Eating meat is, perhaps, in our bones. Scientists recently discovered that as early as 3.4 million years ago, human ancestors may have used heavy stones to butcher animals, consuming meat at least 800,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to the journal Nature.

And the cravings continue. Despite lean times, a gluttony for sustainable beef abounds. Perhaps it’s because of an obsession with control in an increasingly globalized world, or an idealization of a primal past (add some E. coli scares and mad-cow disease). But suddenly, meat is following the path of the vegetable: local, and obsessed over.

Boutique meats - quality meat from small producers and regional fields ? are entering the mainstream. As the public has grown more aware of how industrial meat is produced, there’s a demand for meat from farmers who do not send their animals to large processors. And never before has so much specialized meat been as widely available in stores and farmer’s markets, wrote The Times.

“Obviously everyone is in the middle of a total meat obsession,” Tia Keenan, a fromager in New York, told The Times. With the demand for local meat and more restaurants specializing in offal, butchering is back, and in a glamorous way. Japanese Premium Beef, which opened last year in New York, sells wagyu beef for $110 a kilogram in a storefront that looks like a Prada store.

Boutique butchers like Tom Mylan, formerly of Marlow & Daughters in Brooklyn, are gaining cult status and devoted followings. They are opening stores in New York, London and San Francisco and offering classes: from $75 to learn to break down a 40-kilogram pig, to $10,000 for six to eight weeks of instruction.

“It’s the whole D.I.Y. thing” that has trickled down and out, David Kamp, the author of “The United States of Arugula,” told The Times. The result is “a newfound celebration of carnivorousness.”

For some, this means having a meat locker in the living room. That’s where John Durant, 26, keeps his organ meat and deer ribs in his New York apartment. He is part of a subculture whose members in the United States and Europe seek good health through a return to the diet and exercise of their Paleolithic ancestors, wrote The Times. The caveman lifestyle involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to simulate lean times between hunts.

Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as millenniums of bad habits, he told The Times. In a meat-obsessed world, some habits can be easy to break, or bend. At her wedding in July, Chelsea Clinton, a vegetarian, served meat. It was a decision that sparked debate.

“The idea that anyone would expect someone who was vegan to serve meat at their wedding seems absolutely crazy to me,” wrote one commenter on the Serious Eats blog. Fernanda Capobianco, a vegan pastry chef from Rio de Janeiro, will marry fellow pastry chef Francois Payard in October.

She told The Times that meat will be served at their wedding, despite her ethical qualms. “We are inviting chefs like Eric Ripert and Daniel Boulud,” she said. “How can we invite chefs and then have no meat? They’ll think we’re crazy.”


ANITA PATIL