María José Fuenteálamo, writer: «Before we laughed at the city children who went to school farms. Now no one knows where a steak comes from»

María José Fuenteálamo—her surname is a tribute to her town, in Albacete—did not want to be a butcher. And he did it. «My secret wish was for everyone to become a vegetarian so that my parents would stop being butchers. But I didn’t want to be a vegetarian,» recalls the current journalist and university professor, author of the brilliant The Butcher’s Daughter, recently published by the Círculo de Tiza publishing house. «I saw that my parents were doing something good, that the people loved them, that we were integrated. I understood that later. At that moment I hated it. And that contradiction is the strength of the book. It is a love letter to my father. And also to the sector.» However, the work of this writer, who defines herself as a «moderate of the flesh,» is much more than a settling of accounts with the past. For the little more than 200 pages of this dazzling text, which distills memory and winks to a yesterday that is gone, there is also a lot of cultural history, of trying to understand why meat consumption and the butcher’s trade have been vilified and treated with so little care. «The word ‘butcher’ has a negative meaning as an adjective. It is used to describe someone who is cruel. That made me think. Why have we loaded that word with symbolic violence?» Fuenteálamo asks himself, while taking a sip of coffee in a bar near the butcher shop where the photo shoot took place. Before, at the end of this, he does not hesitate to ask the butcher how business is going. The answer connects with everything that underlies his essay: “It works very well, but there is no replacement.” The family butcher shop in Fuenteálamo was opened by his great-grandfather in 1910 and his parents closed it in 2016. Antón and Águeda. The end of a lineage that the writer uses to establish various analogies with what it was like to grow up in a town grocery store, which had a slaughterhouse, a drying room, a sausage factory, and a garage where you could look at pigs, chickens, and rabbits face to face. «I accompanied my father to choose lambs, for example. I knew the ranchers, I played with their children, we shared meals on Sundays,» he explains of those bonds, human networks that were formed in the countryside.The author’s parents in their office. Image from the family archive. The building, the family house, which also served as a store, made of rustic red brick, serves Fuenteálamo to show how that place was a meeting space, with many overtones of a confessional. «My mother and her clients – many older today, some already deceased – maintained a relationship that went beyond the commercial. It was not about taking a tray and leaving. You chose the piece, you waited your turn, you talked. Life was made there,» she describes dynamics that are almost extinct. «Over time I have understood that those conversations – about couples, children, everyday problems – were authentic places of trust. My mother knew intimate details about her clients and they advised each other. When I say that it was a center for women in the town, I am not exaggerating or fictionalizing. It was real.» As for the ideas that I wanted to dismantle, above all there is that simplified and dehumanized vision of the sector. «A very widespread moral idea weighs on the butcher and the rancher: that killing an animal is, in itself, ethically reprehensible. My approach was to question this simplification. We have become a comfortable, distant society that has broken its direct relationship with what it eats and with what it is,» he says about the current moment in which we live, and which in the book is analyzed by delving into what previous authors such as Plutarco (About Eating Meat), Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating animals) or Vaclav Simil (Should we eat meat?). In addition to a lot of literature – there is talk of Annie Ernaux, Albert Camus, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Mann or Gustave Flaubert – that penetrates through beautiful writing, full of reflections and descriptions like this one that accompanies the first chapter: «To cut open a rabbit, like a lamb or a pig, is to breathe it and feel its heat. The life that has gone intersects with the life that remains through sight, hearing, touch and smell. The taste will come later. But First, the smell. The smell of the opened animal. The smell before gutting. The hot vapor that is released from the intestine, with death, is sweet and sticky. The butcher’s daughter not only looks back, she is also able to see the present with the eyes of a “cloth bag” urbanite. This is where the contradictions come most into play. That industry that replaced the family business today is the one that leads the way. «It seems heroic to me that the small butcher shop continues to exist. The macro farm has broken the man-animal relationship. In China there are pig skyscrapers. We are going there,» he points out some ways in which the industry is imposing itself. «Small farms are not profitable because regulations prevent it. Profitability is in industrial production. Specific policies have decided that. The politician criticizes something that his own regulations have promoted.» Question. What did you feel when the butcher shop closed? Answer. I thought it would be a happy day. He would no longer inherit the business. But I felt a pinch. A world was closing. A connection with animals. I understood that I had lived inside a real fable.P. Has our relationship with meat changed? A. Completely. Before we laughed at the city children who went to school farms. Now no one knows where a steak comes from. It is a discouragement. We don’t want to know. We eat without asking anything. And whoever wants to know must pay more. Before, the majority of society could eat better. Today only an elite can afford certain meats.P. He gives the example of restaurants.R. Yes. Restaurants with a waiting list where they explain what the animal ate, how it was sacrificed. I’ve been there and I thought: this was my father telling his clients 40 years ago. What was once everyday is now luxury.P. Can you eat meat without moral conflict? A. I don’t have it. Because I have lived it from within. I have seen absolute respect. In my house, throwing meat in the trash was prohibited. An animal has died for you. That generates awareness. I understand those who don’t eat meat. I respect it. But the message is oversimplified and sometimes unfairly falls on those who have cared for the animals. And the conversation ends. There is a small silence that allows us to reflect on how our relationship with meat consumption has changed in recent decades. Not a simple exchange, but here we are. And that, as the art historian María José Solano indicates in one of the prologues, remembering the words of Cervantes, Shakespeare and Homer: “The butcher is not only a merchant, but a guardian of an ancestral cycle: caring, sacrificing, feeding.”