As a teenager attending Mount Saint Agnes Academy, Alex Hooper struggled with his studies. It wasn’t until the school offered a culinary arts class that he finally found his niche. Suddenly, a whole new world opened up to him.“The class was only offered at the school for one year,” said Mr Hooper. “I was lucky to be able to take that course.”Today, Mr Hooper, 21, is Bermuda’s youngest butcher, and one of very few Bermudian butchers working on the Island. He works for the Supermart on Front Street in Hamilton.He first started cooking as a child. His father, Michael Hooper, would hoist him up to stand on a stool next to the stove so he could watch his father cook.After graduating high school through an adult education programme he went to the Bermuda College and took their two year Culinary Arts programme.“I went to work as a chef at Harrington Hundreds Grocery and I did a summer at Coco Reef Resort, but I found I didn’t want to be a chef as a fulltime thing,” said Mr Hooper. “I like to cook, but it is more of a hobby thing, rather than me wanting to make a profession of it. I decided I needed a little bit of a change. I wanted to learn how the foods were prepared before they were cooked. I thought that could further my knowledge in the chef trade, if I still wanted to go on with it. I liked working with my hands, so I kind of fell into working with meat and liked it a lot more than the chef’s position.”He recently went abroad to take the retail meat cutting course at the North Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT). It was winter in Alberta, Canada and when you ask him how it was he says simply: “Cold.”“NAIT is known for its culinary arts programme,” said Mr Hooper. “The retail meat cutting programme is small, but they get good results out of it. It wasn’t hard to get into. You didn’t need a lot of education to get into it. That suited me, as I graduated from Adult Education in Bermuda.”At NAIT, Mr Hooper learned safety and sanitation, knife skills, meat identification and also received information related to Canadian government regulations. He also learned about customer flow in a shop, and meat presentation. He said luckily he didn’t have to do any abattoir work. Some programmes make you start in the abattoir, actually killing an animal, but Mr Hooper said NAIT stopped that two years previously.“One thing I learned in the course is breaking down sides,” he said. “The meat that all the grocery stores get now is block ready. It comes in cases. You get a case of tenderloins and a case of ribeyes. In the class, we were taking everything down from the whole side of the animal. We learned where to cut.”He said this makes his current job as a butcher at the Supermart, a lot easier.“You can tell which parts are going to be more tough, and which ones will be leaner or more fatty,” he said. “My favourite meat to eat is lamb, but I like working with beef though. It is bigger and easier to work with. You don’t have to be as delicate with your knife with it.”Mr Hooper said being a butcher has its stresses, but it is a lot of fun. One thing that he enjoys about it is getting to know the customers. He said he is a people person.He admitted that being a butcher could be a messy profession, but he said he was fastidious about keeping working area clean.“Being a butcher is messy, but if you know what you are doing, you can keep clean,” he said.Although he is the youngest butcher on the Island, he said he hasn’t experienced any difficulties because of that. He enjoyed working with his colleagues at the Supermart. “I work with a good group of guys, a really, really good team,” he said. “I learn a lot of things from them by watching them. Everything is visual, and that is how I learn.”He said the retail meat course he took, and also his previous chef training, has helped him a great deal. He said right now, the future is bright,“Anything is possible, right now,” he said. “In the future I might like to be a manager, or start my own place. I have ideas that I might look at more later on. Right now, I really like my job.”