“William and I met at Shuckers and became lovers.”
J’Amy Owens is telling the story of Bill the Butcher, a new chain of Pacific Northwest butcher shops. The story begins with William Von Schneidau, her lover, riding his motorcycle through the tiny farming communities of Eastern Washington.
“He’s charming,” Owens laughs, picturing him in the empty space over my right shoulder. “He’s a huge outdoorsman, and he would get on his motorcycle and explore the state, by himself. And he would meet all these small suppliers, small farmers and ranchers, and he started sewing up this small supply chain—this endless web of love—of farmers and ranchers who were local. He would see a farmer: He’s got plenty of grass that’s fenced—why doesn’t he have cows on it?”
Bill the Butcher is now open in Madison Valley, Laurelhurst, Woodinville, and Redmond. Along with the ability to convert farmers into ranchers, and ranchers into organic ranchers, company founder Von Schneidau boasts meat expertise: “I’ve been in the meat business since I was 14,” he says. His consulting firm, CORE (www.coreseed.com), offers “Restaurant Profit Optimization,” “Specialty Food Marketing,” and “Green Packaging Programs.” According to his bio, he has directed “the production cooking for 12,000 daily casino visitors,” he’s been an executive sous-chef at a four-star hotel, and he’s “distributed over 30 million dollars in proteins” in the wholesale meat industry.
Owens is the CEO of Bill the Butcher and a professional retail consultant—she helped Starbucks open its first stores outside of Seattle. She has the backing of a well-capitalized publicly held company and decades of retail savvy. Her client list includes Nike, McDonald’s, Jenny Craig, Sears, and Cinnabon. She gives motivational speeches at retail conventions and was recently named one of the “25 Most Influential People in Retail” by an industry group. According to the aromatherapy handbook The Fragrant Mind, Owens has specialized in “aroma-psychology,” i.e., the scenting of retail outlets. Aroma is “one of the best ways to influence the customer that’s legal,” she says; she will design a customized retail scent for around $20,000.
“William’s the steak and I’m the sizzle in our partnership… I can’t tell you what to buy and how to cook it,” Owens says, “but William can, all the livelong day.”
William Von Schneidau vouches for the quality of Bill the Butcher’s meat. According to the signage above Bill the Butcher’s meat cases, the beef, pork, lamb, veal, goat, chicken, fish, and game are all “certified organic and natural.”
But there’s one thing Von Schneidau and Owens won’t share, and that’s the names of the putatively organic ranches that supply the shops. “But if we get to know [the ranchers] and we actually know them—we actually know them by their first names, we talk to them every day—that’s good enough for us,” says Owens. “We have the relationships, and that’s good enough to have source verification that we trust.”
Von Schneidau says that the names of the farms aren’t important to his clients: “We don’t want to confuse the consumer getting into too many ‘this farm, that farm’ things.” Within the next six months, he says, the Bill the Butcher supply chain will be solidified, and then they’ll consider revealing sources to their customers. Meanwhile: “If I did a blind test with you, and we served a top sirloin from five different farms… nobody will notice the difference anyway.”
Jill Lightner, food writer and editor of Edible Seattle, disagrees. Vehemently. “There’s no excuse for anything other than a completely transparent supply chain in our food system,” she says. “It’s what a consumer should expect. It’s impossible to tell whether a label means something without a consumer devoting an absurd amount of time… This is exactly why transparency in sourcing is the only thing that matters. If you know the ranch, you can visit the ranch, see the animals, and ask questions. If you don’t know the ranch, you’re relying on a marketing department.”
The cows are from “as close as we can get them,” according to Owens. “If it were being raised across the street and the specs were right, we’d buy them.” She will say that the meat comes from as far as Colorado and Nevada (a 20-hour motorcycle ride).
According to Owens and Von Schneidau, some of the meat is USDA certified organic and some is certified natural—a certification monitored by ranchers themselves, not the USDA. Then some is what Von Schneidau calls “beyond organic”—certified as neither, but “grass-fed and sustainably ranched” and personally checked. Von Schneidau says, “My specs to [the ranchers] are ‘x, y, z,’ and we get as close to that as we can to call it ‘Bill the Butcher.'”
But recently at both the Woodinville store and the Madison Valley store, everything was being sold as certified organic. When asked which ranch a flank steak came from and what the cow ate, the young butcher at the Woodinville store replied, “Well, it’s not like I can ask this steak where it came from, you know. But I can tell you that everything here is local and organic.”
When the butchers at Bill the Butcher in Laurelhurst describe what is sold at all of the stores as a “scavenger chicken,” they tell of how the farmer lets the baby chicks out into the forest, and how they nest and fend for themselves, and how the farmer walks through the trees and finds them wherever they’ve nested when it’s slaughter time.
But Von Schneidau admits, “Scavenger chicken is just a nickname—it doesn’t really mean anything. We just came up with that name to say to people that it wasn’t a store-bought chicken.”
The chicken farm is the one source that Bill the Butcher is forthcoming about: Dog Mountain Farm in Carnation. David Krepky, co-owner of Dog Mountain, says, “Yeah, I told them not to use the word ‘scavenger,’ because they’re not.” The chickens are kept in an indoor/outdoor pen and given feed to supplement whatever bugs and grass they find in the outdoor part.
Dog Mountain Farm’s chickens are highly regarded, sustainably and humanely raised heirloom chickens. But Bill the Butcher’s butchers also claimed that the Dog Mountain Farm chickens were certified organic. “No,” says Krepky, “they’re not organic. The organic feed comes from Canada, and it’s like twice as expensive.” Are they certified natural? “Nope,” says Krepky, “neither. They’re just good chickens.”
Does Krepky know that Bill the Butcher is selling the chickens as organic? “Yeah, I’ve seen it, and I’ve told them it’s not… not to do that. But they label what they do.”
Does Von Schneidau know that Bill the Butcher is selling nonorganic Dog Mountain Farm chickens as organic? “Well, we do have organic chickens—we get those from another farm.” He says the misrepresentation was a “mistake” and “yes, absolutely, a failure in our training. I haven’t taken all of [the butchers] around to the farms yet—I’m slowly doing that.”
Recently, a Nicky USA Farms truck was seen leaving the Madison Valley store. Nicky USA Farms, based in Oregon, confirms that Bill the Butcher is a client. They also confirm that their meat is neither certified organic nor certified natural, in spite of Bill the Butcher’s claims that what they’re selling is all “certified organic and natural.” Von Schneidau says that Nicky USA sells “certain things like quail or venison, caribou and bear, things that go back into a whole different exotic category… that I can’t get, that farmers up this way just aren’t doing.” Nicky USA also sells beef, pork, lamb, veal, and all the other meats Bill the Butcher claims to source from organic ranches that the company refuses to name.
Asked why the consumer should believe in the quality of unnamed meat sources, Owens says, “Well, ‘buyer beware,’ honestly. In any consumer proposition, you have to trust the person you’re buying from.” However, in her retail motivational speeches (which can be viewed on YouTube), she exhorts retailers to focus on the customer’s emotional experience and not the products themselves: “The purpose under every single transaction is personal. They’re not buying the shampoo, they’re buying the feeling—they want to take home the feeling… That’s the reason they’re there.”
Bill the Butcher’s marketing and in-store signage explicitly state “Certified Organic and Natural Beef, Lamb, Veal, Goat, Cheese, Fish, Chicken, Pork, Game” (its website says “only locally sourced and ethically raised meat”). When asked, butchers at two locations said, “Everything in the case is organic.”
The first Bill the Butcher outlet opened less than a year ago; the other three followed almost immediately. Owens is currently looking at real estate for the next wave of Bill the Butcher expansion. Recent food-retail trends reflect an explosion in the organic and local sector of the market—Owens says that organics are currently the “only growth category in food.” Riding its increased popularity, investors in Owens’s company have driven her share price from a penny per share when she bought a controlling interest in 2009 to $3 per share in a 2010 SEC filing—a return of over $11 million on her $37,100 investment, in just under a year. Bill the Butcher customers pay 10 to 20 percent more than at comparable local butcher shops, although no other local shops claim to sell solely certified organic and certified natural meats.
As Owens says in one of her motivational speeches, “If you pick your niche, you get rich.” 
Wow. I feel really used though I guess it kinda points to why I also felt strangely underwhelmed by the Mad Valley store.
I just assumed one of those guys there was “Bill” and that the lady running the checkout was the wife with the heavy hand at all the “cute food”. To find out that’s it a corporate chain store, explains all that cute food (margin on impulse shopping), and also why there’s no place where it looks like the “butchers” are “preparing food” or why they weren’t able to explain some of my simple questions about it. It’s just a meat counter!
Particularly galling to me know is a brief exchange where I mentioned that I really liked “The Swinery” and the guy “Bill” starts bad-mouthing it as I was standing there thinking you’d think as an independent sustainable butcher, he’d be just as much into what they do and totally like, “Yep, they’re great”. I chalked it up to poor business skills and excitement at having his own store..over-riding common decency and the unity of butchers.
I appreciate very much this article, because now that store and my couple experiences there make so much more sense. Those guys don’t have to be butchers at all!
That pushy sales guy who’s not “Bill” probably doesn’t have a clue about sourcing local meat, he’s just unloading whatever truck shows up and what some person sitting in a cube is ordering on the phone.
Really, just wow.
Hey, look! Dishonesty in the meat industry. How udderly surprising!
Thank you Matthew. This is real journalism and a pleasure to read.
Something rare these days, where even the publisher of this story is a corporate mouthpiece masquerading as a local, independent weekly.
Rad article Bethany! Love the deep journalism. Haven’t eaten meat in 11 years, but I’ll make sure to talk shit about this place to anyone who’ll listen.
Oops, sorry for the improper credit. Saw as I was posting links elsewhere that Matthew Richter was the author. Way to be guy I haven’t read from before. Stranger, feature this guy more often.
I was shocked last year when I learned that the “Atlantic salmon” I had been buying was farm-raised, not wild Atlantic salmon. I was told that the Atlantic labeling meant the species, not where it came from. With food sold so deceptively, I no longer trust any grocers.
@57, i know… my wife pointed out that the pasta i bought, marketed as “made with whole wheat,” was not in fact whole wheat pasta. (“made with whole wheat” means they put a little whole wheat in the mix)
Matthew,
I enjoyed your article on meat. I used it as a opportunity to talk to my employees about being honest about where our meat comes from. Forty years in this business has taught me that you are only as good as your reputation. Customers are interested more now days how our product is raised and fed. One mistake a new employee (or a server in a restaurant) makes is to tell the customer everything is organic or raised in the owner’s back yard and fed fresh cut grass. The ‘natural’ label is used or overused so much now days that it’s hard for us in the industry to keep up to date ourselves! For example, a piece of meat can be labeled “organic” even though the animal has not been fed exclusively organic feed all year round. Knowing if a company has good information on the source of its animals, how clean their operation is, etc. is important too. We sell a variety of meats at different price ranges for our customers. I try to let them know where I get it from and as much as I know on how it is raised and fed. The customer deserves to know this information to help them decide how to spend their hard earned bucks.
Don Kuzaro
Don & Joe’s Meats
Pike Place Market
Jim, Don’t let that sour you. If they marketed it as “Wild Atlantic Salmon,” then that in itself is incorrect, and they should be mightily chastized for that. There is no Wild Atlantic Salmon, and there never will be again. What you need to look for is a species of salmon, one of the big five “King, Sockeye, Coho, Keta, or Pink”, and then ask if they’re farmed or wild. Fresh does not mean wild. Fresh means fresh. Nor does medium salmon mean a type of salmon. Medium is a size, not a flavor. I want my salmon to taste like a king. I’ve seen farmed sockeye, farmed Coho, and farmed King, with the latter being the most common. Be wary, and ask questions. Look for the snips on the tail, well worn dorsal fins, and if you see fillets that all look the same in color, that dayglo orange, ask.
Here’s where it gets tricky as a consumer: Who owns the water? A fish can say that it was caught in Iceland, but when you are trolling international waters, there are strange boundaries, oftentimes muddied, where different groups overlap. Some call it piracy, but it’s a fishing gray area.
One such industry is the King Crab Business. There’s Russian and Alaskan King Crab, which both fish out of the Bering Sea. How can you tell the difference? Different countries have different methods of cooking and processing their fish. Look at how the cuts are. If they are sharply cut along the divisions between the leg, chances are they’re probably United States processed. If not, they may be Russian.
One other issue is where the fish is processed vs. where it is caught. A lot of the portion cuts of frozen seafood that you get in the store say “Product of china”, even if it says “wild Alaskan salmon”. Why? Because it’s cheaper to catch the fish in Alaska, slowboat it to Asia, process it over there, and send it back to be sold in the United States. Doesn’t mean the fish is bad, or mistreated, but there are also sustainable options that are caught and processed in the United States.
THis law has been Mandatory for all retail operations since 2008. If someone asks you, you must know. Wholesale operations are required to let the retailers know exactly where their product comes from.
With that said, Don is a standup guy. I’ve gotten stuff from the counter at the market a few times, and they’re great about educating the customer about the reality of what it means to have a fresh cut of meat. It always tastes great, and to Don, I say thank you for being upfront about it and educating your staff. Let’s hope that more butchers follow your lead. You’ve earned some business here.
Please refer to Mr. Bill Hicks’ views on marketing and advertising below. And please everyone, stop being so damn gullible, if the restaurant or store doesn’t know where their meat comes from don’t eat/buy from there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0…
Sounds like Bill is engaged in an unfair or deceptive act or practice on the public. The Washington Attorney General investigates complaints for matters like that.
Form is online at https://fortress.wa.gov/atg/formhandler/…
Went to bills the other day. $25 per pound was the average price. I walked out. Glad I did.
How do you make it big in Seattle? Guilt and adjectives.
They labels are mostly a bunch of bunk anyways. I’m much more interested in overall sustainability. “organic” is a checklist of “don’ts”, with no clear end-goal.
For instance if he brings in cows from the Nevada, then its probably just adding to the water problems they have there. Greenhouse’s might use more energy, but can easily be certified “organic”. etc
I inquired about the source of their pork from the salesman/butcher in their Laurelhurst shop a few months back. When he told me Carlton Farms pork (Carlton, OR), I asked why they didn’t buy from Pure Country Pork in Ephrata, WA since they were closer, a family farm, and their hogs certified by the Food Alliance as “raised in a sustainable and natural environment.” It didn’t appear that he had ever heard of Pure Country Pork…
I inquired about the source of their pork from the salesman/butcher in their Laurelhurst shop a few months back. When he told me Carlton Farms pork (Carlton, OR), I asked why they didn’t buy from Pure Country Pork in Ephrata, WA since they were closer, a family farm, and their hogs certified by the Food Alliance as “raised in a sustainable and natural environment.” It didn’t appear that he had ever heard of Pure Country Pork…he also wasn’t very forthcoming about the source of some of his other meat, so I haven’t been back since.
I swear you can sell anything to the affluent chumps who reside in those well-heeled and carefully chosen neighborhoods. Just so long as it reinforces their smug sense of piety. Let them eat grass-fed, free-range, organic chateaubriand!
By the way, if you Google “Bill the Butcher”, a picture of Daniel Day Lewis in “Gangs of New York” will appear at the top of the results page.
Rain Mountian on Cap Hill is AWESOME! And Russ knows where EVERYTHING comes from, including the names of farmers, etc. And he has fresh squab…mmm, pigeon!
A n J on Queen Anne is good too…
I can’t help but wonder how many of you offended posters are in fact vegetarians? You have no dog in this fight, christ, if you hate this butcher shop so much, just don’t get off your fucking high-horse long enough to go there… Instead of eating organic beef, I suggest that many of you just go ahead and eat shit, and die…
I would like to apologize to any customer that purchased Dog Mountain Farm chickens or eggs under the assumption that they were certified organic. Transparency is very important to us. The decision to sell through a third party wasn’t even considered until we met William and learned about his plan to feature local meats. Since we no longer would have direct customer contact, we insisted on signage to tell the story of how our animals are raised and processed. This was exactly what Bill the Butcher wanted to highlight. From the time William opened the first store in Woodinville, we provided information cards which were prominently displayed. In addition to William visiting our farm, David and I took the time to visit the Woodinville and Redmond stores to ensure our products were appropriately labeled and talked with the butchers working in the shops. William and his staff took our feedback and made the changes we asked for, including instructing customers on proper cooking methods. I can’t validate the statements made in this article, but I believe there was absolutely no intent by the owners to misrepresent products in their stores. They have set big, bold goals that must be challenging and I am certain any lack in training of new staff is being addressed. There aren’t many sources for local meats and most producers are small with limited or seasonal availability. How consumers choose to spend their food dollars is critically important to the sustainability of our local agriculture. We, as farmers, are fortunate to see the return of neighborhood butcher shops and to have a year-round outlet for our high-quality, farm-fresh products. I encourage consumers to support your local farms and butcher shops and make your choices based on more than one critic’s point of view.
Bill’s rebuttal to this article is up at http://billthebutcher.us/An_Open_Letter.…
Well said Cindy! Looking forward to catching up with you and your Dog Mountain crew at QA Farmer’s Market to pick up our weekly ration of eggs. One privilege of city living is that the farmers are willing to come to us. With a little planning we can make eye contact with the people that raise our dinner.
Snap, Bill the Butcher just called you a liar. Or at least set up some strawmen and shot them down.
Another casual reminder that marketing is a dirty, dirty enterprise.
Bill’s response : http://billthebutcher.us/An_Open_Letter.…
There’s No Mystery.
It isn’t easy being green, but for us there is simply no alternative.
It takes a substantial investment and a period of years to get an organic certification and many local farmers and ranchers just cannot afford to pursue this, and that is why we have never stated we are “100 percent certified organic.” In order to ensure our farmers meet our standards, we give them our vendor specification kit. This application requires the farm to demonstrate to us that they do not use hormones, steroids, antibiotics or genetically modified inputs. We formally call their product “Bill the Butcher Natural” and you can review our specifications on the Meat Standards tab at http://www.billthebutcher.com.
In our marketing, in our signage, on our web site, and in our brochure we have never represented our meat as being “100 percent certified organic.” Instead, we have said “organic and natural, grass fed and local” to best represent our total mix of meaty offerings.
Transparency is of the ultimate importance to us and we are creating a system that allows us to track our meat from the farm to our cases. You will be able to learn not only where our meat comes from and who raises it, but also what the animal ate, how it was harvested and the interesting nuances that nobody has ever attempted to reveal, such as the specific breed/bloodline of the animal. We’ll provide you with information allowing you to pinpoint your ultimate preferences in the quest for your perfect steak. For instance, you will be able to discern the difference between Natural Short Horn Brahmin beef raised and finished on grass vs. Organic Limousin beef raised on grass and finished on organic grain.
In a mere 9 months, we’ve formed a new supply chain of local and conscientious ranchers and farmers who raise and produce healthy and safe food. We will start showcasing our ranchers and farmers, those who agree to be featured, next week. As you may already know our meat and poultry comes from Snohomish County, King County, Anacortes, Lopez Island, Spanaway, Duvall, Arlington and Mt. Vernon in Washington , and from Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. This mix is constantly changing and growing as we add new suppliers to our team and we are proud to say that our local roster of farmers is the best of the best. We will always go as close as we can and as far as we have to in order to deliver products of the highest standards.
Our ranchers and farmers and their careful, humane practices have allowed us to open four butcher shops in Woodinville, Madison Valley, Redmond, and Laurelhurst. Each shop has been outfitted and furnished almost entirely from renewed, reused or recycled materials.
We’ve hired a talented group of executive chefs, culinarians and butchers who are all dedicated to sustainability. In the process, we have created over 30 local jobs. We’ve also spent more than $300,000 buying organic and natural, grass fed meats, local chickens and wild fish from people who believe as we do – that the only meat to eat should come from progressive producers who practice better and more humane ways to raise animals in support of human and environmental health.
Our business is just getting started, and we have had some growing pains that are being addressed with an internal training program to ensure accuracy at every level in the shops. But our mission is crystal clear: to bring the butcher shop back to the neighborhood, with clean, environmentally healthy meats brought to you directly from local farmers and ranchers.
It is not easy to be the change agent of a cause this important, but we ask that you continue to support our efforts and assure you that we are going to change our corner of the world “one steak at a time.”
Does it bother anyone that the name of Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan’s buddy from The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Inc. virtually required reading at this point, had his name misspelled in BTB’s list of must reads as “Salatini”? Not once, but twice? Far be it from me to attack the strength of character, but are there not fact checkers, has anyone actually read one of those books, and moreover, do they even know who he is and what his story is? His philosophy does not support what it has been proven that BTB does, customers such as Dog Mountain receiving an exemption based on their local status. I think something good that has come out of this is that it has pushed their agenda of revealing, or scrambling to find, their flagship sources of proteins. Good job, Matthew.
These people sound like charlatans.
Hey Bill. Why no mention of where you get your smoked sausages and wieners and Landjaeger and Bacon? Taste like Bavarian Meats. When did they go organic? You fooled us. Now go.
This is the central problem with the whole “organic” movement. It’s become such a popular marketing buzzword, that any and every kind of business wants to get in on it, and will do anything to market themselves as “organic”.
I just recently saw an ad for a pesticide (for pets) company touting its organic model, and showing people picking flowers out of fields to make flea shampoos. What they neglected to say was that this is the way pyrethrin pesticides have been made for years. Chemicals have all been derived from plant or animal sources at some point. Just show the plant source of your chemical, and you can market anything as “natural”. The terms organic and natural are slowly being rendered meaningless by their own popularity.
I have been a meat cutter for 12 years and the only place I buy meat is at whole foods market! 100% knowlede of all the products they carry, they have all the vendor info upon request, the farms come in and do demos and they are the only certified organic company in the world!
Best shop hands down!
The best, and really only, places to get your meat and know EXACTLY where it comes from are the FARMERS MARKETS. Seattle has a bunch of great farmers markets where local farmers sell directly to the consumer (and I don’t mean Pike Place – I’m talking about U-Distr, Broadway, Ballard, Columbia City, etc). There is no middle-man, and there is no false labeling or marketing – just the farmers selling what they produce on their own family farm. They will tell you exactly what you are getting and what their farm is. It doesn’t get any better than that, unless you go out to the farm yourself to buy, or, grow it yourself. At the U-Distr. farmers market I can buy goat meat, lamb, beef, chicken, pork, eggs, cheeses, not to mention the enormous heads of heirloom lettuces, the flats of raspberries…and every dime goes to directly to the farmer, not the butcher or grocery store owner. (Although I do certainly appreciate the butchers and grocery stores that sell local, sustainable products, and I support them when I absolutely can’t make it to a farmers market.)
@29.. Well done. Thank you, Stranger, for this story! This is just another case of someone taking advantage of the “Green Hallucination” our country is having. It seems like Owens saw “Food Inc.” and found herself a new bandwagon to exploit. I will definitely be going to Rainshadow Meats.
The best, and really only, places to get your meat and know EXACTLY where it comes from are the FARMERS MARKETS. Seattle has a bunch of great farmers markets where local farmers sell directly to the consumer (and I don’t mean Pike Place – I’m talking about U-Distr, Broadway, Ballard, Columbia City, etc). There is no middle-man, and there is no false labeling or marketing – just the farmers selling what they produce on their own family farm. They will tell you exactly what you are getting and what their farm is. It doesn’t get any better than that, unless you go out to the farm yourself to buy, or, grow it yourself. At the U-Distr. farmers market I can buy goat meat, lamb, beef, chicken, pork, eggs, cheeses, not to mention the enormous heads of heirloom lettuces, the flats of raspberries…and every dime goes to directly to the farmer, not the butcher or grocery store owner. (Although I do certainly appreciate the butchers and grocery stores that sell local, sustainable products, and I support them when I absolutely can’t make it to a farmers market.)
Maybe I’m missing something but how can meat that “comes from as far as Colorado and Nevada” be considered local, by any stretch of the imagination? – granted, it could be worse, but thats not what I think of when I think of local – I think more of a 100-mile diet type thing.
And it seems they’re using the terms “natural” and “organic” interchangeably, which you can’t do. “organic” is a certification, “natural” used as a sales pitch to get people to buy more of your product., AFAIK, there is no organization that certifies whether something is “natural” or not
All retailers selling products with an organic label are required to maintain the documents to prove it. Retailers are exempt from having to be certified but not exempt from maintaining the records. This is a requirement of the federal organic labeling laws (1990 Organic Food Production Act and 2002 National Organic Standards). In addition, the retailer must make these records available to accredited certifiers and the National Organic Program. If any customers are concerned about the organic integrity of this retailer’s meats, they can lodge a complaint with the National Orgnaic Program, itself, or with an accredited certifying agency. A complaint always prompts an investigation. The Washington State Dept of Agriculture Organic Program is Washington’s most local certifier. The WSDA Organic Food Program’s # is 360-902-1805
This was a hilarious, and awesome, article. I’m bookmarking it for everyone I hear talking about buying local who believes what they’re told in a store. Good work! Keep it up!
I wonder if the people driving up in their German made cars with their leather seats are really concerned about buying local? The dead hide that heats up your behind, Is it organic?
To think you can change the world with a steak is a mistake. Love and compassion for our food should also go to our fellow humans.
reposted
I am glad to see that a paper would be so honest. I have over 30 years in the meat industry and Bill the BS’r is bad for our industry. To call these people meatcutters is insulting to say the least. I went to his store in Redmond. He had pork displayed above his beef. Do they have a health card. The open bottle of booze is a violation of state law.Can you say L&I. Boycot BS and his little dog too.
Great article; for a moment I was pleasantly surprised that an online paper I’d been reading had finally done some investigative journalism rather than paraphrasing the latest Reuter’s blurb. Then I remembered this was the Stranger, and not ‘another Seattle online paper, which needs to take notes’
Keep up the good work!
Bill:
“In the future” when the “product lines are secure” and we see the “full disclose”, THEN I will shop there.
Meanwhile, I am sticking with Fisher’s Meat in Issauquah. Not organic, but the quality and professional service and skill are outstanding, and at least I am giving my money to a local company, not a giant food conglomerate.
I attempted to write a Yelp review of Bill’s in Redmond to sum up our feelings on this development and to warn other people. It posted on May 19 and since that time, it has been removed. I find this highly suspect and one more (bad) example of what a poor business model this place has!
My visit after all of the comotion resulted in watching the butcher stumble around trying to figure out what sausages had pork or beef in them. While some of the sausages in the case were raw and possibly made by BTB, the cooked/smoked ones were made by Bavarian meets.
While great product Bavarian makes no claims to be organic either.
“The purpose under every single transaction is personal. They’re not buying the shampoo, they’re buying the feeling—they want to take home the feeling… That’s the reason they’re there.”‘
This thinking is the heart of what’s wrong with our economy. Marketing and profits mean everything and actual product quality means next to nothing. This has to stop. This is hurting America.
“Bill the Butcher customers pay 10 to 20 percent more than at comparable local butcher shops,”
Really? Did we drop a zero somewhere?
The “organic” label is meaningless. All I want to know is what the rancher fed the cow. I don’t care for beef that has been force fed grain to fatten it. The grass-finished beef is the best, in my opinion. It is what nature intended beef to be.
I love this article. The writer is brilliant. I am still laughing. I have been doing some consulting on livestock processing. While I am not an expert, what I do know is that a huge part of eating local is how the animal is slaughter. Quite a few very nice farmers send their very nicely raised critters to really bad bad bad slaughter operations. They do not have much an option because most of the small slaughter ops shutdown when all the processing went industrial and now the USDA regs are very expensive. Key question for any butcher is where was the animal slaughtered and how many animals do they do a day. If you are concerned about the human issues this is very important. Recommended reading — Eating Animals – Foer.
What about packaging? Buying organic meat wrapped in plastic on a styrofoam tray is the equivalent of one step forward, and then one step backward again….