October 2010 - Fresh from the Paddock
The red-meat
labelling debate…
I’ve just returned from a trip up Cape York for work and after a few nights of stew and sleeping in my swag I decided to try some luxury and eat a Wagyu fillet when I was in a restaurant in Cooktown.
When my three colleagues and I finished our meals the conversation moved to the quality of the steak.
Various comments were thrown around such as “tender”, “juicy” and “marbled” but not once did anyone mention the age of the animal as a concern.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter how old the animal is because you, the consumer, are chasing eating quality.
So why then are we having a debate about labelling beef based on the age of the animal?
Recently the NSW Parliament passed the Food Amendment (Beef Labelling) Act 2009, which serves to make it law that meat retailers label beef according to the age of the carcass and, once proclaimed, is almost impossible to reverse.
The grades are to be:
18 months and less- Yearling,
18 months to 2.5 years- Young,
2.5 to 3 years- Intermediate,
3 to 3.5 years- Mature
and 3.5 years and over- Economy.
It seems easy to assume that age is the one thing that defines meat quality.
Yes, age does factor into it, but we simply can’t judge an entire carcass based on one subjective observation.
In Australia we have an industry body for red meat called Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA).
Every time a beast is sold in Australia, a levy is paid to MLA which then uses this to fund research and marketing for the red meat industry.
One MLA research outcome was Meat Standards Australia (MSA), which identifies and labels the eating quality of beef and sheepmeat.
It is a program backed by science and objective measurements and consistently predicts the eating quality of a piece of meat.
MSA takes into account the weight of an animal, pH (acidity) of the meat when killed, temperature decline of the carcass in the chiller after slaughter, meat colour, fat colour, fat depth, marbling, degree of tropical content (e.g Brahman breeds), eye muscle area and also ossification.
As animals age they create cross-linkages in their meat to strengthen muscle fibres and this makes meat tougher.
The ossification score estimates the degree of these cross linkages.
Young animals may have high ossification and at the same time older animals may have little ossification.
While ossification does increase with age, it is also highly sensitive to nutrition, which is why we simply cannot assume that an animal at a certain age will be tough.
In the MSA grading system animals are graded based on the merits they display.
If two animals were placed side by side with the same weight and the same age and the first had a high ossification score and the second had a low one, it doesn’t automatically mean the first will be tough, it just gets lower points for that section of the grading.
However, ossification is not the sole predictor of eating quality and if we didn’t need to measure anything else contained within MSA, this grading program wouldn’t exist and wouldn’t have just won a Eureka Award for outstanding achievement in Science, Australia’s top science awards.
We must remember that not everything grades MSA.
Only the carcasses certified to be of a certain eating quality will meat the MSA grades. There are 6 tooth bullocks (between 32 and 44 months old) that are being graded MSA in Tasmania.
If they were to be graded using the new system, most would lie outside the 3.5 years and be graded as economy meat!
So why then would anyone choose to label based solely on age?
It’s like going back to a horse and cart when we have perfectly good cars sitting outside (never mind the carbon debate!). Consumers will receive very mixed messages if we grade subjectively this way. We face the prospect of buying a sensational piece of “economy” steak on one occasion only to be disappointed the next with a tough “leather boot” because age simply can’t tell us the whole truth about meat quality.
Kiri Broad