The Table in 2016
The footage is 22 seconds long and almost ten years old. February 2016, Fort Wayne, Indiana. A whole pig on a stainless table, red cutting boards underneath, and the work done the way it was always done: by hand, in order, one section at a time.
This was my trade before it was my subject. I spent more than ten years in professional kitchens, and a good part of that time in commercial butchery and meat fabrication — breaking whole animals into the large cuts everything else starts from. In the later frames of the time-lapse you can see the table filling up: primal sections separated, rib racks among them, each piece moved off the board as the next one is worked.
Whole-hog breakdown is not fast work, and it does not forgive guessing. The knife follows seams that are already in the animal. Find them and the cut is clean. Fight them and you tear meat, dull edges, and make more work for yourself. That is the whole skill, and it only comes from repetition.
What That Training Is Worth Now
Craft Over Location exists to judge gear — knives, boards, cookware — on materials, construction, and how long it holds up in real use. That judgment did not start with this site. It started at tables like this one.
A knife's steel stops being a spec-sheet argument when you have run an edge through a whole animal and felt where it gives up. A cutting board stops being a listing photo when you have stood at one for a full shift and watched what the surface does under hours of work. Weight, balance, edge retention, board material — these are not review categories to me. They are memories.
The honest trade-off: this background makes me slower to praise gear, not faster. Production work teaches you that most tools are adequate and a few are genuinely better, and the difference only shows up over time. That is Benton's Rule in practice — metallurgy, materials, construction process, and real-world longevity, learned before it had a name.
The Reel is on our Instagram and Facebook now. If you learned your trade by hand, you already know why it matters.
