Some years ago, I think it was in the mid 1970’s, I was appointed to a quango with the unlikely nomenclature of The Sawdust Working Party Committee. This unit was set up by the government who had decided in their wisdom that it needed to ban sawdust from butcher’s shop floors.
The entrenched little men from the Health Department had carefully scrutinised the sawdust and had decreed that it was chock full of organisms and that these little beasties were scampering up the legs of our benches, landing on the cutting area and then cunningly dropping onto the mincers and sausage machines and were eventually causing havoc in people’s stomachs. Meat eaters’ stomachs that is, vegetarians, a rarity back then, were of course, immune.
According to the Health Department, people were writhing around in pain and dying like flies. Actually I just made that last bit up, but it was panic stations all round and sawdust on butcher’s shop floors had now replaced the North Vietnamese as public enemy number one.
Of course we butchers saw it quite differently. Sawdust to us was irreplaceable. Our floors were particularly treacherous because during the day they got covered in fat and water, a lethal mix. Sawdust soaked up the excess moisture and rendered the surface skid proof. We butcher’s liberally sprinkled sawdust on a daily basis behind the counter and in our boning rooms. You spread it around like you would feed your chooks.
We painted grim pictures of butchers doing untold damage to personages as they slipped, slided, and skated around their premises whilst holding super sharp knives and machete like choppers if the miraculous mixture was marginalised. We opined we would inevitably end up stabbing ourselves or doing unmentionable damage to our various appendages.
To be fair, the government of the day did have some sympathy for our cause, hence they set up The Sawdust Working Party Committee; three Health Department boffins plus three master butchers selected to represent the north, mid and southern regions of New Zealand. I represented the central region.
Three health department officials across the table from three intransigent butchers resulted in stalemate, so the then Minister of Health called us to his office at parliament - this was pre-Beehive days - to see if he could overcome the impasse.
We butchers arrived at parliament with the executive director of the N. Z. Meat Retailers Federation, Don Fyfe, in tow. There we were met at the minister’s door by a barrage of reporters and a TV cameraman. We were keen to front up to the press, but Mr. Fyfe urged us to make no comment and hurried us past the expectant scribes. The Minister of Health, Air Commodore Frank Gill, listened intently to both sides of the argument and said he would carefully consider the issue and get back to us.
As we left, the reporters and the cameraman were still eager for a comment, but again our Mr. Fyfe cautioned us to make no response and hurriedly ushered us down the corridor. We looked wistfully back at the cameraman, knowing that this might well be our first and last chance at a moment of fame, but we opted to do as we were told.
Poor Mr. Gill had no such adviser. He approached the camera and told the lens and eventually the world that there were some problems because butchers had orgasms on their floors.
The media had a field day. It made headlines internationally and Tom Scott, who back then wrote an accompanying story with his cartoons in The Listener, arguably concocted the masterpiece of his career.
Of course we butchers were the butt of some rather uncouth jokes and banter in the ensuing weeks, but we had been giving it for years so I guess it was only fair to now be on the receiving end. Other cartoonists besides Scott made use of their skills to chronicle our activities at ground level and “on the shop floor” took on a totally new meaning.
It was great fun while it lasted.
The upshot of all this was that sawdust was eventually banned, but the government gave us ten years to find alternatives before we had to remove it completely from our premises. No substitutes were ever really found; in the end I think we probably just improved our footwear and learnt to be steadier on our feet.
Fast forward to the 21st century and our boning room is now an art gallery called Hedspace. It has a smooth concrete floor sans the sawdust and curiously I read recently where scientists have discovered that wood does not harbour unfriendly bacteria after all. In fact, plastics, which we were subsequently forced to use on our cutting tables, are the more likely carriers of harmful organisms.
So all the fuss was probably over nothing, and indeed the general health of the public may have worsened. Salmonella is now reaching epidemic proportions claim the current spokespeople at the Department of Health, particularly they say, in the greater Wellington region. I note too that we now have three funeral directors in this town when in the sawdust era, one sufficed.
More undertakers, but fewer butcher’s shops; there’s a message here somewhere.
