Know Your Burger
April 11, 2025 at 09:26PMWhen you sit down to eat a meal, do you know exactly where your food comes from and how it was raised? In a revision of a story originally published at Food as a Verb, David Cook profiles the Cherry Family of Tennessee, owners of Bear Creek Farm and Cherry Meat Co., a USDA processing plant. The Cherry Family takes pride in raising and processing cattle and pigs humanely, selling them to customers like Chris LeBlanc of Main Street Meats in Chattanooga, TN. There, with their “no waste” policy, they take care to use every part of every animal they process for their restaurant.
To eat in modern America is to participate in not-knowing. We encounter the meal on our plates, yet behind that, much is kept hidden from us: how the animals were treated, how the land was farmed, who processed the bodies, and who butchered them.
Some 34 million cattle are slaughtered every year in the US, the conditions of the farm or feedlot or processing plant are obscured. Answers are hidden because, too often, answers are vile and violent. But every so often, we find a window. Through it, we can peer into our meal. We can see the farmers, chefs, butchers, and processors.
Behind the Main Street Meats bar in Chattanooga, Tennessee, there’s a square window, opening up to the butchers working in the back of the restaurant and butcher shop. It’s literal: you can watch the Main Street Meats butchers work.
It’s also symbolic: we can see. Know. And appreciate the story of our meal.
“If people knew how much work goes into that hamburger,” said head butcher Chris LeBlanc, “they’d be shocked.”
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/11/know-your-burger/
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