WSJ article about cattle, slaughterhouses, tender steaks.
May 25, 2000
How New Cattlemen Are Turning
A Dead Cow Into a Tender Steak
By JULIA ANGWIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- Every few minutes in the slaughterhouse here,
the carcasses of heifers and steers hanging from a ceiling rack are jolted by
400 volts of 'electrical stimulation.' The feet jerk upward, and the body
shudders as an electrified steel bar hits each torso. Sparks sometimes fly from
the neck.
This is one of the best ways that Charlie Bradbury knows to create a tender
steak.
The Aging Process
Remarkably little is known about what makes one piece of meat fall away from
the fork and another one call out for a sharper knife. But some studies suggest
that administering electrical shocks -- tearing apart tiny muscle knots and tissue
and theoretically preventing meat from further toughening -- improves steak
tenderness by as much as 25%. "It accelerates the aging process," Mr.
Bradbury says.
Despite the popular perception that more fat makes for a more tender steak,
animal scientists have concluded that the amount of fat marbling a piece of
meat is in fact a poor gauge of tenderness.
This may explain studies that show that as many as one in five steaks is too
tough for the liking of consumers. "We've drifted with sorry product for a long
time," says Wayne Purcell, professor of agricultural economics at Virginia
Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Va.
But the nation's $54 billion beef industry is racing to shore up a decade of
declining sales by arming itself with a new wave of tenderizing technology.
Among the more far-out efforts is a process known as "rinse and chill."
Proponents of this technique insert a tube into an artery that feeds sugar-water
solution into the already-dead animal's veins. The goal is to flush out the blood,
chill the body and increase the acidity of the muscles -- thus increasing
tenderness.
Although some academics are skeptical of the process, closely held MPSC
Inc., based in Minneapolis, recently won trial approval from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture to start using the technique.
Frank Grindinger, owner of G&C Packing Co., which has been using the
process in its Colorado Springs, Colo., slaughterhouse since March, insists that
the meat coming off his production line is suddenly much more tender. "My
chuck steaks eat like T-bone," he boasts. "My shoulder steaks eat like sirloin."
Pop Psychology
Ranchers Renaissance, an alliance of cattlemen based in Englewood, Colo., is
also using electronic ear tags, the Internet, Palm Pilots and pop psychology in
pursuit of the perfect steak.
Members mark their cattle with electronic ear tags and use a Web database
created by eMerge Technologies Inc. to track everything from birth to
slaughter. Previously, ranchers had no way to tell what kind of meat their
animals produced after they were sold to the slaughterhouse. By sharing
information with the slaughterhouse through the Ranchers Renaissance Web
database, they can start to weed out relatives of the animals in their herd that
are producing tough meat.
Ranchers Renaissance member Tom Woodward, vice president and general
manager of the Broseco Ranch in Mount Pleasant, Texas, has even embraced
his group's suggestion that he deal with his animals more gently. Electronic
prods, hollering, and whistling are out, while round holding pens and colored
flags for guiding cattle are in. Being nice, the group says, produces
better-tasting meat. Some studies indicate that stressed-out, scared cattle tend
to tense up their muscles and produce tougher meat.
Others have borrowed technology from the maternity ward. Beef barons have
begun using ultrasound machines -- the same devices used to view human
fetuses in the womb.
Technicians hold a small hand-held device up to the area between the cattle's
12th and 13th rib. From that, they can estimate the size of the ribeye steak and
the amount of fat in and around it. Ranchers are convinced that the devices
enable them to determine how juicy their cattle will be on the plate.
By Some Measures
Texas rancher James A. McAllen says he often "eyeballs" his steers to see how
wide they are -- and how much beef they will produce. But the ultrasound, he
says, prevents him from being fooled by fat steers that don't have much
muscle.
"It's a tool to make sure it's just pure red meat," Mr. McAllen says. Last year,
he scanned the ribs of nearly 200 sires on his ranch -- and ended up sending
about 20 of them to the packing plant because they didn't measure up. He will
use the rest to breed calves that he hopes will produce better meat.
Researchers from Iowa State University say they performed ultrasounds on
50,000 cattle last year, up from 10,000 the year before. Each sonogram costs
$12 to $16.
But not all the new-fangled approaches have caught on. Many ranchers still
believe that, in general, black-haired cattle can trace their genetics back to the
Angus breed, which has a reputation for producing well-marbled -- and
sometimes tender -- meat. It is a bias reinforced by the Certified Angus Beef
program, whose pricey steaks are derived exclusively from black cattle. Angus
cows with reddish hides are rejected.
However, the truth is that tenderness varies drastically between individual
animals as well as breeds. The success of the Certified Angus Beef program
has been bad news for some who market a breed of brown-hided cattle called
Beefmasters. Lighter-colored cows are popular in hot areas such as South
Texas where black cattle wither in the heat. But lighter colored cows
sometimes fetch lower prices.
'Help Our Breed Survive'
This explains why Mr. Bradbury is standing on a blood-swathed floor at Sam
Kane Beef Processors Inc. in Corpus Christi, watching cattle carcasses jump
and twitch on the electric stimulator. "This will help our breed survive," says
Mr. Bradbury, chief executive of Beefmaster Cattlemen LP in Huntsville,
Texas.
After the animals have been shocked and then chilled, Mr. Bradbury
photographs their carcasses with a specially designed digital camera.
The BeefCam, a first in the industry, created by Smart Machine Vision Inc. of
Reston, Va., evaluates the color of the ribeye and gives each animal a
tenderness score. Mr. Bradbury sells the tender ones under the brand name of
baseball fireballer Nolan Ryan.
It's a long way from the standard of 30 years ago, when slaughterhouses
judged tenderness by pricking meat with needles and then measuring the
resistance. And despite the barrage of new technology, some are convinced
there haven't been many gains since then.
"There's a definite formula for tender beef, and it has nothing to do with
electrodes and cameras," says Texas rancher James McElroy. "It has to do
with the way you raise and manage the cattle. That's common sense."
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