I'm not very passionate about anything in particular but Mr. Moore's message hit home with me.
I'm a recent high school graduate. I live in a town 45 minutes east of Toronto, fairly large but a town non the less. I worked in a butcher shop for 3 years during high school. I was a cashier, server, merchandiser, you name it. The name of the butcher is Alan's Butcher Shop. It's a single store location. The owner is ACTUALLY named Alan and he's there every single day. The manager's name is Jeff. He's Alan's son. They work side by side, day in and day out. The rest of the staff consisted of myself, Kathleen, maintaining the same position as myself, an older woman named Wilma who has worked day shift for about 5 years now, a cleaning guy turned apprentice butcher named Greg. We were all the 'long-timers'.
We knew eachother really well and the store felt like a family. You know almost everything about everyone, you joke around, you comfort eachother. It feels like home.
At the time when I began my job at this butcher shop, the store was booming. I was 15 and overwhelmed with the things I had to know, the things I had to do, all while serving about 10 customers in this tiny store.
Alan's is one of a kind. Pricey but the highest quality meat, and did we ever know it. This was drilled into our heads since day 1. We learned about gowth injections, hormone injections, feed, livestock, living environments and origin. Canadian beef is a much higher grade than US beef. Canada has strict regulations concerning meat production and distribution. As canadians, all the previous mentioned aspects of meat are not allowed. Only the injection of anti biotics when the animal is sick is allowed. And I regurgitated this information to customers on a daily basis, often quoting Alan: "There is no such word as organic. EVERYTHING is organic." And I considered this true for a while.
I came to become very familiar with this store. I liked going to work. I got to know every customer. I knew a hell of a lot more about meat than any of my friends, and I really came to appreciate the small business.
The longer I worked there, however, it seemed the shifts got longer and longer as less people entered the store. Saturday, during my first weeks at Alan's were non stop and I dreaded the pressure and responsibility I faced before work. Towards the end of my job there, I'd craved it.
Did you know Walmart has a grocery section now. You can essentially buy all of your grocery, clothing, electronic, office needs, you name it, in one convenient place. The kicker with this is, however, what your buying is a piece of the company. A piece of their moral fibre, which, in fact, they lack completely. Everything within that store is a reflection of them. And Walmart brings to mind 2 words: Bottom Line.
The beef in Walmart is shipped from the states. Shipped from the unregulated, profit sucking companies paying farmers to exploit their resources.When I say this, I want you to think of the companies that made your stomach turn like Monsanto.
The butcher shop now, in my opinion, can not be sustained much longer by the few regulars that shop there. The numbers are dwindling and before I left Alan's, there was always a tension in the air that tasted like something lost. The, what felt like inevitable, loss of the small business, the family business, the loss of quality, the loss of an ideal that corporations eat for breakfast.
Corporations are not organic.
If nothing else, Alan's Butcher Shop taught me about the value of human contact and the value of passion for something other than a dollar. The passion for regular customers that become your friends, the passion for quality and the passion for a good steak every saturday night.
Maybe one day, this idea will permeate through the walls of these corpoations and we can show the next generation that the value of life can not be determined by a dollar amount, but by how much we can gain by distinguishing ourselves as something else other than a consumer, by instead being a friend to your friendly, nieghbourhood butcher.