When an Anthropology Master’s Goes to Sell Meat at a Slaughterhouse
“Complaints and errors flood in every early morning. But I choose to switch off my phone and sleep: they are never serious enough to make a customer walk away from us, or to push the slaughterhouse to the brink of bankruptcy. They simply reappear at their appointed hour each day, keeping our days turning as they always have.”
On paper, this slaughterhouse is remarkably modern: it covers more than a hundred mu with an investment exceeding a hundred million yuan, featuring cattle, sheep and live poultry trading areas, an inspection and quarantine area, and a production facility that integrates slaughter, chilling and ageing, carcass breaking, and cold storage and refrigeration under one roof.
But the moment I stepped out of the car on my first visit, a pungent reek of cow dung yanked me out of the world I had imagined. The slaughterhouse may boast industry-leading production lines, yet in practice I quickly discovered that it clearly lacked the team and management capacity to handle large-scale production and sales. And because our customers were scattered across far-flung locations, logistics were dogged by small, nagging problems.
Sometimes I marvelled at how inefficient my aunt’s working style seemed — a problem that could so obviously be sorted online, yet she insisted on driving hundreds of kilometres to deal with it in person, burning an entire day on the road. Yet I was just as often blindsided by the scheming and backstabbing woven through everyday relationships, forced to concede, somewhat helpless, that my aunt had long since honed a capacity for improvisation beyond anything I could have imagined.
In our shared vocabulary there are plenty of words that capture this capacity from different angles — calculating, shrewd, conniving, sly — and each time I take a different view of them, I am really looking at myself: nineteen years of systematised education shattered against the raw, living texture of daily life.
I. Getting to Know a Cow
To start with, I needed to learn which cuts a cow is broken down into. A live cow, once skinned and stripped of its head and tail, four legs and entrails, is first split down the middle to produce a standard split carcass. The bones are then removed to divide the meat into seven major sections: hindquarter (rump and leg), loin, flank, brisket, rib, shoulder and neck, and foreleg. Each of these seven can be further subdivided — the hindquarter, for instance, breaks down into the knuckle, silverside, shank, and so on. The sirloin and fillet steaks you find in most Western restaurants are, in our terms, the back sirloin (the beef back muscle) and the tenderloin.
Fresh beef sales at the plant fall into two broad categories: bulk orders and retail of individual cuts. The minimum size for a bulk order is half a cow, at an average price of ¥24 per jin (500 g). Individual cuts are priced separately by the specific cut, with prices varying widely — brisket at ¥24 per jin, for example, back sirloin at ¥37.
Shank meat — particularly the cross-cut centre shank — is generally the most expensive cut; consumers usually buy it to make braised beef shank. Back sirloin and tenderloin come next in price and are typically pan-fried, used for hotpot, or grilled. The bull’s penis, meanwhile, is the rarest delicacy of all: each bull provides only one. According to some of the independent butchers, their customers usually need to place orders several days in advance just to be sure of getting one.
My aunt’s slaughterhouse primarily supplies local supermarkets and independent butchers, and occasionally enters public tenders to win catering contracts with government departments or schools. These customers all share one trait — high volume, and orders that are comparatively straightforward to process.
Even so, production problems are a daily occurrence, no matter how large the accounts. Each cow yields a fixed amount of back sirloin: just two strips per animal — not much, and the price is steep. If only ten cows are slaughtered on a given evening and eight of them are already committed to bulk orders, that leaves just four strips of back sirloin from two cows available for individual sale.
Now suppose three customers each want to add two strips of back sirloin that evening. By arithmetic, one request is bound to go unmet. So — who gets the short end?
II. Sought-After Back Sirloin, Hard-to-Please Customers
As it turned out, our very first transaction nearly cost me his order. That day, he asked me to place an order for a whole cow with an extra strip of back sirloin on the side. I was thrilled — it was the first order I had ever handled. The moment his message came through, I relayed it to the production floor. It was already past ten at night when I decided to drive to the workshop myself to oversee his meat being prepared, weighed, and dispatched. But just as I was driving there, I got word from the floor: there was no back sirloin left that evening. Before I had even pulled up to the building, my phone rang. It was Boss Wang, furious. “You’re telling me now there’s no back sirloin? What am I supposed to hand my customers tomorrow?”
I was brimming with grievances of my own. Once the production floor received an order, it allocated meat according to the sequence in which orders arrived; Boss Wang’s order had probably sat further down the queue, and by the time it came to his turn, the back sirloin supply had run dry. I explained as much, but Boss Wang was still livid. He said flatly that he didn’t want the whole cow either — he’d just source it from another plant. Panicking, I stammered through telling the floor supervisor what had happened. To my surprise, the supervisor shrugged it off and even comforted me: “Don’t worry about it. If he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t want it. He’s hardly a valuable customer anyway. Doesn’t he know how hard back sirloin is to match out?” I had no idea what “valuable customer” meant. The supervisor’s words made no sense to me — I simply felt that you shouldn’t treat customers differently based on the size of their order.
In the end, Boss Wang did place the order that night. After he hung up on me, I sent him a WeChat message, carefully laid out the reasons, and apologised sincerely. Before long he called back and said he’d still order a whole cow — after all, it was our first time working together, and he didn’t want to make things difficult for me. As for the back sirloin, he’d find someone else to source it.
The slaughterhouse typically began slaughtering cattle around eight or nine in the evening, continuing until one in the morning. The earlier a customer placed their order, the more certain they could be that their requests would be met. Customers understood this principle perfectly well — reality simply didn’t allow it. A butcher like Boss Wang was often the supplier for dozens of local restaurants. The restaurant owners might not tell him what cuts they needed until eight or nine at night, and only then would he come to us. The timeline was pushed back again and again, and friction in the work grew ever larger. After all, the slaughterhouse would never slaughter an extra cow just to match out one strip of back sirloin for a customer.
When conflicts arose, sometimes it was the customer who relented — as with Boss Wang, who went to other suppliers to find his extra back sirloin. Other times, the pressure was kicked back onto the slaughterhouse staff. One evening, Boss Wang placed an order well ahead of schedule, adding an extra strip of back sirloin. I relayed it straight away to the order coordinator. But come the evening, the coordinator told me there would be no back sirloin for Boss Wang tonight. My stomach dropped — according to the order sequence in the WeChat group, there was no way Boss Wang should have missed out. I rushed to the production floor and learned that another salesperson’s customer had taken the entire surplus of back sirloin for the night. Why was the sequence not being followed this time? I argued my case, but to no avail. All I could do was phone my aunt to complain. A little while later, that other salesperson came over and said, “Ah, fine, have a strip, have a strip,” as though doing me a favour. I was utterly bewildered. A bit later still, my aunt sent me a message telling me not to be so uptight — the job was exhausting, yes, but you had to learn to be flexible.
The rule of allocating by order sequence was theirs — they set it, they demanded it be followed. How, when it really mattered, did following it become my being “uptight”? Why only the demands of big customers counted, while small customers’ requests could be brushed aside with a laugh? This nagged at me for a long time, until a sales crisis one evening finally revealed what “valuable customer” really meant to them: the slaughterhouse had about twenty surplus strips of back sirloin at closing time, and we needed buyers fast. The general manager messaged the group urging everyone to find customers immediately. I canvassed the retail butchers, but none dared take an extra strip on the spot, fearing they’d be stuck with it if it didn’t sell. My aunt made a few phone calls and shifted most of the stock — largely to customers whose back sirloin demand was already high. They had vast customer bases and high daily volumes; an extra few strips of back sirloin would be absorbed without trouble.
Different customers had different capacities to absorb risk. Only then did I grasp what “don’t be so uptight” really meant: don’t be so rigid that you tear the relationship apart; leave a little room, and both buyer and seller can meet again tomorrow without bitterness. After that, whenever a customer placed an order for individual cuts, I never dared commit on the spot. I always confirmed with the production floor first, and only then gave my word.
III. Before Bed, I Switch Off My Phone
Take Boss Wang, for instance. His butcher shop prides itself on being self-raised and self-slaughtered — fresh, never water-injected. He told me several times, quite proudly, that many customers came to him specifically because of that. So when we first started doing business, he said he’d meet me at the motorway junction around four in the morning to take delivery — he didn’t want his competitors to know that, alongside his own slaughter, he also sourced from a slaughterhouse. The county town wasn’t large, and he feared a competitor might pass the word on to local customers.
This tension runs through the entire fresh-meat trade. Consumers gravitate towards butchers like Boss Wang, yet private, small-scale slaughter is hard to regulate. If the owner has no scruples, water-injected or drug-injected beef is a recurring food-safety problem. In 2021, Sichuan Province revised its Regulations on the Administration of Pig Slaughter, stipulating that the slaughtering of cattle and sheep must follow the same rules. The revised regulations call for centralised, designated slaughter facilities, mandate inspection and quarantine certificates, prohibit any entity or individual from slaughtering cattle outside designated facilities for sale, and target in particular unlicensed slaughter. Animals that farmers slaughter on their own — whether pigs, cattle or sheep — may be consumed only by the family; they are not permitted to enter the market.
So Boss Wang was left with no choice but to keep up the self-raised, self-slaughtered sign while quietly taking delivery from us. Market supervision is not enforced rigorously every day, which left him a certain margin of manoeuvre. Sometimes his household would slaughter two cows on its own but come up short on particular cuts, and he would place an order with us; other times he simply found the prospect of slaughtering on his own too tiring and wanted a breather, so he came to us too. The slaughterhouse issued an inspection and quarantine certificate with every order, and with the certificates he collected on each delivery, he had more than enough to satisfy market inspectors — even if the dates didn’t quite line up, the gap was never more than a day or two.
The problem, though, was that nearly ten customers in County Z were taking delivery from us simultaneously. By the time we had loaded the truck and were ready to set off, it was already past three in the morning, and we would not reach County Z until close to five. Boss Wang wanted his delivery at the motorway junction by four; another shop owner required the goods at his store before five; one was at East Gate Market, the other at West Gate Market… and after each customer received their load, unloading, checking the scales, and signing off took another ten minutes or so. These fiddly, overlapping demands were, in practice, impossible to reconcile.
The headache was about to begin again. At four in the morning, the delivery truck would be on the road, and I would have just got home, washed up, and crawled into bed. Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep, because I knew that before long the messages would start pouring in. Around five, give or take, the WeChat pings or the phone’s ringtone would start.
“It’s nearly five o’clock and the delivery still hasn’t arrived — it’s enough to drive you out of your mind!”
“I asked for two extra strips of back sirloin — how come there’s only one? How am I supposed to explain this to my customers today!”
“I said the whole cow should be around 350 jin, and you’ve hauled me over 400. How am I meant to sell all this in this heat? You lot just throw things together day after day, honestly.”
At first, I replied to every message promptly, calming the customer down before immediately relaying the issue to the production floor. But after making that kind of deal enough times, I learned to switch off my phone before bed, leaving just an alarm for eight. After sleeping enough — barely — I would face, still bleary-eyed, a batch of dozens of messages and missed calls all at once.
It wasn’t that I was irresponsible. I simply found that, for the customer, for the production floor, and for me, these issues were merely run-of-the-mill nuisances — never serious enough to make a customer walk away from us, or to push the slaughterhouse to the brink of bankruptcy. They simply reappeared at their appointed hour each day, keeping our days turning as they always have. This daily rhythm wore away the severity of the problems and dulled our senses.
IV. Out of the Slaughterhouse, Still Eating Meat
Before I came to intern at the slaughterhouse, I was a recently graduated master’s student in anthropology. In an experience not unlike Timothy’s, I came away with much the same feeling.
Standing each day in the cleaned slaughterhouse, you would not see a single trace of bloodshed. But smell doesn’t lie — the reek of mingled blood and excrement pervades every corner of the space. Sometimes, meeting the workers during the day, you can tell they carry a heavy odour about them. Timothy’s book explains a similar detail: the workers assigned to cutting tripe are sprayed with the contents of the tripe, and even after a shower the stench clings. It also reminded me of the “class smell” in the South Korean film Parasite.
As for me, every night, by the time I got home from the late shift, the clothes I changed out of reeked of blood. In the workshop I was oblivious — I had become one with the smell. But back home, after showering, the moment I picked up my laundry and the odour hit me again, more than once I nearly retched.
Without this opportunity that came through a relative’s invitation, I, like most people, might never have set foot in the slaughter trade in my entire life. This regular, rhythmic, vast industrialised killing is hidden from most people’s line of sight. So when my aunt invited me, I was thrilled — it seemed a rare chance to get to know an industry that touches almost everyone’s life yet remains invisible to the public.
Yet actually being inside that industry, genuinely taking part and learning how each stage functions, is exhausting. The work schedule, which inverts day and night, has left dark circles under my eyes that still have not faded. The first time I witnessed a cow being slaughtered, it was the silent heifer who drew a single, taut thread of dread through my chest. She faced her end with eerie calm — could she have been the Chosen Cow, the one who would snap her chains and charge, goring every person in the room? Later, when I gave customers tours of the production floor, all I wanted was to rush through the introduction: here is the hanging slaughter area, there is the ageing room, every animal is slaughtered alive, no water or drug injection — and then I could go home and sleep. I was so exhausted that apart from that heifer, I cannot recall the face of any other cow that was killed.
By then, I had gone numb, just like the workers in Timothy’s account. I never even touched a knife — the inverted hours alone were enough to wear me down. And every other stage of the trade is no easier: raising cattle, slaughtering them, breaking down carcasses, selling the meat — all work my peers around me would never take on. I remember once, over a meal with Boss Wang, it came up that I was a graduate. He looked at me in utter bewilderment. “A master’s degree — and you come here to sell meat? What are you thinking?” I said a relative had brought me in. He nodded thoughtfully. “So you’ve got someone to show you the ropes? Well, that’s alright. Work hard — this trade pays well.” I thought to myself: once I’ve seen enough, I’m out. Not for a fortune would I stay.
I wanted to leave not out of conscience, but out of exhaustion — and a desire to get away from all the killing. When “progress” depends on concealing violence rather than eliminating it, morality is nothing but an illusion of collective complicity. For instance, I assumed that after witnessing a cow being slaughtered, I would become a staunch vegetarian. Yet the more I saw, the more buying fresh, good-quality meat straight from the slaughterhouse became my go-to gift — after all, it was far cheaper than buying elsewhere, and I could personally vouch for the beef. I could even tell good meat from poor when eating out, and would occasionally griping to the restaurant staff: “This is definitely not fresh-cut beef — it doesn’t even curl up when it hits the pot.”
Editor: Auntie Xiong