Everything about this trend makes me nauseous.  To step back a little, a few months ago I read Julie Powell's book Julie & Julia.  One of the most harrowing sections involved dishes which required her to cut live lobsters in half and OMG ARE YOU SERIOUS yes she really did that.  I advise people to follow their squeamishness - if cutting a live animal in half makes you queasy, go with that instinct!  Just DON'T.

Instead, Julie Powell decided to push forward and make her entire next book all about butchery.  So gross!  Now there is an argument to be made that if people were more familiar with where their food came from, they would treat it with more respect.  As opposed to all the unidentified meat we consume every year, in the form of corn dogs, hot pockets, and other forms where it's difficult to believe an animal died to leave this weird pink thing on our plate.

However, Powell's book - and this apparent new trend of "butchering parties" - is just far too voyeuristic. The best I can say is, maybe it will inspire some people to become vegetarian!  Because seriously, that is just gross.

It's difficult to make the "respect the animal" argument when your butchery "class" is taking place at a singles bar, and people are doing shots.  That's' not respecting animals; that's using their corpses as a strange, transgressive form of performance art at best.  Entertainment value at worst.

Even one of the butchers involved in the butchery parties has qualms.  He makes the interesting point that "It's kind of sending a message like, animals are like strippers, or animals are like whores."  This is an interesting twist on the theory of male gaze, the connection being the objectification and commoditization of a living creature.

The industrial slaughter and meat packing industry certainly exemplifies our disrespect for animals.  But certainly "butcher parties" deserve that label as well.  When I read Michael Pollan's story about slaughtering and processing chickens at Joel Salatin's farm in The Omnivore's Dilemma, I felt his respect.  The process is carried out as humanely as possible at Salatin's farm, and the corpses are treated with respect.  I doubt Joel Salatin would allow anyone to whoop it up at Polyface Farm on chicken slaughtering day, doing shots of Jaeger and snapping pics with their iPhones.

Naturally all these butcher parties are being held in New York City.  Is there any city whose young hipster denizens yearn more longingly for "authenticity"?  For the real life, for real experiences?  Isn't that why they come to New York in the first place, to find gritty reality?  Of course the problem is that they carry their own insulating bubble with them - the bubble of youth and privilege, both cultural and economic.

The reason no one's having a butchery party in the Midwest or the rural south is that people there are already living the reality of slaughtering their own animals.  In this way, the butcher parties of New York are the worst kind of privileged tourism.  What next, "abortion parties"?  "Work parties," where skinny jeans-clad hipsters perform mock housekeeping services and manual labor?

Creative Commons-licensed image of savage asparagus butchery courtesy of Flickr user itsjustanalias