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Decked out in a black apron on a recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Swanstrom, 27, slipped a six-inch boning knife into the carcass of a 275-pound Berkshire-Duroc hog that was splayed out in two large hemispheres on a table inside Local Pig, a butcher shop in this city's industrial East Bottoms area. He was supposed to carve off the front shank, which requires separating the flesh and tendons around the lower shoulder to remove the limb. But even after dislocating a joint — it popped with the shrill squeak of compressed air escaping — the shoulder still hung together fibrously, causing Mr. Swanstrom to have to pull it over the side of the table for better leverage.

"Don't force it," said Alex Pope, one of the shop's owners. "If you are in a spot that feels like it's not going well, just move the knife around a little bit."

When the limb detached, Mr. Swanstrom handed it over and took a swig of his beer.

"That was tougher than I thought," he said.

Hands-on classes in butchering meat, created to give diners carnal familiarity with their food, emerged as a fad in the late 2000s, one confined largely to the coasts. That has since changed, with shops in places like Chicago and Milwaukee inviting students.

Mr. Pope, who opened his shop smack dab in the middle of the heartland a year ago, decided to offer hands-on classes after hearing about another shop that charged customers just to watch a demonstration.

"That's ridiculous," he said. "If you are going to learn to break down a pig, you should be able to actually do it."

Students at Local Pig pay $100 to trade cuts on a freshly killed pig and take home the spoils: at least 10 pounds of fresh meat, plus recipes for using some of the lesser known vittles.

One of the most surprising things has been his clientele. Kansas City is a meat metropolis, both in terms of its famous barbecue and the proximity of ranchers and outdoorsmen more intimately familiar with its source. So rather than attracting just food tourism's classic archetype, the hipster or yuppie in search of one-off adventure, Mr. Pope often caters to people interested in actually applying his art — everyone from deer hunters to nouveau back-to-the-landers with their own swine.

Mr. Swanstrom, for instance, helps run his family's 100-head cattle ranch in Iowa, and wanted to tackle a stand-in before culling a lame steer from his herd. Two other attendees that afternoon, Matt Simonitsch, 56, an analyst with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Gary Hoffman, 64, a lawyer at a life insurance company, are members of the Kansas City Barbeque Society, a nationally known group that judges barbecue events. The two men wanted to learn more about what cuts look like in their rawest form.

"I look at it like continuing education," Mr. Simonitsch said. "We know where certain cuts come from, but this is just to give you more depth."

In a way, Mr. Pope, 29, offers the basic apprentice program he never had, the kind that was commonplace in the first half of the 20th century. With the rise of packing houses in the 1960s, which shipped pre-boxed cuts of meat directly to supermarkets, the lone artisanal butcher went out of style in much the same way that cobblers did. Eventually whole-animal butchery all but disappeared at some culinary schools.

Mr. Pope belongs to the generation of chefs who missed out; he attended culinary school, but honed his skills working backward from the finished cuts shown in a handbook of the North American Meat Processors.

He has since found great joy teaching others the lost trade. One of his early disciples went on to become the head butcher at City Provisions, a deli in Chicago. Another took Mr. Pope's first class at Local Pig, volunteered in the shop and worked his way up to general manager.

But his classes are a bit freewheeling, too, even social, to bring people in regardless of whether they will use the skills again. (While the combination of drinking and knife play might seem prickly, Mr. Pope said it helped "lubricate social interaction.")