Via Gothamist, a New York Times article on the rise in urban slaughterhouses highlights differences in cultures of consumption:
Mr. Ali, meanwhile, says he is performing a much-needed service. Some come for the halal meat, killed according to Islam. (He weighs his goats on a scale built for pigs, an animal that Islam proscribes as food. A pig decoration on the scale had been scratched out.) But customers also want to see that the animals, usually trucked from no farther than Pennsylvania, are healthy.
“I want to see it with my own eyes,” said Shamsul Rahman, 65, who is originally from Bangladesh and was buying 11 chickens.
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Tom Mylan, who carves up cows in front of customers at Marlow & Daughters, a butcher shop and locavore’s temple in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said he lived near three live-animal markets, two run by Hasidic Jews and one by Latin Americans. Although they may not share his obsession with animal welfare and organic feed, he said, he views them as allies against the mass-market industry he calls “big meat.”
What he teaches his gourmet followers, he said, is what the working-class live-market customers have never forgotten: “To eat meat, you have to kill — something that we got pulled out of during the last 50 years in America,” he said. “We’re used to going into the grocery store and there’s not even a butcher counter, just a bunch of foam trays with a lot of anonymous blobs of meat in them.”
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