Everyday People is our series that spotlights the jobs, and people doing them, who form the fabric of our everyday lives. Renee Wilde travels to Dayton to meet a butcher who is working to create a sustainable food system, that in turn, will support a sustainable community - one customer at a time.
Adrien Harris wants to change the way that people shop for groceries in Dayton.
“Have you ever seen the Andy Griffith Show?” Adrien asked. “You go into, like, the local market and old Harold knows everyone. That’s what I want to bring here.”
“Because this department, and this area, is missing that, and they need someone who cares about who they are and what they are eating,” he added. “And the more you know who your neighborhood is, the better you can take care of them.”
Discovering Gem City Market's mission
Adrien is the butcher at the Gem City Market co-op on Salem Avenue in Dayton.
Adrien reflected back on coming to the market to work.“I started cutting meat and started meeting the people. I started finding out what the mission was about here, about the food dessert — which I hate that term, but it’s ok.”
“Food apartheid is really the word I would choose,” he added. “But, the community needed something. The community didn’t need somebody that was there to take from them, they just needed somebody kind. Like, I’ll be kind, and also add what I’m good at.”
It’s obvious that building community is very important to Adrien.
In fact, he learned his skills as a butcher when someone in the community took him under their wing.
Building community through butchery
“When I was in my 20’s I made a lot of terrible mistakes. So I wanted to come back and fix those mistakes and give back to the community that birthed me,” he said of his younger days growing up in the Five Oaks neighborhood nearby.
“I got a felony in 2006, and I did all my restitution and everything, but you still have a felony on your record, and nobody would hire that,” he added “So I had to work breaking down boxes and everything else, and the main butcher, he saw me breaking down boxes, so he was like, “Hey, man, let me show you how to do something.’ So he taught me how to do it.”
“And I lost my dad when I was in jail and so I was really seeking a father figure, and somebody that went through the same thing that I went (through), like going to jail and trying to make your life better,” Adrien said.
Adrien’s former mentor now works alongside him at the Gem City Market.
In the refrigerated work area behind the counter, Adrien cut slabs of steak into different thicknesses with a special meat saw that looks scary and dangerous to the average person.
“So this is my t-bone that I’m cutting from a short loin,” Adrien said, showing the thick cuts of steak.
He cuts the individual steaks into two different thicknesses. “A lot of elderly couples like the thinner cut. The basic cut is normally at 1.25, this is cut at probably .75. I try to keep it as varied as possible because we get all types of clients.”
“One size doesn’t always fit all - especially for food,” Adrien stated.
Adrien loves learning from his customers and prides himself on stocking meat that serves the needs of this diverse population in west Dayton.
“A cowboy cut is a cut of ribeye or t-bone that exposes a lot more of the bone, but you get a lot of the meat right there, and It’s trimmed in such a way that it’s just nice meat,” Adrien said, listing the different kinds of meat he cuts.
“Oxtails is another one that's from Jamaica, a lot of people from Louisiana know how to cook it,” he added. “So I had to learn a new piece of meat, how to trim it, because there is actually a certain way to trim the meat on an oxtail that reduces the amount of fat, which also takes care of your gravy.”
Adrien said that the more he learned from his customers, the more he learned what his job was, “and it’s researching and asking more questions, because food is medicine and eating indigenous to where you are from is extremely important, too.”
Nurturing sustainable practices
Dennis Hanley is the Interim General Manager of the Gem City Market. He said that he “believes the Black community wants a butchery, wants a full, fresh meat department, not all case-ready, but actually sliced on site. And that’s your highest quality of meat when you do it that way, and fish.”
“And I found superstar over here, Adrien, and I knew from the start, he could cut the meat, he understood the community, but more importantly he can connect,” Hanley said, looking at Adrien.
As more people from the community shop at Gem City Market, the more sustainable having grocery stores in the Salem Corridor becomes, which in turn creates a more sustainable community.
“Everytime I get on the RTA, everytime I walk to work, every time I talk to somebody (I ask them) ‘Have you visited Gem City Market?’” Harris said. ‘I’ll see you when I get there.”
This story was brought to our attention by WYSO listener Lela Klein who is the co-executive director at Co-op Dayton. If you know someone who does a job that we should know more about, send our producer an email at rwilde@wyso.org.
