Editors note: a representative from Butcher Box reached out to me directly and explained that the extra shipping time was because of the 4th of July, I just got another box, completely frozen. I will be assembling the meat into one giant log and consuming it with a pint of Red Stag, Kid Rock’s cherry flavored whiskey.

Butcher Box is advertised as a local butcher’s hand selected meats shipped conveniently to your door, which would absolutely be true if the local butcher’s shop kept their meat in a deflating baby pool of old bath water behind an abandoned Cracker Barrel and the butcher himself was a Ted Nugent impersonator fucked out of his mind on acid who seemed indifferent as to whether or not you lived or died.

In some ways I would have preferred that to my experience, at least an Instagram with the right filter applied, playing in a pool of festering meat would have garnered a modest amount of likes from fellow beef enthusiasts. The prospect of dying at the hands of a fully nude Ted Nugent impersonator would make a hell of obituary as well.

Instead I waited an inexplicable three weeks to receive a box of sustainably sourced, barely cooled meat which I responsibly and soul crushingly tossed in the trash can. Farm to dumpster. A pasture in the heart of the Pacific Northwest trash vortex. An iconic celebration of goddamn waste. The chicken could have been used in a super soaker at a summer cookout.

The type of waste that is truly heartbreaking.

It was certainly an honor to flippantly throw away an entire box of animals and I’m sure they were just as grateful to give their lives for the sake of burdening someone with immediately discarding their corpses. I got a refund which is a plus, but goddamnit this is a Mickey Mouse operation.