This tag will be added to represent a meat processor, a business where someone can take a recently hunted or slaughtered animal to be processed for its meat and other products, such as leather. This is performed on a small scale for only a couple animals, generally by appointment. This fills a gap in the tagging since this business cannot be accurately represented by industrial=slaughterhouse or shop=butcher since generally meat is not sold outside of the rendered services, and animals are not killed on site or in large amounts.
More examples and rationale can be found on the wiki.
what is the exact nature of these boxes? From the website it just seems like a place they will tag it, cool it, and transport it, not process it. In that case, I wouldn’t use this tag for those.
is this the same as craft=butcher? Why is it called meat processing when it actually deals with preparing also other parts of the animal, like leather, potentially bones etc.?
My only issue with this tag is that it becomes more ambiguous. I have always heard these facilities referred to as deer processing or meat processing, though they technically are very similar to a butcher. How would you represent this in a tagging preset in order to not confuse the editor?
See:
Though craft=butcher wouldn’t totally solve this issue, it does not use the word meat which could be less ambiguous, though I still wouldn’t automatically associate a butcher with someone who doesn’t sell meat.
I think the distinction between shop and craft could be that the shop sells, while the craft implies someone being able to do the work at the place, without giving indication whether they also sell meat or not.
I do not think meat processing is covering someone shearing sheep, and while it may be connected, it also doesn’t cover producing leather by its name. Deer processing seems more inclusive regarding leather.
The reason I don’t want to use deer processing is that it explicitly excludes other kinds of game processing offered at these facilities. Based on the previous discussion, processors of other types of game are prevalent, such as bear or turkey. craft=deer_processing is less ambiguous in regards to the service provided, but you lose the ability to specify the animal(s) processed in facilities that do more than deer.
But there was a concern about confusion between craft=butcher and shop=butcher:
I still think craft=butcher would be fine. The distinction would just need to be clearly documented.
I’ve not seen examples of this sort of business offering sheep sheering. The focus is definitely on processing animal carcasses for meat, not services for live animals. I also haven’t seen examples of leather production included in this small scale sort of business. I’d expect many save the hides and pass them on to others who do leather production. Maybe some do it in house, but it would be good to find some examples of this before we worry about the tag terminology needing to intuitively cover it.
Some more in depth discussion of what this sort of business is like here:
Quoting Wikipedia, “A butcher is a tradesperson who specializes in meatcutting”. Butchers commonly work in a shop that sells the resulting meat to the public, but in the cases we’re talking about here they just sell their services to people who bring them animal carcasses. The work they are doing is still called butchering and they are still butchers[1] by trade, but their workplace is not a “butcher shop” as it is not a shop/store where the general public can buy the meat.
If the tag were craft=butcher, I might still avoid the word “butcher” for an American English preset name. In North America, “Meat Processor” or “Animal Processor” are the more commonly used terms for the kind of place we are talking about even though we would still call the person who works there a butcher. So I’d probably recommend one of those terms instead. A place like this could also be called a “Custom Butchery”, but I think some people would conflate that term with “Butcher Shop” and think that it sells meat to the public.
Other terms like meat processor, game processor, and animal processor mean essentially the same thing ↩︎
As I said in the other thread, at least from a British English point of view “meat processing” sounds very industrial-scale, where the facility wouldn’t be dealing with individual people that have a dead animal they want cutting up. The sort of smaller enterprise that provides this sort of service would be called a butcher. (In fact many of the more traditional butcher’s shops would also provide this as a service, in addition to there being people doing it without being attached to a butcher’s shop.)
So I’d very much prefer craft=butcher or craft=butchery over craft=meat_processing .
Also, in the description on the proposal page, you describe the tag as “A facility where…”. I think this is a little ambiguous, as to whether you’re referring to the building or the service. I assume it’s the service that’s being tagged, so perhaps the description could be changed to “The location of a service where…”
In the UK it is now, but it wasn’t always like that. Pre-1990 or so small-scale meat production was serviced by local abattoirs; I remember eating pork that the family had obtained from “a friend who had some rare breed pigs in his garden” - it was supplied with photographs of said pig cooling off in the family’s swimming pool. That sort of approach simply isn’t cost-effective now; people can’t afford to just “keep a pig” in the way that they did historically.
However, as I also said in the other thread I’m not convinced that the current UK is typical worldwide - the concept of craft scale meat-processing-but-not-sale doesn’t occur here but surely does elsewhere.
Probably not. But if we have craft=meat_processing, I think there’s a distinct danger that people will use it anyway to tag industrial-scale meat processing plants, which would then skunk the tag.
We already have that problem with most other craft tags, and consumers have to deal with it. This query finds that Bulmers in Ireland (industrial cider makers) are tagged as both craft=brewery and industrial=brewery. Even excluding double tagging, this one finds the former Banks’s plant which closed last year, but even before then wasn’t really a craft enterprise. Someone presumably typed “brewery” into a preset search and craft=brewery came back.
That’s going to happen whichever OSM key name is chosen, because the search name used is common to both large and small examples of the same thing, whereas OSM differentiates between craft and industrial.
Edit: I’ve since edited both Bulmer’s and the ex-Banks’s site to remove craft from the former (but leave industrial=brewery) and to make clear that the latter has closed.
