When Justine Fulton scrolls through Instagram, her homepage is filled with pictures of meat. Lots and lots of meat.
Having swapped social work for butchery, she's plying her trade at an artisan butcher in Manchester's most fashionable neighbourhood - the Northern Quarter.
At the same time, she's building a following on Instagram as rack_of_glam, where she charts her progress in a male-dominated field as a woman with 'fake eyelashes and extensions', with videos that set butchery to hip hop.
She's also on a mission to educate people about meat eating and sustainability.
It all started during lockdown, when Justine saw an opportunity to start her own business providing meat deliveries to people’s doors. The enterprise - Meat Co - supported farmers during a difficult period and was led by an ethos of “local farms, low food miles, zero waste and eco-friendly packaging”.
It didn't feel like an unusual sideline to Justine. But, when she took it a step further and decided to give up her career - helping people who had been homeless into housing - to become a butcher, it’s fair to say her friends and family were a little taken aback.
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“People were pretty shocked and thought I was joking, but my dad’s first job was as a butcher so I feel like it’s gone full circle," Justine says as we sit down in her new workplace, The Butcher’s Quarter on Tib Street in the Northern Quarter. “Working in social care was really stressful and I was just making myself really ill - it felt like there wasn’t really an end goal in sight.
“Then myself, my partner and a friend set up a company during the pandemic and through that I looked more at butchery and thought I could do it for a living.”
Pursuing her new passion, Justine, originally from Bacup in Rossendale Valley, started working behind the counter at a butchers in Bolton in February 2021 before moving onto popular Cheshire farm shop, The Lambing Shed in Knutsford.
“I was brought up in pubs and my mum was a landlady so she would prepare a lot of food and would send me to the butchers. I had knowledge of it but I was actually a little bit scared to go in, I used to find it quite intimidating.”
“I think when you go into a butcher you think of a grumpy old man or someone who is a little blunt, so to go in as a young female it feels a bit intimidating, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking for. But, when you start working in that environment you realise it’s not like that at all.”
Now working at The Butcher’s Quarter, Justine has learnt a lot in a short period of time and will soon gain her level two in butchery. “I started off as a counter assistant, getting to know the meat and different cuts, and then I started an apprenticeship two months after joining. I’m still an apprentice now, but I’ll be qualified in June.
“When I first started I didn’t know how I was going to remember it all, but once I got into it and you start to learn and remember more, it does come to you. Once you’ve done one body of meat, it’s quite similar to the next one, like lambs and pigs are quite similar to beef, but on a bigger scale.”
She launched her own Instagram page as a way to track her progress, using it as a means to connect with other butchers and inspire other people who may be interested in pursuing a career in butchery.
“It started off as a way to document the journey for myself and after a while people started following me and liking my posts - it became something I enjoyed doing to help other people. If I can use it to inspire and help others, especially women, to get into it and show it’s not intimidating but actually fun and a really good job then that’s great.”
“My home screen on Instagram is just full of butchers now. But, if you delve into it there’s a load of young butchers doing really cool videos, and we all bounce off one another and tag each other in posts.
“It’s been really positive, I would say 99 percent of butchers have been really supportive. There’s a really big community of butchers on the platform and everyone is really friendly and messaging to ask if I need any help or support. It’s a very small minority who still have that belief that women can’t do it, which adds to that stigma, but overall it's been a really positive experience.”
As well as sharing time lapses of her work in the butchers - soundtracked by Beyoncé's song Cuff It and Hypnotize by The Notorious B.I.G - in her new role as a ‘meatfluencer, Justine is populating the grid with educational posts, personal learnings and daily wins as a woman in a heavily male-dominated industry.
The work appears to be paying off as well, as she was recently a finalist in the Rising Star category at the Women in Meat awards. Though, she notes, she doesn’t want her account to come across as “preachy” or that she’s telling people what to do, with her interest in sustainability.
“I have a few family members who are vegan and trying to have a conversation with them is quite difficult. But when you start working in this world you realise how important farming and cattle is, and when people are vegan for environmental reasons I try to carefully explain that we need cattle for herds to keep the soil going - farmers aren’t going to keep cattle for nothing.
“If you want to promote good, healthy meat eating, so not factory farming, if you do it this way - through supporting local butchers and your farmers, then you know these animals have been looked after.
"I’m also really interested in the field-to-fork aspect, which picks up on Meat Co and why we did that - so supporting British meat and farmers, working in these environments and actually getting to know where your food comes from.”
After Justine passes her level two she can then start her level three in butchery, which looks in more depth at the science and ordering side of the trade. Clearly happy with her major life change, she says that the journey she’s been on for the last few years has been a really positive one.
“I think with butchery there is an end goal - you butcher something, finish it and sell it and then you move onto the next thing, so you’re getting that job satisfaction. Whereas with social work the system is stacked against a lot of people - you might get them into a house, on benefits, or a job but then they might have an issue again and become homeless again and you’re always trying to fight these battles that are really hard to win for them.
“Now I can say I love doing what I do. Whilst trying to be relatable as possible I hope to encourage good meat eating and sustainability. I want to show that girls can do it too, as many other female butchers are doing also.”
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