Movers & Thinkers: A Nashville Butcher Asks Customers To Consider ‘The Real Price Of Food’

Ever since he was a kid, Chris Carter has been a meat guy.

“I would come home from school, and my grandmother would have five or six vegetable dishes going on the stove, and it was always my job to choose the protein,” he said.

So it’s no surprise that he grew up to become the co-owner of Porter Road Butcher, an East Nashville business that serves locally sourced meat.

Before becoming a butcher, Carter ran a catering company that focused on local ingredients — but noticed that meat was particularly difficult to come by.

“It’s very easy as a consumer, especially us in Nashville, to be able to drive outside the city — 15, 20 minutes and see these beautiful pastures full of roaming animals — and then go to a nearby grocery store and just assume that that Styrofoam tray that’s wrapped in plastic is, you know, coming from those beautiful farms,” Carter told WPLN’s Emily Siner in our podcast Movers & Thinkers. “Unfortunately, it’s not.”

More: Movers & Thinkers: The Butcher, The Vegan Baker, The Potions Maker

Chris and his business partner decided to create a solution. They opened a butcher shop with a mission is to make sure every part of the process is local and ethical.

They start by buying and slaughtering the whole animal, “wasting none of it,” Carter said. “Using the bones for stock. We even render our tallow and send it over to East Tennessee and get back this beautiful soap that we sell at the shop.”

But local meat can also be a luxury: A grocery store purchase may not feel as holistic, but it’s usually cheaper. So how does Carter convince customers to spend more on his products?

“I call it the real price of food,” he said. “They ask the question of, ‘Why is this so expensive?’ And I think that the question that you should really be asking is, ‘Why is what I’ve been buying so inexpensive, and … where’s that coming from? What is that process more like?’

“What we do and what we’re considering our movement now is decentralization of the meat industry, giving the life back to the farmer, regenerating the land by natural farming practices.”

It’s a passion that extends even beyond the food. And unlike as a child, Carter now can influence far more than a single dinner at a time.