10 Questions to Ask your Butcher

Butchers who enjoy their work love telling people just how much. So start with that: a conversation. They also love customers who ask questions. Consider these, for starters:

What does “butcher’s grade”, “AAA grade” or “special reserve” mean?

Don’t be baffled by marketing bullshit. Are we selling wine or meat? Unfortunately, there’s a lot of mysterious red tape around labelling laws. Grading of meat in South Africa is bewildering (if not misleading) for consumers, and buzzwords like “free range” and “all natural” don’t really count for much. In SAMIC’s (South African Meat Industry Company) meat classification, for instance, beef and lamb carcasses are designated a letter and a number. The letter speaks nothing of the quality; it indicates the animal’s age. “AAA grade beef” simply means that the animal was very young when it was slaughtered. Traceability and animal welfare is what’s important (well, for butchers who care, anyway). At our shop, we buy three-and-a-half-year-old animals (in other words, C grade meat). If you ask the average consumer if they want A-grade or C-grade beef, what do you think their answer would be? We aren’t hung up on calling our meat “grass-fed” or “free-range” (it is), we’d rather have a conversation. We can tell you about the farms we visit, the breeds of animal, what they ate and how they lived. We also get into the manner in which they’ve been slaughtered which, for us, is just as important. Don’t get thrown by complicated descriptions of meat. It’s nonsense.