PETA Folks - Don't Read This Post

I met a most interesting fellow yesterday. His name was Sandy, and he was 83 years old. He used to manage a small grocery store that specialized in meat. He said that back in the day, he had as many as ten butchers working for him (which made him popular with the local hospital - he had to go to the hosiptal but once in his long career and, as he said, "It was a clean cut at least...").

While he had nothing to do with the slaughtering of the animals, he told me a little bit about the day-to-day operations of his store - things I never really stopped to think about.

For example, if he had a customer who wanted brisket, he would cut that from the "swinging beef" ( a whole cow)...then he said briskets got really popular, so to satisfy the brisket customers, he had to keep ordering whole cows...and then...what do you do with all of the rest of it? You have to sell it...

Ordering for and running a shop back in the day had a whole lot of considerations I never thought of. I can imagine the stress of looking into a locker full of hanging cows and wondering how in the world you are going to move it in a timely fashion.

Beef. It's what for dinner, I guess. But I think they missed an opportunity with not capitalizing on the "Swinging Beef" phrase...I'm seeing Sinatra, rakish fedora hats...cool, man.