When Brandon Sheard brings his knife across the throat of a sheep, his movements are swift and precise.  The sheep, lying calmly on her side in the pasture on which she has lived her whole life, gently closes her eyes.  Brandon rests his hand on her throat and offers a prayer of gratitude to affirm the sacrifice of her life.

Brandon and his wife Lauren are the proprietors of Farmstead Meatsmith, a small business on Vashon Island, WA, that provides the services of slaughter, butchery, and charcuterie to small farmers in the Puget Sound region, as well as classes in slaughter and butchery.

Operations like Farmstead Meatsmith are unusual in today’s highly concentrated system of industrial animal processing. For example, only four corporations process 84% of the beef raised in the United States. Smithfield Foods alone slaughters 100,000 pigs every day (Brandon slaughters three on a busy day). The effects of this concentration are widespread and result in the mistreatment of the animals, workers, farmers, the land, and the consumers.

While working for a small farm on Vashon three years ago, Brandon had a vision for an alternative approach that could serve the interests of all of the parties involved. Today, the business processes animals in small quantities, on the farms where they are reared, for the farmers’ use. It’s a seldom utilized model that involves traveling around the Puget Sound region with a mobile unit, outfitted to process a range of livestock and poultry.

The implementation of this seemingly simple model is actually deceptively complex, due primarily to the suite of regulations upheld by the state and US  Department of Agriculture (USDA).  In order to sell meat that one has processed, not only does that have to be carried out in certifiable facilities, which are extraordinarily expensive to outfit, but there must be a USDA-trained inspector on site for every slaughter and every animal that you process must be chemically evaluated for dangerous pathogens. (These are regulations primarily geared toward multimillion dollar, high-volume facilities owned and operated by multinational corporations).

In an effort to balance the idealism of their vision and the reality of regulation, Farmstead Meatsmith provides services rather than products. In other words, they do not (and cannot) sell meat. They exclusively slaughter and butcher, and as such there are fewer (though lamentably not nonexistent) regulations. Instead, the model they have found feasible to employ is to travel around the region with a mobile unit, outfitted to process a range of livestock and poultry.

There are significant benefits to the mobility of slaughter services; it alleviates the farmers of the need to truck their animals to larger facilities, gives them more control over how their animals are processed, and allows for virtually immediate delivery of their products. Furthermore, traveling to each farm allows Brandon and Lauren to get to know the farmers for whom they work, and forge relationships, not just invoices. After all, strong communities are integral to shifting our current industrialized agricultural system towards a more localized model.

As one of the few businesses to employ the traveling processing model on their scale, Farmstead Meatsmith is actively reviving knowledge, in the form of traditional slaughter practices. They see it as part of their mission to share this nearly forgotten skill set to any and everyone who has the desire to learn.

That’s why they’re campaigning on Kickstarter to fund a web-based series of instructional butchery and cookery films. Each episode will focus on a traditional process or finished product—from curing (bacon, prosciutto and guanciale) to making blood sausage and head cheese—and will include explicit instructions in addition to history, anecdote and illustration to fully illuminate the rich stories of each process.

According to cable TV, being a chef is pretty much the most badass profession out there. Not only are the physical trappings evidence of badassery – neck tattoos, devil-may-care hairdos – but there’s also lots of yelling, throwing stuff around, and general tough non-conformism. In the midst of the hard stares and big attitudes of the bad boy chefs, we’ve lost track of the true hardcore food professions – real culinary badasses.

I remember visiting a sheep farmer in Sardinia years ago. He built a fire from some sticks he gathered, milked his sheep and then made cheese in a giant cauldron. For lunch he grilled sausages in a pit and drank wild blueberry wine. He was maybe 5 feet tall. His front lawn had a clothesline of bloody dripping sheep skins that he had skinned himself that morning. He killed snakes with his knife. He made his own rennet. He had no tattoos. This shepherd – I’ve forgotten his name – remains pretty much my Badass Gold Standard.

The constraints I’ve put on this series are to focus – for now – on America. I’m also going to avoid profiling professions that become monstrously badass-ish simply because of unhealthy and dehumanizing  scale of the industrial food system (i.e. meat processing plant worker, King’s Valley strawberry picker). Crucial characteristics of a culinary badass:

• Wisdom and skill
• Toughness/stoicism
• Regular exposure to extreme physical and climactic conditions
• Regular contact with spines/teeth/poison, etc.

So – move out of the way you tattooed chefs – let’s raise our glasses to some true Culinary Badasses.

Gator Rancher

Clearly, no-brainer badassery. Key criteria: (1) Alligators!, (2) alligators!!, (3) alligators!!! Unfortunately, not much information is available about the details of these farms, but there are dozens of them in Louisiana and Florida. Over a million are raised every year in Louisiana for their meat, each gator weighs between 400 and 600 pounds. Usually the tail is harvested for meat, while the skin is sold for shoes and clothes.

Nopales Harvester

Key Badass Criteria: (1) Long thick Spines, (2) short fine spines. Although there is apparently now a tool that minimizes contact with their thorns, Nopales are prickly little beasts to harvest. Made more badass by the dense way these paddles grow, the heat of the places they grow in, and the scary possibility that during harvest one of those paddles is likely to fall on your head.

King-crab Fisherman

Key Badass criteria: (1) cold weather, (2) isolation, (3) potential for death, (4) claws, (5) waves, (6) knot-tying amidst factors (1) through (5). Alaska crab fishing is one of the most dangerous jobs in North America – the fatality rate is 90 times that of the average US worker. It involves 6+ days at sea at a time rocking around in small boats in huge icy waves. Just about 100 boats still fish for Snow and King crab in Alaska, check out the good times here.

Competitive Pumpkin Cultivator

Pumpkin farming would not usually fit into the badass criteria. But, the recent epidemic of oversize pumpkin explosions and the subsequent potential for splatter elevate this profession into the zone. Competitive pumpkin growers feed their beasts liquid seaweed, protein shakes, and more, but occasionally overdo it, with disastrous consequences. Read more about it here.

Custom Slaughterers

Key Badass Criteria: (1) Firearm skill; (2) USDA circumvention. One exemplar of this category, John Taylor of JT’s Custom Slaughtering in Sebastopol, was most recently described to me with awe by a local winemaker as casually – and perfectly – shooting a steer from about 60 feet away. He and other local harvesters around the US have withstood the past decades of consolidation in the meat industry, practicing humane on-farm slaughter for farmers and direct buyers.

Have any nominees for badass food jobs? More to come.

Photos: Oksaysj, Mexicanwave