The butcher, along with the baker and the candlestick maker, was once a mainstay of local commerce. Now their ranks are thinning out as stores sell more prepackaged meats shipped from big packing plants.

 But there are still those like John Flaherty, a longtime butcher who wields a mean cleaver and practices his craft in the refrigerated meat room at Lexington Stop & Shop. He learned his knife skills from another master, who coached him through the carcass slicing and dicing by saying, “It’s already dead. You can’t hurt it.’’ Globe correspondent Cindy Atoji Keene spoke with this butcher about the dying trade.

“Is butchering a craft? Absolutely. Anyone can put a can of Bumble Bee tuna on a shelf but not everyone can cut a tri-tip from a beef quarter. There’s a skill and art to cutting, trimming, and packaging meat in a correct and appealing manner. In the old days, there would be carcasses hanging down with just a burlap bag hanging over it. Nowadays meat is sealed, processed, and heavily inspected. We’d have 10 meat cutters in a store; now you’re lucky if you have two, maybe three.

“We get our meat from Iowa and Nebraska, and it’s taken to warehouses down in Freetown. From there, shipments to our store arrive five days a week, anywhere from 800 to 900 pounds for each delivery. It’s a judgment call on how much to order; the weather forecast, holidays, and past shopping trends all play a factor. We have a computer-generated cutting list that’s used as a guideline, not a bible; we go right down the list to prepare the meat. Thickness of the cut varies; not everyone wants a steak that’s an inch and a half. I have only a few knives in the work area: a steak knife and a boning knife, among others. The knives are sharpened and swapped out every week by an outside company; a dull knife is actually more dangerous than a sharp one.

“People ask, ‘How can you be a butcher?’ I work in 38 degrees, do a lot of heavy lifting, and there’s dead animals and blood. I wear a white lab coat with a disposable apron over it; if I walk out on the sales floor, I throw the dirty apron away, because otherwise it looks like I committed murder. Butchers have an image as mean, burly guys but my favorite part of the job is talking with the customers and helping them figure out what dinner to put on the table. I myself love petite sirloin; it’s inexpensive – half the price of a filet mignon – and very tender. It’s like eating butter.’’

Cindy Atoji Keene can be reach at cindy.atoji@gmail.com.