Nature’s joints
January 2nd, 2008 by David Weinberger
Bill Buford, writing in the New Yorker (Dec. 3, 2007), notes that the American versions of two books about meat don’t contain the same diagrams of cut-up animals:
What none of these writers acknowledges is probably something that all of them discovered right before their books were published: that there is no universal, accepted practice for cutting up an animal, that it has always been nationally and sometimes regionally determined, and that there is not, therefore, a universal set of butcher’s terms that can be translated from one language to another. Maybe, in this respect, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s instructions for butchering a piece of lamb are the most sensible after all: the only way you’ll learn is by hacking into it, and so you may as well brave the mess.
So much for Socrates’ admonition to carve nature at its joints…
