Last year Royal Larocque was kind enough to let me visit the Royal Butcher in Randolph as a part of my farm-to-table project. After months of photographing vegetables, farm workers and cute farm animals, I thought it was time to include some of the messier aspects of food production in my story (I started with chicken slaughter to ease into the subject).
For most of us that eat meat, we tend to consume it while giving as little thought as possible to how meat gets to our plates. As you can imagine, it’s not pretty to slaughter and process cows, sheep and other animals, and I found myself witnessing a whole other aspect of food production that I’ve never seen before. Despite the mess and blood, the workers at the Royal Butcher were unfazed, professional, and went about their work with great focus and attention to detail.
A cow peeks through metal bars while waiting for processing at the Royal Butcher slaughterhouse (abettoir) in Randolph, Vermont.
A worker at the Royal Butcher processes a cow. After using a ‘percussion stunner’ on the animal, it is bled upside-down for several minutes. Here, the cow is being skinned; next it will be eviscerated and cleaned.
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