"The Meat Lab."

In the college town that I now live in, one of the things that locals gush over if you're "in the know" is what everyone calls "the Meat Lab," which is basically like a university-run butcher shop that's open like once a week and is staffed by students and sells what they've learned to slaughter as part of their study of agronomy, and as part of their extracurricular activities like the "Meat Judging Club" and whatnot.

And, I guess a ton of land-grant institutions have this and the regular name for it everywhere really is "the meat lab," though now that probably causes confusion, as when I've begun telling other people about it, sometimes they initially think that I'm talking about lab-grown meat.

Anyhow, though, I found out about it this summer, but only right after it had closed for a few months and they were doing a "fire sale" of different value packages combining everything they had left, and then this fall I wasn't able to go for a while because I had stuff going on and then I had COVID, but then I finally went, and I impulse-bought like almost forty dollars of sausage (like, it freezes, so why not?).

Most of it was solid but nothing to write home about, but one kind was exceptionally good, so I ended up going back the very next week to stock up on stuff that I could freeze and give out as gifts to people when I was traveling around the holidays, since that was the only time that I could make it there to get stuff, since their hours became erratic with school vacations and whatnot and I just couldn't make it back there, otherwise.

("Nice to see you again," the [fatter] [young] [blonde] woman manning the register told me, amidst the cinder blocks and cement floor and industrial lights and various coolers.)

Interestingly, the second time that I went back, I was talking with a(n older) (white) woman who was manning the door while I was waiting to get in -- because of lingering COVID precautions, they only let so many people in at one time -- and so I asked her about the extraordinary number of women working there, since it was really prominent everywhere you turned, whether at the door or at the register or behind the butcher-counter or just milling around, everyone in their clinical white smocks.

And, it turns out that she was one of the professors who was just happening to be working that day, and she said it's actually a male-dominated field, but yes, they do have an incredible number of women in this particular program.

Later, I was telling about all of this to a (lawyer) friend from undergraduate who also has become obsessed with "the Meat Lab," and I said something about how I felt compelled to almost make some kind of joke about there being so many women, and something involving how they cut sausage.

And, she was like, "Well, women are good at judging meat."

But, I told her that that wasn't true, and it erased the experience of lesbian butchers.

My one (professor) friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature, too, was also somewhat aghast that student can take classes on how to make cheesy bratwurst

"They call that a liberal arts university?", she was like.

So, I pointed out to her that many students from top schools are protesting in support of Hamas, so if I had to guess, the students who are making sausages are probably more well-adjusted.

("Very true, that is a good response," the [Romanian] wife of my one [Romanian] colleague said, when I told them that story later.)

I also gave some of the sausages to my one (Romanian) colleague, who likes to be a contrarian and b*tch about Democrats.

So, since the state I'm in is blue, I made sure to point out to him that our taxes subsidize that Meat Lab, and that I never wanted to hear him b*tch about Democrats again.

He didn't have much to say about that.