It's a daily ritual bordering on the obsessive, she says, but Los Angeles homemaker Marina Lopez can't stay away from her local carniceria.
Every day, she carefully studies the long glass cases filled with fresh meat at the small Westlake neighborhood store. On this particular Wednesday afternoon, her eyes stop at the beef tongue, but she quickly rules it too expensive. After consulting her butcher--her carnicero--Lopez settles on ground chuck that will become her family's dinner of albondigas, a meatball soup.
"Meat should be fresh so that it tastes good," Lopez says, reflecting an attitude she acquired from going to the market every day in her native El Salvador. Carnicerias help her keep the tradition locally, she says.
The Latin-style butcher shops are an essential market stop for millions of local Latinos who know they can find the right carnes for any dish. The shops also are pushing the U.S. food industry to reconsider how fresh meat, particularly beef, is sold in Southern California.
Imitating these niche markets, large and medium-sized supermarket operators across the region are luring carniceria shoppers by stocking such specialized cuts as tripe, goat head and tongue and adding professional butchers to create full-service meat counters that buck the trend toward prepackaged, self-serve, warehouse-style food shopping.
"The Latino consumer is making a huge difference in the meat industry," said Bruce Berven, executive director of the California Beef Council.
Californians spend $5 billion to $6 billion annually on beef, and about a third of that is spent by Latinos, Berven said. Industry market studies also indicate that Latino families eat beef more often (four to five times a week) than the general population (two times a week), and that a higher percentage of Latinos' household incomes is spent on beef than in non-Latino households.
"We like our meat. I can cut back on other things, but I always have money to spend on food. And always with your food you have meat," said Raul Morales, a taco stand owner near downtown L.A. who makes regular trips to carnicerias for his family and for his business.
Believed to have first appeared in the 1930s, carnicerias sprang from the need for fresh cuts of meat like those popular in Mexico. With few such butcher shops in Southern California, immigrant Latino families would travel to family-run stores each week for their grocery shopping but also found them to be cultural havens.
