Beef's Journey From Farm to Fork

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

You're home, you don't want to eat from outside since you're more cautious after Covid-19 and you want to have a beef brisket for dinner. You can actually reach a good brisket recipe from my previous post. Have you ever thought about the journey of that brisket on your plate? Here is the story..

Image by winterseitler from Pixabay

Cattle Farms

Beef is the meat of cattle which are 2 years old. Cattle get raised in farms by eating grass in feedlots until get sent to abbatoirs. Farmers don't do the slaughter process, they send them to abbatoir companies to do that. When a cow gets If the cattle lucky, they are raised humanely. They can have open space to walk around. Some farms stuff the animals as much as they can. So there is no place to walk. And we should research, find and shop from humanely raised and slaughtered animals. And boycott the butchers/farms who do otherwise.

In Canada, in farms every animal has a tag on their ears. This unique number identifies the animal and track it until where it is sold.

Abbatoirs

In abbatoirs, or slaughter house by other name, the animals (mostly) get stunned and get killed. The animals get stunned for two reasons. The first one is ethical concerns, and the second one is to prevent the animal from adrenaline . When animal's adrenaline is high, meat will be tough. So to be able to have softer meat, they get stunned.

Disturbing Content by Saltbae

Butchering

After slaughtering the animal, it is time to remove the pelt of the cow/bull. They cut the skin of the animal with help of knives. After doing that, they remove the innards very carefully. For safety standards, they should be very careful at this point. No contaminants should be on the carcass.

Grading

Canada grades the meat by looking for 6 (Six) criteria. These are; marbling, maturity, meat color, fat color, muscling and meat texture. Grades are; A, AA, AAA, Prime. Maturity should be youthful, meat color bright red, no yellow fat, good muscling and a firm texture should have the meat to be able to get a grade. Marbling is the criteria that differs the grades. More marbled meat, the higher grade it gets.

We also should look for grading when we buy meat from the butcher/grocery store.

For more info about to buy a meat, please visit my previous blog post.

Quality Grade Standards for Youthful Cattle

Some labels that is in use Canada

Cutting

At this section, workers cut the meat into smaller pieces. They take the bones out of the meat to be sold as it is, or they perform some other cuts to the meat to be sold in the grocery stores. They usually cut the cow into 3 pieces first, then they cut into ribs, shank, brisket. After this process, the last step is packaging the meat.

Packaging & Selling

After cutting the meat into small pieces, it is time to pack up. Workers vacuum seal the meats and send them to the grocery stores where we buy them to eat. In the grocery store, they can cut even into smaller pieces and portions for us to buy them. People buy portions so they don't have to cut into portions when they get home.

They last step after this process is buying the meat and cook a good meal at home with our beloved ones :)