Note to readers: this story contains images from a processing plant. At first glance, these images may seem inhumane, yet, we offer a reminder: millions of animals are slaughtered each year, often in nightmarish conditions.

Not here.

Our story spotlights a wholesome, intentional relationship between farmers, processors, butchers, animals and restaurant owners.

In life and death, these relationships are built on respect. They benefit all involved.

Chapter One: May I Take Your Order?

It's Saturday night at Main Street Meats, the butcher shop + restaurant in Chattanooga's Southside. Servers wearing trucker hats hustle out New York strips and sirloins and two fingers of $30 whiskey as the bartender pours an Old Fashioned with one hand, a draft IPA with the other, while Norah Jones sings over the speakers and folks at four-top tables pick up forks and knives, laugh and clink glasses.

It's loud and big-hearted and delicious.

A man at the bar orders a burger.

A woman on the patio, a charcuterie board. A couple on their second date: Reubens and pork rinds.

Pause here, amidst the noise. Freeze frame this moment.

Where does it come from?

The burger, Reuben and rinds?

The charcuterie?

What is the story of your dinner before it becomes ... your dinner?

Behind the meat counter, there's a square window, opening up to the butcher shop.

It's literal: you can watch the Main Street Meats butchers work.

It's also symbolic: we can see into the story of our food.

"If people knew how much work goes into that hamburger," said butcher Chris LeBlanc, "they’d be shocked."

Inside the butcher shop - just beyond the meat counter and bar - it's like another world. The quiet stretches like a horizon, a calm that feels grounding and easy.

The quiet seems to originate with Chris.

"This is my moment of Zen," he said.

While folks eat and drink nearby, Chris, 43, stands with a 10-inch knife above 200 pounds of Black Angus on the white table before him.  

He is the head butcher at Main Street Meats and oversees a team of three others whose job is turning whole cows and whole pigs into items on the Main Street Meats menu.

"It's nice to be hyper-focused on one thing," he said.

Chris is hyper-focused on what he can't see. This is the butcher's work: to extract, withdraw and resurrect the cuts hidden within. Somewhere inside this Black Angus, there's a bonanza of future meals.

The butcher's job is to find them.

“You have to know what you're looking for,” Chris said.

Chris and his team - Aaron Gonzales, Anna Scott, Jeremy Southern - work smoothly and deliberately, using three or four different knives - a 10-inch breaking knife, a six-inch trimming knife, four-inch boning knife, and, every so often, a hacksaw - like sculptors before stone.

Hendrix played differently than Jimmy Page; Steph's form isn't Ionescu's. So, too, with butchers. There are many ways to break down beef. Main Street butchers have their own style.

"Someone called us the orthopedic surgeons of the restaurant industry," offered Anna, scraping off bone dust and excess fat from beef ribs.

Most of all? They work with kindness. We will spend days with Chris, taking hours of notes, and if there was a Venn diagram of all he said, one word rises above the rest.

Respect.

"Respect for farmers," he said, "respect for the animal that gave its life, respect for our customers."

Four times a week, Chris will stand over the stark white butcher tables, black Birks on his feet, temp set low and begin to work. It is more surgical than bloody; multiple times a week, they are visited by a federal inspector.

If people knew ...

To eat in modern America is to participate in not-knowing: how were animals treated? How was the land treated? Who processed this? Who butchered this?

Some 34 million cattle are slaughtered every year in the US. What were the conditions of the farm or feedlot? Of the slaughterhouse, or processing plant, and its workers?

We ... don't ... know. Often, this is kept hidden because the answers can be violent.

This, however, is a story of understanding.

Of respect.

This is a story of clear knowing.

Look into the window.

If people knew ...

Chris wants you to know.

Chapter Two: Where It All Begins

Bill Cherry’s not meant for the office, not meant for ergonomic swivel chairs or Excel spreadsheets. He’s meant for this:

"Being outside working with the land," he said. "Not being cooped up in an office."

They cooped him up once in an office and it about killed him. So, years ago, Bill, 60, decided to farm south of Nashville.

Today, he and his wife LeeAnn, twin sons and daughter are doing what very few farming families in America can. Or will.

"We do everything from getting animals bred and selecting genetics to calving them out to growing them, weaning them and taking them to our own processing plant," said Bill.

The Cherry family owns and manages Bear Creek Farm, some 2,000 acres in Williamson and Maury counties with 800 Black Angus and 200 Berkshire, Duroc and Red Wattle pigs.

They also own and manage Cherry Meat Co., a processing plant one county over.

Within an industry often vast and secretive, they've built the opposite: an intimate form of vertical integration, from conception to harvest, loving stewards over it all.

"We handle everything from birth and conception until it goes to somebody’s hands to cook," said Bill.

When you order at Main Street Meats - pause here, freeze frame this moment - you're now in relationship with the Cherry family and Bear Creek Farm.

Their decisions affect and influence the dinner you receive.

"I can't think of another example in the Southeast of someone who does it that intentionally," said Main Street Meats Chef-owner Erik Niel.

Bill was raised here, his dad one of several large land-owning families back when land south of Nashville was affordable. (Locals whisper the recent story of one faraway billionaire who flew into town, wrote a kitchen-table check for more money than the sellers dreamed and began to row crop.)

We ride across the Bear Creek land in Bill's truck, then, Honda side-by-side. Bill uses his left foot to gas and brake. ("An old injury," he said, something to do with racing motorcycles.) He then tells the story of the 2006 drought.

"We were hauling city water with a semi 24 hours a day," remembers Bill. "We couldn't keep up."

His father had enough. Don't want to see another cow in my whole life, he said. I'm done. Sell it all.

Instead, Bill bought it, then quilted together nearly 2000 acres in several plots spread through Williamson and Maury counties.

Bill carries a calmness and kindness you can't mask or manufacture. Most of his decisions - using horses, not four-wheelers, working with the signs - come from one motivation:

"It's less stressful for the animals," he said.

Bill built his own house; Bear Creek runs just beyond the back porch. Twin sons - Alex and Grant McKenzie - are shoulder-to-shoulder with him managing the pigs and Black Angus cattle. Well, mostly.

"LeeAnn likes one or two Charolais and a few Jerseys on the farm," Bill said.

During COVID, they opened a farm store in their driveway, quickly cleaning out a cinder block building - "full of dirt daubers and old coolers," LeeAnn said - as a way to feed the community.

"There was a line from here to the road," she said.

It's been like that every Wednesday since. They usually sell out.

Years ago, the cattleman philosophy was to "sell pounds, not cows," as Bill says, which meant a fat cow was the gold standard. Sentiments have shifted. Today, Bill sells cows: carefully stewarded, with selected genetics, finished on grain.

"We need a better product over pounds," he said.

In 2012, the Cherrys did what very few other cattle-farmers have.

They bought their own USDA processing plant.

In Chapel Hill, Tennessee, the Cherrys own Cherry Meat Co., which processes all of Bear Creek Farm's cattle and pigs, giving them control from conception-to-carcass.

"It was a mutual saving of asses," LeeAnn jokes.

Chapter Three: Do You Hear Angels?

Cherry Meat Co. is about a 20-minute drive down country roads from Bear Creek Farm. Each month, they process, or slaughter, approximately 80 steer, or cows, 80 hogs and 20 lambs. Most cattle and hogs originate from Bear Creek, but not all.

"Any animal that comes into the driveway? We treat it like it's our own," LeeAnn said.

LeeAnn Cherry is the type of woman you like immediately. Tough, like she could hold her own in Yellowstone. So, too, her daughter Paige Alden, a former police officer who manages Cherry Meat Co.

Behind their grit, there is something else:

A softness.

"I'm a hugger," LeeAnn tells us.

Even after all these years, when folks aren't looking, she still tears up thinking about these cows and pigs.

“My eyes still water when I look at them," she said. "It's a sacrifice we appreciate."

A USDA inspector - with an office next to Paige's - is involved in every aspect of the plant. That's how the Cherrys want it.

“This is our livelihood. This is what our children do. This is what our grandchildren will have the opportunity to do," she said. "We take this shit so seriously.”

Today, the Cherry family sells to as many as 60 restaurants from Atlanta to Birmingham to Chattanooga.

When the Cherry family bought the processing facility, LeeAnn asked Paige, 36, to run operations.

“I grew up in suburbia. I went to a private high school," Paige said. "Managing a processing plant was not on my radar."

After college - Connecticut, then MTSU - she took a job with the Colombia, Tenn. police force. LeeAnn married Bill, and the call came: please work for us on the farm.

“I loved it,” Paige said. “Outside, working.”

Once, a man called the processing plant with some questions. Paige stumbled over her answers. Frustrated, the caller said something she'll never forget:

Put a man on the phone.

“For months on end, I stayed on the processing floor, asking questions so that when people called, they did not ask to speak to a man," Paige said.

From the moment the trailer is unlatched, Paige and LeeAnn work to ensure the least amount of stress - for animals and humans - as possible.

"So the animal doesn't feel anything," said LeeAnn. "That is the ultimate goal."

Not only ethical, it's good business. In your sirloin, you can taste stress.

"When steers are harvested with high levels of cortisol from stress, the meat is affected," she said. "The cost is affected. Profit is affected."

Farmers can work years caring gently for their animals, but, if the processing experience is brutal, well ...

"All that hard work goes out the window," LeeAnn said.

When animals arrive at Cherry Meat Co., their last hours of life are defined by multiple safeguards that prevent stress and suffering.

• A Temple-Grandin-inspired chute allows animals to lie down at any point.
• Workers are trained to move with patience and ease. Animals are not rushed.
• Trained workers fire two bolt guns into brain lobes simultaneously. Workers train on proper firing angles so that death is instantaneous; the animal feels nothing. A .22 rifle sits within arm's reach for backup.  
• The post-death process involves multiple layers of ease, precision and efficiency, all designed to protect workers and respect animals.

After death, animals are skinned, entrails and heads removed, then, halved and quartered.

If people knew ...

Witnessing pig carcasses being sawed in half is startling. Yet, there is no sausage, salami or charcuterie served in the country that somehow avoids or skips such a process.

The slaughterhouse industry is historically cruel with a high turnover rate and critical mental health issues among workers. (We heard of one slaughterhouse that hired a full-time chaplain.)

At Cherry Meat. Co., it feels abundantly different.

“I love it,” said Otonniel Ramirez. "It's awesome. This is what we like to do."

Immigrating from Mexico in 2009, he joined Cherry Meat Co. in 2012. He spoke of his father, a butcher in Colorado, and his brothers, cousins and brother-in-law, all Cherry Meat Co. employees.

"I take care of my family and pay the bills," he said. "It's a good opportunity."

At Cherry Meat Co., the meat hangs in dry air for two weeks, minimum, to begin the dry-aging process.

In other plants, the meat is placed into wet bags immediately.

"There's never a chance for the dry air enzymes to do their work and magic," said LeeAnn.

She hands us hair nets and white coats and walks us past the killing floor - "No, sorry, your presence would stress the animals" - and opens a thick steel door.

We walk inside.

The room takes our breath away.

But not from the cold.

We are standing in a room full of carcasses. Row after row of pigs and cattle hang from steel chains hooked into heels.

The bodies are stock-still. The air in the room is so calm - almost like you could whisper one side to the other - that if you gently touched one of the hanging bodies, bumping it with your finger, it may rock back and forth for minutes before stopping.

The cows are headless, but not the pigs, whose eyes still stare unblinking.

It is 35 degrees. Soon, our limbs will begin to shake.

The moment is arresting, humbling.

One feels so small among the enormous, vertical rivers of pink, red and white fat and muscle.

Had we closed our eyes, not knowing we were standing in a processing plant freezer, we might have guessed: an empty chapel at midnight. An opening in the forest, falcons overhead. The air felt reverent, not brutal.

We kept whispering, surprised by the words escaping our mouths: it's ... beautiful.

"Do you hear angels?" LeeAnn asks.

Afterward, we will look back on this moment with surprise, trying to interpret the felt-sense - beautiful - of such a place.

Later, we found the right words.

It is the culmination of a beautiful system.

• Animals raised on rich pasture and open air by farmers acting with intelligence, love and respect.
• Farming practices that are intentional and beneficial for the land.
• Animals harvested with care by highly ethical and trained people whose entire decision-making process is designed to reduce stress.

So, yes. Beautiful, indeed.

"Thank you," said LeeAnn. "It was paramount for us to control the ending in a humane and ethical way."

That's why, 100 miles away, Chris LeBlanc is waking up so early.

Chapter Four: Butcher, Meet Cow

Every other Monday, Chris - the head butcher at Main Street Meats - wakes up before the sun, loads up the refrigerated box truck, pulls out of the parking lot with a mug of coffee, maybe a podcast, maybe silence, bound for Cherry Meat Co. in Chapel Hill, Tennessee.

He enjoys the changing scenery: curving river, mountains, exiting into small town Bell Buckle, the pastoral roads with their head-jerking conundrum: slow tractors 15-mph-ing down country lanes while the land around the sells for $50,000 an acre, sometimes more. 

Mid-morning, he arrives, backing the boxed truck into the Cherry Meat Co. loading dock. They're expecting him. His order's ready.

One whole cow.

Two whole hogs.

Each halved, then, quartered.

These are the Bear Creek cows and pigs processed at Cherry Meat Co. that Chris and his team will prepare for the Main Street Meats menu.

Pulling into Cherry Meat Co., there are handshakes and hugs.

"The relationships we build are the most important thing," Chris said.

Chris comes from what he calls “a stereotypical Texas family.” The son of oilmen and ranchers, he’s had a knife in his pocket for decades, with a DNA of toughness forged in Texas. (At 93, his grandmother still lives on the family's 500-acre cattle ranch and used to shoot stray armadillos from her window.)

Drawn to the restaurant industry, perpetually curious about food and food systems, he became a chef in Austin before moving to Chattanooga in 2015. 

Stereotypical Texans are big and blustery: Chris is the opposite, more like a haiku than bluster, not wanting the spotlight, content to work with precision and solitude. When he moved here, Erik Niel offered him two spots: Easy Bistro & Bar or Main Street Meats.

“I knew," he said. "Immediately."

As a chef, Chris could already break down many animals. Took him a day to learn how to process a hog. But cows? It took months of informal study - books, videos, trial, error - and Malcolm Gladwell-hours of practice.

So, driving to Cherry Meat Co., then onto Bear Creek Farm, the direct line of relationships becomes clear, his box truck tracing the path from farm-to-plate.

Bear Creek Farm.

To Cherry Meat Co.

To Main Street Meats.

After he loads up from Cherry Meat Co., Chris detours to Bear Creek Farm, where he tours the land with Bill and Alex.

Everyone is present: farmer, steer and butcher.

For the Cherry family, this afternoon with Chris is reassuring; all their work will be honored.

"When it's respected and appreciated," Alex said, "it makes it worth it. It is the culmination of all this hard work and respect for animals."

Chris drives his box truck back towards Main Street. He will look back on this trip as "one of the most meaningful days."

He unloads that night.

The next morning, the butchers get to work.

Chapter Five: The Definition of a Good Butcher

There are dozens of cuts of meat within every cow and hog.

But they're hidden.

Finding those cuts takes about two hours per carcass.

“There’s a Denver living inside of this guy here. The teres major? That lives right over here," Chris said, pointing with his knife towards the Black Angus carcass on the table.

Chris and his team spend the day unearthing a Noah's ark of meat: tri-tip, teres major, sirloin, ribeye, NY strip, flank steaks, chuck eye, chuck roast, short ribs, flat irons, brisket, ranch steak, ossobuco, oyster steak.

They're also cutting trim: parts of the cow reserved for ground beef, sliced and saved in trays below the cutting table.

While they work, Chef Niel walks in. We do a little math.  

Let's say a cow weighs 1000 pounds. Of that, 200 pounds are bones, 50 pounds are waste, 500 pounds are grind – the term used to describe cuts that become ground beef – leaving 250 pounds for prime cuts. 

Steaks. Ribs. Roasts.

Within every cow, there are only eight or so pounds of tenderloin, placing any butcher or restaurant owner in a financially perilous position:

“To get 40 tenderloins, you need 20 cows,” said Erik. “That’s 10,000 pounds of grind to go through."

"We utilize everything," Chris said.

It's the guiding principle, the North Star of Main Street Meats.

No waste.

"Whole animal butchery," said Chris.

The beef fat gets rendered to make tallow, also used in the kitchen's fryers. Bones become beef stock, then, reduced with red wine, become bordelaise.

Other cuts - like eye-of-round - are hung to dry, becoming bresaola. Hog fat is rendered into lard. Bones become pork stock, skins become pork rinds, trim becomes sausage and salami.

Pig heads are used for porchetta di testa. Jowls can become guanciale. Loins become lonzino, coppas become capicola.

Hog muscles become trays of charcuterie, a French term describing an ancient way of preserving meat preservation and using all parts of the animal.

Inside the walk-in cooler, rows of salami hang like chimes and ornaments, as the mold inoculates and covers like a soft white blanket.  

The work is scientific; when we visited, rib and short loins were dry-aging in the cooler for an exact 48 days, not 49. Grams of sea salt and sugars are measured with precision.

Precision is a form of respect.

This whole process? Creating this all within one restaurant, which also makes its own sandwich meats?

"Very rare," said Chris. "We try not to let anything go to waste. A good butcher is someone who does that."

“You’re learning how to do it and not lose your ass on 1,000 pounds of cow,” said Erik. “I find it fascinating, man.”

If people knew ...

When Erik and Amanda Niel opened Main Street Meats, they were criticized for a $9 hamburger, which now sells for $16.

Yet cheap burgers can reinforce a cheap system with potentially devastating  consequences: from recalls to antibiotic resistance to chemical run-off to animal and human abuse. 

This 1000-pound cow costs $5.15-per-pound before anyone even picks up a knife. Add in expenses and labor and $5.15 can quickly become $15.

Ten years ago - October 2014 - the Niels took over Main Street Meats from  original owner, Tom Montague, whose Link 41 opened next to Niedlov's Bakery & Cafe.

"Like a bakery, we need a butcher shop," Erik said. "Look at Niedlov's. This entire food ecosystem we've created in Chattanooga falls flat on its face without Niedlov's.

"I thought we could be as integral as that."

Chapter Six: You and Your Burger

It's Saturday night at Main Street Meats. Servers carry out plates of sausage and tallow fries and bartenders pour jalapeno margaritas and now it's Jack White on the stereo as folks pick up forks and knives, laugh and clink glasses.

It's loud and big-hearted and delicious.

A woman at the bar orders a burger. The couple in the corner orders charcuterie.

Pause here. Freeze frame this moment.

On each plate, you can touch a line of relationships stretching from Main Street to a 2,000-acre farm and do-you-hear-angels-processing plant south of Nashville, then all the way back to the Zen quiet of a butcher shop.

Look in the window.

Look at the people involved.

All their decisions, ethics and intelligence.

All their care, precision and respect.

If people knew ...

"Our job has always been to respect the ingredients and all the hard work that went into raising or growing them," Chris said. "In this case, we do it by utilizing everything."

Every so often, you find a window into this process.

And what do you see?

It's beautiful.

Story ideas, questions, feedback? Interested in partnering with us? Email: david@foodasaverb.com

This story is 100% human generated; no AI chatbot was used in the creation of this content.