Others know these maps too: they're posted at your neighbourhood butcher's, and feature prominently in food porn coffee table books. Eyeing a putative patch of pasture just outside the picture frame, a cow calmly presents her side to the viewer. The animal's side is crisscrossed by lines prefiguring the future carve-up of her carcass, but the animal seems unperturbed by this; perhaps she's been told they're measurements for a fancy suit. Curiously, the cow more often than not faces left. Does this somehow enhance the map's readability?
In one of the posts on Musings on Maps , a blog examining the "rhetoric of maps", academic Daniel Brownstein zooms in on these so-called butchery maps, "distancing bovine forms by labeling, converting limbs beneath its skin to an ownable set of parts and taking possession by some alchemy of them as cuts, renaming the animal as the edible (…) In this butcher diagram, the cow becomes the territory".
