Playing with knives
Photo Credit: Chelsea Foster
Culinary arts teacher Dana Kinney first discovered butchery at a teachers' conference.
April 17, 2010 • Colleen Suratt, Staff writer
Filed under Features
As she was growing up, culinary arts teacher Dana Kinney wanted to be a vet, a pediatrician, even an actress. As she got older, she eventually discovered she wanted to be a teacher. However, Kinney still has one career aspiration sitting on the back burner — she wants to be a butcher.
The stereotypical butcher is a big, strong, burly man. Kinney falls far from that stereotype. A slender, woman in her 20s clad in designer jeans, she’s not what anyone would expect to see behind the butcher’s counter.
Kinney first discovered that she wanted to be a butcher at a teacher’s workshop in late January of 2009. “With teaching culinary arts, we have gone to several workshops and two of them have been on butchery,” Kinney said. “At the first one, there was a Jamaican man who was a butcher. He had a cow strung up from the ceiling and it was cut down from the middle long ways so we saw all of its insides. It had been skinned. He broke it down right in front of us. I was just fascinated.”
Of the 12 women there, Kinney was the only one to be so intrigued. “It’s 8:30 in the morning and all the other ladies are green. But I just could not sit close enough. I thought it was the coolest thing,” Kinney said. “They were all wondering why this little girl kept volunteering. They were like ‘Why does Dana want to get up there every chance she gets?’ If nobody would volunteer they would just look at me, and I would say ‘You know I will [volunteer]!’ You didn’t have to ask me twice,” Kinney said. “I kept thinking to myself, ‘This is great! This needs to be what I do!’”
Kinney says her fascination of butchery stems from her love of food. Since she was young, cooking has been a part of her life. “My mom was not a stay at home mom. She didn’t cook for us. She was a single mom and she had three kids so while she was out working, we were making dinner for ourselves,” Kinney said. “Unless I wanted macaroni and cheese and fish sticks every night, I had to figure out what I could make without burning the house down. Also, I’m a very picky eater, so if I wanted food that I liked I was going to have to make it myself.”
Kinney also likes butchery because it is one of the culinary arts. She says that it is as artistic as the other branches in the culinary field. “Now, the meat industry is a lot less sloppy, we’re not barbaric. There’s all this etiquette. When I watched the man break the cow down, I saw that there’s a technique to it. Each cut is different – it is very much an art. Maybe that’s why I thought it was so great, because it was so methodical.”
After high school, Kinney wanted to attend culinary school. However, it was too expensive, so she attended the University of Georgia on a Hope Scholarship instead. There, she studied nutrition and then later took courses in culinary arts. After experimenting with a few other jobs like life guarding, working in a science lab and interning for a congressman in Washington, DC, Kinney found her niche as a culinary arts teacher. “I was never a waitress because I don’t have the patience for stupid people and that’s just not a fun job for me; you don’t make enough money for the work you do. That’s not saying teachers do, but I actually get to enjoy this.”
However, Kinney has no immediate plans for becoming a butcher. “I want to stay at Decatur for a while so the [culinary arts] program can really pick up.” Once the new tech-ed facility is built, if there is enough interest, culinary arts will consist of three levels: Intro, I, and II. Kinney says she may implement some butchery into the third level of Culinary Arts. “It’s not really going to be more intense than what you could do at home, but students will learn the basics; they’ll learn how to distinguish the different parts of the meat.”
Kinney says one day she may try to snag her own cooking show. “In their spare time, my brother and his girlfriend are trying to find get-rich-quick things. Right now they’re trying to get me a spot on the Food Network,” Kinney said. “There aren’t any shows on butchery yet. There’s Bobby Flay, of course, but he does more cooking on the grill. I could be a female butcher. The Food Network needs one of those.”
Unfortunately, butchery requires professional training, which Kinney hasn’t had yet. “You don’t start off with a knife in your hand,” Jeff Malcolm, of Buckhead Beef, said. “If someone is untrained, and we’re looking to cut an 8 ounces piece of steak, but they cut a 10 oz piece, then we lose on our yields. The yields is what all this is all about, being able to sell the most meat, and getting the most money.” According to Malcolm, you must be trained to prevent this error.
To improve her skills, Kinney hopes to continue going to workshops and maybe even doing a summer internship. “The guy who ran the butchery workshop at the teacher conference said that they couldn’t do paid internships right now,” Kinney said. “But even an unpaid one would be fine with me. I’m a teacher, I don’t need the work. I just want the experience.”
Until then, Kinney tries to get her hands on as much meat to practice with as possible. “I try to do the butchery thing on a small scale. I can break down a chicken or filet a fish easily, but I don’t think I’m ready to do an entire big animal on my own. It’s extremely messy.”
Kinney says she gets her butchery fix when she goes to the grocery store. “The ladies in the meat department at the Publix I go to love me. I’m always there, I always ask questions. They’ve told me that when I come in I can come behind the counter and watch. My plan is to get the experience there with professionals, instead of buying the equipment myself and dirtying up my house. I think it would be a lot easier.”
In addition to the mess, butchering is a very strenuous activity. “At the workshop when the guy had the huge cow, he had to cut it with a chainsaw. It looked exhausting,” Kinney said. “He was a big man and he was sweating. I don’t think I’m quite ready for that. I’d have to start small.”
Aside from the physical aspect, Kinney says there are few other obstacles to get past. “I can easily get over the grossness … The blood and stuff doesn’t bother me at all,” Kinney says she isn’t bothered by the smell, either. “If anything ever smells, you don’t want to eat it. If chicken or beef smells, that means it’s gone bad.”
The look of the dead animal doesn’t turn her away from eating the meat, either. “I’m a big meat eater. I always have been. My mom read a book a few years ago called “Skinny Bitch” and decided that meat was bad and that butchering was mean. And I said, ‘Whatever you want to do, that’s your thing,’ and she’s stuck to it. But I could never do that. I love meat. I love chicken, I love pork, I love it all. I could never stop [eating it],” Kinney said.
“After the workshop, I went home and told my mom what I wanted to do when I stopped teaching. I told her I wanted to be a butcher. She just thought it was weird,” Kinney said.
The number of women in the butchering industry is increasing. What used to be considered a man’s job is beginning to change. According to Malcolm of Buckhead Beef, at least 30% of butchers are now women. So the next time you walk into a butchery, don’t be too surprised if you happen to see a lady behind the counter. Maybe it’ll even be Kinney with her Seven For All Mankind jeans splattered with blood.
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