Follow Chicago's Hog Butcher Past With Chicago Detours

By Chuck Sudo in Food on May 16, 2013 6:20PM

Meatpacking is a major part of Chicago’s history, from Carl Sandburg’s exhortation of the city being the “hog butcher for the world” in his famous 1916 poem, Upton Sinclair pulling back the veil behind the Chicago Stockyards in The Jungle to the still-brewing mess at Bubbly Creek. Newer butchers like Rob Levitt’s The Butcher and Larder and Paul Kahan’s Publican Quality Meats have taken a sustainable approach to butchery while the shops along Fulton market and Randolph Streets that preceded them still do good business.

Chicago Detours founder and executive director Amanda Scotese used the city’s history of meat to put together a tour of Chicago’s butchering past and present June 1 from 1:30 p.m. until 4:30 p.m. Scotese is calling “From Cuts to Cult: Chicago Meat Past to Present” a “one-time-only food history tour around the Fulton Market Meatpacking District.” It's the second in Chicago Detours' quarterly "Detour" series.

Here’s what the tour entails:

- A visit to Grant Park Packing, where owner Joe Maffei will lead a butchering demonstration.
- A walking tour of the Fulton Market with insights provided by Scotese and Saveur magazine editor David McAninch.
- A stop at Northwestern Cutlery (where everyone serious about their kitchen knives gets theirs sharpened).
- A visit to Publican Quality Meats, including a guided tour of their meat cellar.
Meat tastings at Grange Hall featuring Bill Kurtis’s Tallgrass Beef.

Both McAninch and Scotese have the food writer credentials to make this an interesting tour and the deeper look past the polished gleam of Fulton Market will make tickets to this a hot commodity when they go on sale 10 a.m. May 17. Tickets are limited to 20 people and cost $125, but Chicago Detours will put folks still interested in the tour on a waiting list.