NONFICTION: Carcass Balancing - Yale Daily News

The walk-in freezer is stuffed with carcasses. The air is fragrant with oxidation and decay. Sunlight glints across the weathered orange skin of the lambs as they rest on green metal shelves. The pigs, a little further into the freezer, are pink and bloody, with yawning gashes running down their midsections. And in the way back are the cow chunks — once a single cow, now sawed into eight pieces — flecked with cakey white fat, exhaling blood that trickles over their suet and onto the floor. Zach Pierce leans against a shelf, beholding the thousands of pounds of carcass before him. Within a week’s time, all of it will become meat. We walk back to the front of Provisions on State, a shop on State Street in New Haven, Connecticut, where Zach works as head butcher. As a whole animal butcher, Zach gets two pigs, a lamb, a cow and 60 chickens delivered to him each week. The carcasses come de-skinned, de-organed and de-genitaled. The cows also come decapitated. Much of Zach’s work, then, is de

The walk-in freezer is stuffed with carcasses. The air is fragrant with oxidation and decay. Sunlight glints across the weathered orange skin of the lambs as they rest on green metal shelves. The pigs, a little further into the freezer, are pink and bloody, with yawning gashes running down their midsections. And in the way back are the cow chunks — once a single cow, now sawed into eight pieces — flecked with cakey white fat, exhaling blood that trickles over their suet and onto the floor. Zach Pierce leans against a shelf, beholding the thousands of pounds of carcass before him. Within a week