I buy skirt steak about once every couple of months, and usually I can only find the inner skirt cut. However, the last time I went to buy skirt steak, I went to a new butcher shop in town and was able to buy the outer skirt at a much higher price than the inner...and I wondered why?
As a kid growing up in the country and field dressing the game I hunted and watching and participating in animals being slaughtered by my neighbors/farmers, I am somewhat familiar with cuts of meat and where they're located on an animal. I am also intimately familiar with what it's like to kill an animal eye-to-eye, remove its innards while they are still steaming with life in the cold autumn air of Update NY or Northern PA with my arms covered in blood. As a teen, I experienced the fear more than once of becoming separated from my hunting party and truly getting lost in some remote woodlands for most of a very cold winter day. I had my first experiences like these over 30 years ago, at the age of 12; it made a big impression on me. Early on in life I learned about the beauty and mysticism of nature, about its absolute power, about real life and death as it plays out in nature. But enough nostalgia...
I mention these graphic, childhood experiences because I think it's relevant for those of us who eat meat, and because the article in the link below is just as blunt. While it may be trendy via the "slow food" and "source local" movements (I always knew both of those as just home cooking) to ooh and aah over offal and marrow, there's much more too it, or should I say, much more which precedes it, than that.
Although this article is from 2009 in The Houston Press, it is highly informative:
http://www.houstonpress.com/2009-06-18/restaurants/not-so-clear-cut/#liv...