Pleased to meet you, and meat to please you

Celebrity chef Marco Pierre White hails the pig's trotter as the best dish in the world and says he'd choose it as his last meal on earth.

What's good enough for ''the Godfather'', it seems, is good enough for an increasing number of us.

Whether it's the influence of television or a need to return to our roots, nose-to-tail cookery has led to a growing interest in basic butchery.

Craig Macindoe, owner and head chef at Crows Nest restaurant MUMU Grill, last year ran cooking masterclasses attended by 5000 enthusiasts. He asked his database of 17,000 followers what they would like to learn and the answer was more about butchery. New courses start shortly.

''They want to know where the cuts come from,'' he said. ''We buy whole organic lambs and pigs and so it is a natural progression to bone them out in front of people.

''There is a big fashion in using secondary cuts, starting with whole animals and using the whole thing.

''After stories like the Indonesian beef scandal [allegations of cruelty in abattoirs] people want to know more about where their meat comes from.''

Anthony Puharich, fifth-generation butcher and chief executive of Vic's Meat, which owns the upmarket Woollahra butcher Victor Churchill, said there was an increase in people prepared to buy whole or half carcasses at their Saturday market days in Mascot.

''We are selling so many more cuts than we were five years ago,'' he said.

''Our parents used cheaper cuts and now we have gone full circle. They are now the cuts that the next generation is appreciating. It's all about variety - you can't grill a steak every night of the week.''

Victor Churchill runs butchery technique classes, has an Ask the Butcher app and at the end of the month Mr Puharich will front a TV show on Foxtel, also called Ask the Butcher, entirely devoted to meat.

The move accords with the Food Forward 2013 survey of culinary trends by global PR firm Weber Shandwick, which found 44 per cent of customers were looking for cheaper alternatives.

Fifty per cent said the most significant news story last year related to food prices forecast to reach record highs this year, with the world entering a period of ''agflation''.

Andrew Cox, of Meat & Livestock Australia, said increasing interest from men in cooking and food preparation was likely to be a contributing factor.

''Blokes are taking on more of the cooking duties and part of that would lend itself to an interest in butchery,'' he said. ''People are definitely more interested in how food gets from the paddock to the plate and I think this is part of that trend.''