Butchers in 2070s Seattle, Do they still exist?! Options

[noonesshowmonkey]

A player of mine is runnin a street doc contact that he wants to have running a butchershop during the day and a chopshop for cyber samurai by night - pretty standard stuff...

Except for the question "do real butchers exist?"

Butchers were always a blue collar job in the urban environment but with the rise of nutrisoy based products isn't the role of a traditional butcher totally obsolete? If they still did exist they would be mucho cash operations that worked on the super expensive real meats... Right?

Where in Seattle would they be at? Bellevue? Would there be a 'classic' butcher still around anywhere else?

[Jaid]

i would be inclined to agree that if you're a butcher, you're probably providing a service to wealthy people only. as for whether or not it pays well, that's another question...

(there would, of course, be plenty of people who butcher most anything they can get their hands on in the barrens, but i also expect that most of those people are doing it for themselves)

[Chibu]

Yeah, probably for the wealthy who like to choose how they want their meat. Seattle has always had a very large cattle farm within its borders that everyone seems to ignore. Also, with the rise of tribal crap, people will probably hunt. Rich people will also want their Rhino or whatever they get when they go big game hunting cut up (sometimes).

[Adarael]

Sure, butchers exist. Rich people still wanna eat meat, right? And they want it cut so that it's tasty, yeah? And right now in Seattle, there's one very traditional butcher shop that charges through the nose for the authenticity of artisan meats (http://www.salumicuredmeats.com/ - 15 bucks a pound for salami! Usually it's 4-5 a pound) so I don't see why that would change in 2070. If anything, butchers may become even more exclusive, since only rich people can regularly afford real meat.

[noonesshowmonkey]

Thanks for the responses. I figured out what I needed to. The output:

Prime Cuts Charcouterie - Corner of 207th SE and 95th SE, Redmond Barrens

Prime Cuts is a fine meats delicatessan nestled on the border of the Redmond Barrens and Snohomish. Providing a full range of nutrisoy imitation all the way out to real sausages and cured meat, this small butcher shop turns a tidy profit in a niche market. Sourcing their meat from Snohomish livestockers and corp-farms and envirojunkie communes from the Plastic Jungle, quality and price vary considerably. Frank Brownbear, the owner, is a strange sight; a hulking human of mixed Salish-Shidhe and german ancestry and a man of considerable temper.

>What the signs and menus won't tell you is that one of the major sources of meat probably comes from Barrens rats.
> Flip

>Never ask to see how the sausage is made!
> Toodster

Frank moonlights as a Chopshop Streetdoc out of the back of his butcher shop.

Frank Blackbear
Human Male
Body 6
Agiliy 4
Reaction 3
Strength 5
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 5
Willpower 3

Active Skills: Cybertech 4, First Aid 4, Medicine 5, Negotiation 4, Perception 3
Knowledge Skills: Old World Meats 4, Butchery 4, Charcouterie 4, Salish-Shide Rituals 4

[Mirilion]

It's hard to imagine a traditional butcher's shop in 2070, as Adarael and Chibu remarked.
You can take it further to include restaurants that serve illegal meats (That thai movie about the young man going to australia to rescue his elephant) to rich and eccentric clientelle.
Paracritter steak ? If the rich are willing to pay, someone is there sharpening the knives. It can be made into a cult-for-rich-bored-people thing, where they meet in a fancy, classicaly decorated restaurant,
with brainwashed servants bringing dishes of... anything from basilisk to thunderbirds. Maybe even dragon-meat. The kitchen staff in that place might be powerful as some shadowrunners.

I wonder if the awakened taste better than the mundane....

[Jackstand]

I think Old World Meats is my new favorite knowledge skill.

[Ancient History]

I'm reminded of Wormwood, Gentleman Corpse where the worm in question went to a special butcher for some information, all it cost him was a cyclops testicle ("After all, it's not like you get two with each.") and of the Hellblazer graphic novel All His Engines where a priest of Mictlantecuhtli was working as a butcher in a slaughterhouse.

[AngelisStorm]

Seattle has always had a very large cattle farm within its borders that everyone seems to ignore. Also, with the rise of tribal crap, people will probably hunt.

Which cattle farm are you referencing, out of curiosity?

And "with the rise" of tribal stuff, people will hunt? People hunt now.

[Snow_Fox]

In our gamnes 'real' food is not so rare. That soy stuff all came in with cyberpunk but in a world where the population was devistated by VITAS food would not be a problem.

A butcher does not have to be in his own shop though. those are pretty rare in the US today, but a lot of them work in grocery stores. So we'd have the same thing, the guys who get the side of beef/pig/sheep and have to render it down to what cuts will sell. There's an asian market near my house that has a greta seafood section where the guys will reduce fish to pretty much what you need in a few minutes.That having been said, same things should be running around in Sr.

[Writer]

Read King Rat, by James Clavell. Set in World War Two, a US soldier sells rat meat as bird meat to US and British prisoners in a Japanese prison camp. In the barrens, you could have kids bringing in rats for the butcher. He uses small knives to filet the little buggers (rats, not kids). With enough, you can sell stir fry with rice.

On the darker side, there may be a few ghoul colonies that want their meat "prepared" by a professional, rather than BBQed off the bone.

[Ancient History]

Hey, there's a reason cats were known as "roof rabbits."

[Bob Lord of Evil]

In our gamnes 'real' food is not so rare. That soy stuff all came in with cyberpunk but in a world where the population was devistated by VITAS food would not be a problem.

I agree, you combine the decreased population and vertical greenhouses (as talked about on Future World) I can't see where food is going to be the sort of problem as portrayed in SR.

[Snow_Fox]

Read King Rat, by James Clavell. Set in World War Two, a US soldier sells rat meat as bird meat to US and British prisoners in a Japanese prison camp. In the barrens, you could have kids bringing in rats for the butcher. He uses small knives to filet the little buggers (rats, not kids). With enough, you can sell stir fry with rice.

.

Not just in camps like that. In RL WW2 after the US cut off the Japanese held Wake Island from almost all supplies the starving Japanese soldiers exterminated the rat population on the island.

[Jaid]

I agree, you combine the decreased population and vertical greenhouses (as talked about on Future World) I can't see where food is going to be the sort of problem as portrayed in SR.

substantial portions of the world's farms have been removed. south america, for example, no longer has many farms; the jungle has reclaimed that entire area. north america, likewise, has the various NAN countries, and not many farms there. much of the rest of the world has been polluted or made otherwise suitable for agriculture.

so yes, the world's regular food production has also been reduced.

also, it's not that more food couldn't be produced... in large part, it's due to the fact that soy, krill, etc can be produced more cheaply.

[tweak]

Sounds like you could borrow from the Sopranos with this one.

[FlakJacket]

Substantial portions of the world's farms have been removed. South America, for example, no longer has many farms; the jungle has reclaimed that entire area.

That might be true for most of Amazonia (created by the overthrow of the Brazilian government and annexations of Suriname and Guyana along with parts of Venezuela and Colombia) but other than that all the rest of the modern day countries are still there. Argentina has a large cattle industry in the Pampas being the second or third largest exporter in the world after Brazil and considering how strongly Argentinians feel about their meat I can't see them stopping, hell with Brazil out of the market and Australia having all that weird weather I could see them ramping up production. Uruguay also has a fairly large meat industry IIRC.

['Sconnie]

I agree, you combine the decreased population and vertical greenhouses (as talked about on Future World) I can't see where food is going to be the sort of problem as portrayed in SR.

Demand would be much lower in places like Tir Tairngire and Tir Na nOg, as I seem to recall reading in one of the SR4 books that most elves are either vegetarians of some sort or vegans.

[Chibu]

Which cattle farm are you referencing, out of curiosity?

And "with the rise" of tribal stuff, people will hunt? People hunt now.

First: Hunting. I know people hunt now. I went to college, for instance in West Virginia (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) What i meant was that, in a traditional cyberpunk setting, I can' t really imagine people hunting much (other than rats and such), as it doesn't really fit the setting. However, in SR, "with the rise of tribal stuff", the setting is therefore changed to include them and hunting therefore would again be natural. Basically, it was to note the difference between SR and 'Pure' Cyberpunk.

French W Ranch, Sonomish. It's run by some Troll who goes out of his way to only hire metahumans becuase of the anti-meta bias in Sonomish. This is, mind you, referenced in the original Seattle book. So, it might not have been talked about since then, I really don't know. The only reason I remmeber it is becuase I used it in a character background once. It doesn't actually mention how big it is, or how much they 'produce'. But, I if you can get a look at the map you can see that it's not tiny. Though, I don't have the book with me to try to give you an estimate. Though, it does (iirc) mention something about supplying fancy resturants or something.