the butcher's job
was fragmented. >> PACYGA: Well, the butcher, of
course, became one of 200 men. You know, the original job of a
butcher was to slaughter and dress the beef, these were very
skilled men. But if you were gonna make
money in slaughtering large numbers of animals, you cut the
jobs down, so that unskilled workers, at the turn of the
century, were getting about 14 cents an hour.
The men who were very skilled were getting about 50 cents an
hour. >> NARRATOR: Chicago's packing-
town rose to dominance, in part, because of the development of
one major technology-- refrigeration for shipping.
For many years, natural refrigeration using ice cut from
frozen ponds preserved fresh meat for weeks on end.
The problem was shipping it. In 1875, a Massachusetts cattle
dealer named Gustavus Swift opened a packing house in
Chicago. Knowing the potential huge
profits of shipping fresh meat to eastern markets, he perfected
the first refrigerated railcar. These custom cars were loaded
with block ice at the slaughterhouse, then reloaded at
various stops along the route. Swift's experiment created the
market for Chicago "dressed beef", a term that described a
fully-processed carcass delivered fresh, hanging on a
hook. >> PACYGA: The first meat that
Swift brought to the eastern markets, local butchers who were
making money slaughtering their own cattle, refused to handle
it and called it embalmed meat. There was an awful lot of bad
publicity about this. There was this talk of western
embalmed meat, and Chicago selling sick beef on the eastern
markets. But the beef was cheaper.
In fact, Swift basically said to his agents, "make it as cheap,
even if you have to give it away, so you can get a foot in
the market," and he did. >> NARRATOR: In 1906, author
Upton Sinclair published a novel called<i> The Jungle.</i>
Sinclair hoped to draw attention to the miserable working
conditions of the packing houses, but the book had a very
different impact. >> PACYGA: There's 13, maybe 15
pages of meat processing in the book, and those 13 or 15 pages
of meat processing is what really struck the public.
It had a tremendous impact because it hit them right in the
stomach, you know. This is what I'm eating?
You know, this kind of stuff, and he's talking about men
falling into vats of lard, he's talking about fingers being
chopped off and going out as hash, you know, all this kind of
stuff. >> NARRATOR: The resulting
outcry helped bring about the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and
the Pure Food and Drug Act, both passed within months of the
book's publication. Together, the laws brought huge
changes. All animals had to pass an
inspection by the newly-formed United States Drug
Administration; all carcasses were subject to post-mortem
inspection, and cleanliness standards were established for
all phases of the job. For the next 75 years, Swift,
Armour, and other Chicago meat packing giants controlled
much of the industry. But as sure as transportation
technology built the union stockyards, its further
evolution also tore them down. >> PACYGA: Because as they
become no longer dependent on the railroad, that is neither
for bringing their livestock in or for shipping their meat out,
you have refrigerated trucks that are moving along the new
highway systems and you get this massive decentralization of the
industry. >> NARRATOR: Today, the only
remaining evidence of the world's largest meat packing
enterprise is the original stone gate on Chicago's south side.
After 106 years of continuous operation, the union stockyards
officially closed in 1971. But the packinghouses evolved
into highly-automated regional processing plants where the
final product is no longer a side of beef, but a box of beef.
Today, the traditional butcher's livelihood is threatened by the
fast-cutting, pre-packaging skills of a mass-production
army. "The Butcher" will return on<i>
Modern Marvels.</i> >> NARRATOR: We now return to
"The Butcher" on<i> Modern Marvels.</i> Chicago was once the center of
America's massive meat packing industry.
Today, Chicago's legacy is scattered across the Great
Plains in states like Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa.
Feedlots bigger than many of the local towns now provide the
animals for a business worth more than $80 billion annually.
According to the American Meat Institute, U.S. production of
red meat exceeded 38 billion pounds in 1990.
The butcher's craft is now a sophisticated alliance of man
and machine; a high-speed, mass production disassembly of
traditional meat products and a staggering assortment of
processed meats and inedible byproducts.
>> KILLEFER:: The industry is very efficient in terms of how
they utilize all the parts from an animal.
There's very little waste. >> NARRATOR: It all starts with
steam cleaning, a process that removes dirt and other
contaminants from the hide. The animal's hide is removed by
a mechanical "hide puller" and the 1,300-pound carcass is
halved using massive backsplitter saws.
The large sides of beef are kept in cold storage for a number of
days. This allows the enzymes to break
down the steak before cutting begins.
On its journey to the knife, each carcass is graded for
quality and yield by highly trained USDA graders.
The graders examine the rib eye portion for the dispersion or
"marbling" of fat cells. "Select" beef has slight
marbling. "Choice" offers modest marbling,
and "prime-grade" beef contains the best dispersion of fat and
fetches the highest market price.
The marbled fat is what gives the cooked steak much of its
flavor. In recent years, the human eye
is being replaced by a video- grading system in many plants.
This imaging device calculates color and marbling of fat and
assigns a quality grade in seconds.
Prior to cutting, many processors inject nitrogen or
other gases into the carcass to help separate muscle from bone
and make disassembly easier. >> KILLEFER: We have a
carcass coming in, and we will take certain parts off, and they
will go down one line. Another set of parts will go
down another line. We'll have people that are
specialized in, say, pulling out a strip loin, and then cutting
it into steaks, for example. >> NARRATOR: A modern meat
processing facility is much like any industrial workplace; safety
is a major concern. Because of repetitive motion and
the speed of the lines, the mass production butcher wears a
vest and gloves of chainmail to avoid potential accidents
with the razor-sharp blades. A vast majority of the butchered
beef cuts are "primals," or large portions such as the
sirloin or the chuck that will be further processed into retail
cuts. In large processing facilities,
all of the large, primal beef cuts are sent to the packaging
department. The first vacuum-packaging
technologies were intended to remove air from around a meat
product. The lack of oxygen inhibits
bacteria and helps to preserve a sterile environment.
Today, the vastly improved vacuum-packaging technology is
critically important to butchers and consumers alike.
>> McKEITH: We're seeing more and more products being vacuum
packaged. Consumer-ready products that are
very convenient. And it ranges from luncheon
meats and cured products, things like that, because it has the
ability to maintain the color of those products.
>> NARRATOR: At the University of Illinois' Meat Sciences lab,
researchers are looking at ways to improve upon a much newer
technology known as "MAP," or Modified Atmosphere Packaging,
a process of modifying the atmosphere around the meat by
injecting a mixture of gases. >> McKEITH: And one of the
thought processes was to increase the shelf life of fresh
meat in the retail store, was to add oxygen to the gas mix so
that the meat cut looked like it was a bright cherry red or to
give it its natural color. >> NARRATOR: University of
Illinois researchers also study an industry movement called
"enhancement." Enhancement is a process in
which meat products are injected with various solutions to
improve palatablity. >> McKEITH: Typically you will
find salt, phosphate, sometimes they'll use a natural flavoring
like rosemary, that has some antioxidant characteristics.
And many products will contain either sodium or potassium
lactate. >> KILLEFER: What it does is,
obviously, adds a little bit of flavor, a little saltiness to
it, which enhances the meat flavor.
But maybe more importantly, it changes some of the
characteristics of what's called the "protein matrix."
And it opens that matrix and allows for more water-protein
interactions. And that also allows the meat to
become more tender once it's cooked.
>> NARRATOR: Researchers experimenting with different
enhancements use both mechanical and human taste-testers.
Using an insatron device, sheer force is used to measure the
tenderness of various cooked enhanced steaks.
Consumer taste panels are also used to measure the palatability
of different injected solutions. From these blind taste tests,
researchers can gauge what new recipes will appeal to the mass
market. Meat enhancement for many
chicken, beef and pork products is a well established practice.
But what about the meat that the butcher trims from the primal
cuts? Trimmings are a key component of
the all-American cookout: hamburgers and hot dogs.
>> KILLEFER: Hamburger is a process where we're going to
take cuts of meat, lean meat, and we typically will add what
is known as "trim." And so these are higher fat
content parts of the animal. And we blend them in a specific
proportion, to give us, say a, an 80-20, a 90-10 lean-to-fat
ratio. >> NARRATOR: Some extra-lean
hamburger contains even less than 10% fat.
But hot dogs have a fat content of more than 20%, although that
doesn't stop U.S. consumers from eating more than one million
tons every year. These beef or pork products are
made with an odd assortment of animal parts.
>> GLADU: There are federal guidelines for the amount of
meat and/or byproducts that go into a hot dog or a sausage.
The, the labeling is such that it will tell you.
For example, a beef hot dog has to obviously have beef in it.
It's certainly a wholesome product.
It's not something that you may want to see on your dinner table
in, in its original form, but generally when I say byproducts,
maybe some liver, or organ meat, or parts of a pig that you
ordinarily wouldn't want to eat, for example cheek meat, or you
know, snouts or whatever. >> NARRATOR: Sausage is the
oldest processed meat product. For thousands of years, we've
used salt and animal intestines to preserve and encase meat for
later consumption. By the 11th century, European
butchers began specializing in sausage-making and it soon
became a highly regarded art with recipes passed down from
generation to generation. Today, most sausage-making is
performed by the mega-processors.
High-speed production lines allow the industry to produce
over 1,000,000 tons of hot dogs every year.
But not all producers pump out millions of pounds every week.
Some family-run producers focus on quality rather than quantity.
At Usinger's in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Old-World tradition
meets a modern, yet limited, production facility.
>> USINGER: We employ about 100 people.
And we are basically a very large butcher shop, more so than
a highly automated facility. And we try and keep our recipes
as authentic as they were three generations ago.
So that means we don't use a lot of processing aids, such as
monosodium glutamate. The onions we use are fresh
onions. We use fresh garlic.
>> NARRATOR: At Usinger's, meat, water and fresh spices are mixed
and combined in a grinding machine to create a unique
sausage emulsion. >> USINGER: In manufacturing
of fresh sausage, a refrigerant such as dry ice is often added
during the chopping portion. And that is to keep the meat
very, very cold during chopping, because the chopping produces
friction, which produces heat. But it's very important that the
meat stays cold during chopping, so that you have particle
definition between the fat and the lean.
Because in fresh sausage, the product has to look its best,
because sight sells. >> NARRATOR: The emulsion is
then put through a stuffing machine.
Here, processed edible animal intestines act as the casings
for the sausages. Usinger's sausages are hung on
racks and smoked in a smoking chamber for a period of days,
completed to the unique specifications of three
generations of sausage-makers. >> USINGER: When you're making
specialty, you're trying to differentiate yourself from the
mass-produced product. And I think that the American
consumer is awakening to that fact and being a more
adventurous eater. >> NARRATOR: But specialty meat
processors share one very grave concern with the large, mass-
production butchers. It's a terrifying new threat
that cannot be seen or tasted, but still has the power to kill.
"The Butcher" will return on <i>Modern Marvels.</i>
>> NARRATOR: We now return to "The Butcher" on<i> Modern Marvels.</i>
Despite major advances in technology throughout the 20th
century, the trend towards mass production of meat created the
potential for new threats to the expanding population.
As the corner butcher gave way to industrialized meat packing,
the chance of spreading an outbreak of disease over a wide
area increased dramatically. The most commonly recognized
food-borne bacteria are campylobacter, salmonella and
E. Coli. Up until the 1990s, the USDA
regularly inspected all slaughtering and processing
facilities in the United States. However, a major outbreak of E.
Coli in 1994 of more than 500 confirmed infections caused a
reexamination of sanitary guidelines and practices.
In the mid-'90s, meat processors began adopting a set of
practices known as "HACCP." HACCP stands for "Hazard
Analysis Critical Control Points."
The system and was originally developed in the 1950s for
NASA to ensure the safety of food in the space program.
>> McKEITH: And HACCP is a process by which the
manufacturer or the processor is involved in providing safety
for his products. He designs a plan to assure the
safety, and then basically the government supervises or
oversees that he's following the plan that he's developed.
>> NARRATOR: HACCP consists of seven steps which can be
applied to any butchering operation to ensure food safety.
Under USDA guidelines, every meat processing facility in the
United States has to implement and follow a HACCP plan.
The Great Western Beef Company is a "portion-control" house,
receiving large primals from the packing houses and cutting them
into high-end steaks for hotels and restaurants.
Great Western rigorously monitors their plant, following
HACCP guidelines. >> THOMAS DUFFY: Well, we start
first thing in the morning, I do a pre-op sanitation.
We check all the equipment, the tables, cutting boards, lugs,
carts, hand knives, utensils, et cetera.
Check for cleanliness of the equipment.
>> NARRATOR: At Great Western, processing area room temperature
is taken three times a day to ensure a 40-degree environment.
Meat products are sampled for temperatures every 30 minutes.
And each day, random samples are trimmed from packed boxes and
sent to a USDA lab for pathogen testing.
>> DUFFY: Since the government has started testing for E. Coli,
it has dropped dramatically. The products that I have coming
in house, I have never tested positive for E. Coli.
>> NARRATOR: Each night after the meat-cutters finish their
work, the cleanup crew takes over.
>> DUFFY: They use 180-degree water, they rinse, foam
everything down, hand-scrub all the equipment, rinse again, then
they apply a sanitizer-- either a quatinary or a chlorinated
sanitizer. We alternate to ensure the
effectiveness of both. >> NARRATOR: In response to
demands for food safety, large- volume meat processors have
adopted many new technologies. The automatic hide-washing
cabinet treats cattle hides with a high-powered anti-bacterial
spray to remove dirt and bacterial contaminants.
High pressure steam vacuums remove excess fluids.
Next, a dilute organic acid wash similar to vinegar kills any
residual pathogens. Before the rapid cooling
process, workers check each carcass with the "Verifeye"
system-- a powerful black-light that can detect any stray specks
of organic contaminants. Workers continually trim product
samples and swab work surfaces. An onsite lab facility cultures
these samples and checks for any bacterial growth.
Every butcher needs to be especially careful with ground
beef and hamburger products, as they tend to have a much higher
incidence of food-borne illness than muscle cuts of meat.
>> KILLEFER: One of the reasons that hamburger sometimes is, is
suspect, or, or gets singled out more commonly as a suspect in,
say, food-borne illness outbreaks, is it's a mixed
product. It's not a whole muscle product
anymore. And if you think about a whole
muscle product, say a steak, that intact muscle is, in
essence, sterile. And the only place that it can
be contaminated would be on its surface.
Hamburger, on the other hand, because it's a mixed product, if
there were any bacteria on the surface of those original meat
products that were ground, they're now in the inside of
that product. >> NARRATOR: The Centers For
Disease Control and Prevention recently announced significant
declines in illnesses caused by E. Coli, salmonella and
campylobacter. But even as sanitation has
improved, a new menace has emerged that threatens the
worldwide beef supply. In December 2003, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture announced that an adult cow in
Washington State tested positive for bovine spongiform
encepalopathy, also known as BSE or "mad cow" disease.
>> MIKE EICKMAN: BSE is one of those deals, um...
It was not a matter of if it would get here, it's when it
would get here. And it didn't take long for it
to finally get here. >> NARRATOR: BSE is a
degenerative disease that attacks the central nervous
systems of cattle, destroying brain tissue and eventually
causing death. Many scientists believe the
disease is caused by a malformed protein that has been named a
prion. Prions multiply by converting
normal protein cells into abnormally shaped cells that
eventually clog the entire brain.
These misshapen proteins are infectious, but cannot be killed
by cooking or freezing. Scientists believe the disease
has spread among cattle through so-called animal recycling-- the
use of cattle parts in commercial cattle feed.
Nearly one hundred people have died from a human variant of mad
cow disease, probably from eating infected beef products.
The disease is carried in nervous system tissue, like the
spinal cord, and is most likely found in products like sausage.
Early symptoms in humans include insomnia, memory loss and
dementia. Currently, there is no known
cure for this fatal disease. In the U.S., The Food Safety
Inspection Service has taken numerous steps to ensure the
safety of the beef supply. >> EICKMAN: It's something we
all have to watch out for. The laws and the rules and
regulations since that, the first one was found out in
Washington, has changed a lot of the ways we handle a lot of the
beef that comes in here. >> McKEITH: So, without a doubt,
we will improve the safety and the wholesomeness of the food
products that are coming to our table.
I feel very comfortable in saying we probably have the
safest food supply-- United States-- of anywhere in the
world. >> NARRATOR: Experts agree it
will take a very concerted and focused effort on the part of
both large and small butchering operations to eliminate the
threat of mad cow disease. "The Butcher" will return
on<i> Modern Marvels,</i> here on the History Channel.
>> NARRATOR: We now return to "The Butcher" on<i> Modern Marvels.</i>
The traditional butcher is a survivor in a changing business.
>> PACYGA: When I was a... a boy in the 1950s, and in, you
know, the early 1960s, I lived in an inner-city community which
had maybe 10 butcher shops in walking distance.
Those butcher shops would have sawdust on the floor, and it was
a place where people met. That has shifted.
Now you go to the supermarket, and you pick something out in a
plastic container that is wrapped, and it may be frozen,
it may not be frozen, but it certainly isn't processed in
front of you. >> NARRATOR: Today's factory-
cut, vacuum-pacakaged meat products have forced the
traditional butcher to seek out specialized niches in the meat
marketplace. Chicago's Paulina Market is a
classic specialty meat market for urban consumers determined
to maintain the tradition of face-to-face contact with the
butcher. >> LEKAN: When you go to that
supermarket or superstore, you're looking at a lot of
things that have been precut. Not by the butcher shop, not by
the people working there. Box beef came along, and now
they're into centralized cutting.
Centralized cutting has cut out the... us.
We start with the whole cattle. We work our way down.
We-we trim it, we, we make all the portion cuts, and when a
customer comes in here, they can actually talk to a butcher who
can tell you what to do with that and how to cook it and how
to prepare it. >> NARRATOR: Another type of
niche butcher is unknown to millions of city-dwelling
consumers. This "country" butcher sidesteps
the large packinghouses and deals directly with the family
farmer. Eickman's meats in Seward,
Illinois, is the small farmer's slaughterhouse.
>> EICKMAN: We are what they call a custom processor.
It's almost like being a custom tailor.
Local farmers will bring in a beef to us.
We'll slaughter them. We'll hang them and age them for
about two weeks. Then we bring them out, cut them
as to their specifications. And then we process it, freeze
it, give the customer a call, they come in, pick them up and
take it home for their use. >> NARRATOR: Sometimes,
delivering livestock from the ranch to the slaughterhouse
isn't practical. In cases like this, another
niche butcher steps up. He is called the mobile
butcher. >> JIM WIERINGA: My job
description is, um... A to Z, you know.
We go out, slaughter the animals, um... so I'm in there
doing that. I'm also in there cutting and
wrapping the animals, processing it for the people the way they
like it. >> NARRATOR: Getting to the
farms on Washington State's tiny Lummi Island means taking the
ferry from the mainland. The 28-foot mobile processing
unit, or MPU, contains everything the mobile butcher
needs for his long day. >> WIERINGA: Typically, the
customer with this USDA mobile unit has the opportunity to have
us come right to their farm, slaughter their animals under
inspection; therefore, allowing them to further retail their
meat. >> NARRATOR: The day begins by
leveling the MPU on the uneven ground to ensure that fluids
will drain in the proper direction.
Next the sanitation process begins.
>> WIERINGA: We have two different sanitizers.
One's for organic and one's for non-organic.
And this is a quaternary, which is non-organic, and we have an
iodine sanitizer for organic, so we spray all the surfaces just
kill any bacteria that might be present.
>> NARRATOR: With a clean environment, the mobile butcher
turns his attention to the dirty work.
>> WIERINGA: This is one of the stun guns... which, if you can
get close enough to the animal, we can use one of these... and
it just has shells like this that you pop in the end of it...
and there's a pin in there which will stun the animal.
Now we gotta find the animals. (<i> laughing</i> )
>> NARRATOR: When an animal cannot be restrained for a
short-range job, the butcher uses a single bullet.
(<i> gunshot</i> ) Just as his predecessors did for
thousands of years, the mobile butcher removes the hide and
processes the animal without assistance.
Despite the remote location, an onsite USDA inspector oversees
the day's work. Using a variety of knives and
electric saws, a single steer is dressed in approximately two
hours. At the end of the day, the
butcher cleans and sanitizes tools and the MPU before
departing. He will later turn the animals
into cuts of meat for the farmer's freezer.
>> WIERINGA: Yeah, they're getting what they want.
They don't have to go to the store and just say, "Well,
that's what I've got to buy. No, they can actually create
different cuts, um, different styles of cuts.
>> NARRATOR: The processing plants have forever changed the
world of the traditional retail butcher.
Some wonder if that world can continue to survive.
>> LEKAN: Are we a dying breed? Yeah. I really think so.
At one time in the city of Chicago, there was a tavern and
a butcher shop on every block. That's gone.
There's a few of us that have survived, and, and, uh... uh,
we're here to supply those that appreciate that difference.
>> NARRATOR: It's the deft skill with a knife, the intimate
knowledge of the product and the secrets handed down through
generations that may ultimately save the traditional butcher
from extinction. As long as there's a demand for
quality, there will be a butcher to offer that special cut above.<font color="#FFFF00">
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