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Eating In, a series examining food and food culture in New Hampshire, ran May 17-21, 2010.

Roving Butchers: An Edible Minute

Maybe it’s all the knives, or the blood. But there’s something a little eerie about a slaughterhouse on wheels.

If you raise chickens, or lamb, or hunt deer for food, you might need the service of a good roving butcher. Like Ray Garcia of Cabin View Farms in Littleton. Solo, he can process about 200 chickens a day in a home built rolling abattoir:

It’s a Wells Fargo Trailer. We have stainless steel tables, stainless steel sinks. If it wasn’t for a lot of the custom facilities throughout New Hampshire, a lot of people wouldn’t be raising things.

While building his own mobile butchery was Ray’s first step toward keeping things clean and safe, Ray wanted more assurance. So he went to the USDA:

When I brought my idea of a portable unit to the USDA the gentleman actually laughed for about 15 minutes...

Today, the USDA might actually want to promote this sort of operation, but for the time being, Ray’s a free range butcher for free range chickens.

Sean Hurley lives in Thornton with his wife Lois and his son Sam. An award-winning playwright and radio journalist, his fictional “Atoms, Motion & the Void” podcast has aired nationally on NPR and Sirius & XM Satellite radio. When he isn't writing stories or performing on stage, he likes to run in the White Mountains. He can be reached at shurley@nhpr.org.
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