Why Would Abramovich Taste Good?
“Come and get your beer, boys!” Ifor Humphreys calls, as he splashes a bucketful of award-winning ale into a wooden trough. Seven black steers lazily raise their heads, their mouths full of hay. “Not too thirsty today?” Humphreys asks, and as if in response, two of the cattle turn toward the trough and dip their long, black tongues into the frothy brew. It’s beer time at the farm. Shortly after, it’s massage time. Humphreys pulls on his rain boots, picks up a currycomb, and steps between the steers. He begins to brush one of the massive black backs, just the way you would groom a horse. Swipe, swipe, circle, circle, swipe. Humphreys doesn’t massage his beef cattle every day, but he does it often enough for their coats to shine. Although the steer doesn’t exactly sigh in pleasure, he does seem unusually content, relaxed. The beer and massage, a Kobe-style treatment, must be working.
If the name Ifor Humphreys doesn’t sound very Japanese to you, that’s because it isn’t. The “Kobe” farm I’m visiting is not in Kobe, Japan, but in Abermule, nestled in the hilly greenness of Wales. Yet Humphreys’s beef has much in common with the meat from Kobe. Humphreys puts in many hours a day to produce beef that tastes better than the regular supermarket cuts, and judging from his satisfied and growing customer base, he is succeeding.
It comes as no surprise that most modern food is carefully engineered. Few consumers would be surprised to learn that Oreo cookies and Cheez Whiz have been painstakingly designed in laboratories to be as pleasing to our taste buds as possible. But fresh meat producers work hard on their merchandise, too. If you are a meat company, and you want people to buy lots of meat, you have to make sure that the product you are selling is tender, juicy, and full of flavors. It’s not an easy task. Many large meat producers have ultramodern research facilities, where a legion of meat scientists design animal feed, study breed genetics, and devise new ways to package the products so that they stay fresh and appetizing for as long as possible. Their goal is to ensure that Americans—and other nations—stay hooked on meat.
Humphreys is not a scientist—“I’m just a farmer,” he says—but he knows a fair bit about how to make beef taste good. And just like many meat scientists, he believes that the breed of the animal is of particular importance: some breeds of cattle, poultry, or swine simply taste better than others. Take Berkshire pigs. According to a legend, over three hundred years ago, when the army of Oliver Cromwell was stationed in the shire of Berks, just west of London, the soldiers came across a remarkable breed of hogs. The animals were huge and produced hams and bacon so delicious their fame soon reached the ears of the British monarchs. A herd of Berkshire pigs was installed by the Windsor Castle to provide the fatty and amazingly tender pork for the royal tables. Years later, the breed benefited from a bit of Chinese and Siamese blood, which made the pigs even more efficient at plumping up. When the Japanese from Kagoshima Prefecture got hold of Berkshires, they called them Kurobuta (black pigs) and worked hard at breeding to make the meat even better. Today Berkshires are famed worldwide and sometimes even called the Kobe of pork. The official website of the Kagoshima Prefecture boasts that Kurobuta pigs have a “lip-smacking flavour” and meat that is light and crisp, soft and tender.
The tenderness of meat is one of the key features that the industry works to improve. Meat scientists say that tenderness is all about resistance to tooth pressure. If meat is not tender, at some point in the chewing process you will be ready to swallow but at the same time you will feel like you should chew a bit more. And, most likely, you will end up forcing a sinewy blob down your throat. On the other hand, meat that is tender will be soft on the tongue and leave no coarse strands between the teeth. Not everyone agrees that increased tenderness is better. In some cultures—in parts of Africa, for example—people actually like their meat to be chewy. In the West, though, the preference is for soft and tender, especially among women.
The science of meat’s tenderness is quite complicated, yet there are some predictable qualities that can push a steak or a chop from being soft to resembling a piece of dried-out rubber. To be tender, a muscle should contain low quantities of collagen—a type of protein that is the main component of connective tissue and that is abundant in tendons, skin, bones, and blood vessels. Some muscles have tons of collagen, making them tough, others very little. If you like your meat soft under your teeth, here’s a tip: avoid cuts that come from powerful muscles that the animal used a lot. If a muscle is exercised frequently, like the ones found in legs, it needs a lot of support in the form of connective tissue made of collagen. Most tender meat comes from muscles designed for structural support rather than for movement, such as the ones running along the spine.
There is one particular thing about the Kurobuta breed of pigs that makes their meat notably tender: marbling. Marbling occurs when fat is deposited between bundles of muscle fibers—that is, inside the muscle itself. If you take a piece of meat that has very little marbling, it will appear almost uniformly red. A well-marbled meat, on the other hand, will have so many white intrusions of fat that there won’t be much space left for the red. Marbling not only makes meat more tender (fat is softer to bite through than muscle) but also more juicy. Such fat gets released from the meat when you chew it, stimulating the flow of saliva and providing that “melt in your mouth” sensation.
Marbling is also the main reason why the word Kobe is for many practically synonymous with “deliciousness.” Traditionally produced among the green mountains of Hyogo Prefecture in Japan, Kobe is so renowned and craved that its price may soar up to $400 a pound. When Mark Schatzker, a Slate columnist who has traveled the world in search of the most perfect steak, tried his first cut of Kobe, he described it as being “smoother than hot buttered silk.” Kobe beef is so good mostly because the black Wagyu breed of cattle from which it comes produces extremely marbled meat. Some cuts of the A5 beef (the highest grading of marbling) are so fatty they look like a piece of lard dotted with a touch of ketchup. Humphreys is one of the very few farmers outside Japan who owns the famous black Wagyu breed. “In all of UK there is probably ten of us,” he tells me. If you are not in Japan, it’s not easy to get hold of Wagyu genetics to start your own herd. Seven years ago, when Humphreys decided to do something more “exciting” and try his hand at producing Kobe-style beef, he had to import a Wagyu embryo in a flask of liquid nitrogen all the way from Australia and implant it into a surrogate mother. He got a pure-blood Wagyu cow this way and a bull whom he named Abramovich (after the Russian investor, so that it sounded “contemporary and prestigious”). Fast-forward seven years, and now Humphreys has over twenty head of cattle, although some of them have a touch of Angus blood mixed in. That’s Humphreys’s little “Kobe” herd.
In Japan, no cow is born a future Kobe beef, though. Only a chosen few, those that meet several specific criteria, are “entitled to be called ‘Kobe beef,’” in the words of the Kobe Beef Marketing & Distribution Promotion Association. Either a pure-blood bull or a virgin Wagyu cow has to be raised and killed in Hyogo Prefecture. Its meat has to have tons of marbling and a firm texture. Each year as few as three thousand such cattle get certified—after death, of course—as Kobe beef. Very little of it makes it outside Japan. If you think you ate Kobe beef in the US before 2012, you can be certain you got scammed (unless someone smuggled it for you in a suitcase). The first cut of true Kobe arrived officially in North America in November 2012, imported by the Fremont Beef Company. In all of 2013, just 3,636 pounds was imported to the US and none to Canada, Australia, the UK, or any other EU country. Official imports to Europe began in mid-2014, with shipments to Germany and the Netherlands. In the States, you can eat a real Kobe steak at only a few restaurants, such as one at the Wynn resort in Las Vegas or 212 Steakhouse on East Fifty-Third Street in New York. Most of the other “Kobe” is not the real thing. Some of it may be from Wagyu cows raised outside Japan using traditional techniques, Humphreys style. The rest is regular beef, just overpriced.
Although Kobe is hard to come by in the US, there is plenty of Certified Angus Beef to please those who crave fatty steaks. Since cattle of the Angus-Aberdeen breed pack on fat earlier in their lives than most breeds, their meat is usually more marbled and tender than that of other breeds. The Certified Angus Beef, meanwhile, is a brand of beef. There are ten specifications that a cow’s carcass has to fulfill to be recognized as Certified Angus Beef—all in the hope that the meat will be so good that customers will keep wanting more. It has to have abundant marbling, a well-shaped rib eye, superior color, and “no neck hump exceeding 2 inches.” The argument behind this last requirement is that a neck hump is characteristic of Brahman cattle, famous for being the typical “holy cow” of India and for its particularly tough meat (which could well be one reason why Indians didn’t develop much taste for beef).
If you want to keep people buying the meat you produce, it’s not just the breed that counts, though. What you feed your animals is also important. The grain or grass they consume has a large impact on flavor. Diet was the reason, for example, why pork in colonial America wasn’t as good as the pork of the early twentieth century, nor even like what we have available to us today. In those days pigs ran freely in the forests, rooting for acorns and nuts. This made for happy pigs but poor meat—a diet of acorns makes pork soft, oily, and prone to rancidity. As a result, the original American pork couldn’t compare with modern, corn-fed industrial pigs, far from happy animals but better meat.
Neither Kobe nor certified Angus cattle are by definition grass fed, yet grass-fed beef has been on the rise in recent years as a natural, healthier option. But if we were to ask whether such beef actually tastes better, the answer would depend on the person asked. A majority of Americans don’t actually like the taste of grass-fed beef: it’s too strong for them, too gamey, and some have even described it as “fishy,” a flavor that comes from a high amount of omega-3 fatty acids found in such meat—the same ones that are abundant in salmon or mackerel. Generally, the argument goes, you like what you grew up eating. If the beef of your childhood was corn fed (as in the US), you will enjoy corn-fed beef as an adult. If you ate barley-fed cattle (as in Canada), you will like barley fed now. One problem American consumers have with grass-fed beef is that it tends to have yellowish fat. There is nothing wrong with yellow fat—the color comes from the carotene animals get from eating green plants. But Westerners don’t like the fat in their meat to be yellow. They prefer it to be snowy white, standing out in contrast to the bright red of the muscle.
You may have heard that the secret of Kobe beef lies in the way the cows are pampered. Stories abound of cows whose backs are massaged with sake, their thirst slaked with beer, and their sense of pleasure stimulated by Mozart’s piano concertos. But it’s all a myth—at least as genuine Japanese Kobe goes. According to the official website of the Kobe Beef Marketing & Distribution Promotion Association: “There have been almost no cases of cows being raised on beer,” and “massage itself neither softens meat nor increases the amount of marbling.” Humphreys knows that the way he treats his cows is not standard in Japan, but he does it anyway. Why? “It’s a good story,” he says, and then adds, with a smile: “And the cows like it.”
Although massaging cattle hasn’t been shown to improve the taste of their meat, we’ve long known that, on the other end of the spectrum, stressed, anxious animals all too often equal bad meat. If you find that your sautéed pork medallions are devoid of flavor, you may have just eaten a piece of an animal that has endured a life that couldn’t be further from the lush hills of Kobe or the rolling fields of Wales. It might have grown up in such filthy, crowded conditions that, out of stress, it compulsively gnawed on its cage bars. It might have been roughly handled, even beaten, and kept without adequate water. It might have been hungry. Because of overbreeding, it might have been too crippled to walk. In its final trip to the slaughterhouse, it might have been transported for days in the soaring heat of a truck, pressed against companions that had already died from the strain. Under such prolonged stress, muscle fibers become packed too tightly, like yarn in a sweater washed in hot water. The result is toughness, dryness, and bad taste. This condition, known as DFD meat (dark, firm, dry), affects about 10 percent of the pork in both the US and the UK and about 15 percent in Australia. In other words, far more farm pigs, cows, and chickens experience this kind of stress, which influences the taste of their meat, than enjoy the luxury treatment afforded to a tiny portion of animals. And it’s surely not the only industry practice that takes its toll on taste (not to mention the well-being of animals). To learn more about how meat producers end up influencing their own products—and potentially put up roadblocks to keeping consumers hooked on meat—I decided to seek out the experts and headed to State College, Pennsylvania.
I’m wearing a blue hard hat and a white overcoat that is far too big for me. The corridor in which I’m standing is spartan—the bright overhead lights giving it a slightly unreal, washed-out appearance. Here at the Penn State University Meats Lab, a sixteen-thousand-square-foot facility in State College, designed for research of animal slaughter and processing, I’ve come to learn how, and how not, to make meat taste good. Edward Mills, professor of meat science, is a big man who looks perfectly comfortable in a workman’s outfit. Once an aspiring vet, he grew up on a farm, where they regularly slaughtered hogs and cattle, so his work researching the death of livestock doesn’t bother him much at all.
As we tour the lab’s facilities, Mills offers me a sniff of one small vial that contains a substance that plays an important role in how good meat tastes. For Mills, the substance has no scent, but other people with a different genetic makeup are able to detect the odor. Unfortunately, it seems I’m one of them. The moment I place the vial under my nose, I feel as if someone punched me in the face. The stench is unbelievable. Imagine a mix of rotten rat carcasses with sweaty unwashed feet, and then multiply that by a hundred. The substance is called androstenone, and it’s a compound produced in the testicles of male pigs. Androstenone can make pork smell disgusting when cooked, and so for the meat industry, it spells trouble.
The simplest solution to the problem of androstenone is to castrate the pigs. But the customers not only want their pork free of dead rat stench, they also want it to be lean. Intact boars don’t get as fat as castrated ones do, so their meat is better for your arteries—and worse for your sense of smell. If boars could choose, they would probably vote for androstenone-tainted pork. Castration is usually done on fully conscious animals, without anesthesia or painkillers, by making incisions with a scalpel and squeezing the testicles out. It takes a long time. That the animals suffer is obvious from their cries (for those with steel nerves there are videos of the procedure on the Internet).
It seems, though, that you can get used to the stench of androstenone (luckily in meat it’s much more diluted than the concentrated form I experienced). In a few countries boars are not castrated, and their meat is more likely to be tainted with the compound—and yet, people still eat it. But if you are an American who grew up consuming pork from castrated pigs, you may be in for a culinary surprise in places such as Ireland, Spain, or the UK, where male pigs are usually—and happily—left untouched.
With the vial of androstenone safely stowed away, we go upstairs to visit the kill floor. Thankfully, there are no animals there today, and I am able to walk down the ramp, just as a cow or a pig would, between the bare, gray walls. At the end of the narrow, winding path, in a bloodstained room that smells of metal, is an electric stunner, a gun-like machine that renders an animal unconscious. Its electrodes are applied to the animal’s forehead, electrical current passes through the brain, and the animal collapses, its head extended. The breathing stops, but after fifteen to twenty seconds, the legs start to kick. Just then a knife is stuck in the animal’s throat to severe the carotid arteries and jugular veins. If it’s done correctly, brain death will occur about twenty seconds later. The animal bleeds out. Every Tuesday between twelve and twenty animals are slaughtered at Penn State—a tiny amount compared to big “processing plants” (meat industry lingo), which can “harvest” (an industry euphemism for “kill”) about 400 cows, 1,000 hogs, or 46,000 chickens per hour. Every day in the US, 24 million farm animals walk down ramps similar to the one I walked at Penn State, or are put on conveyor belts that air-lift them to the killing floor. That’s as much as the human population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and Dallas combined. About 9 billion animals per year in the US alone.
Mills’s lab has confirmed that the last hours and minutes of an animal’s life are particularly important in determining the taste of the meat on your plate. The more it suffers, the less likely your pork chop or steak will be any good. “If the animal is severely stressed, the meat may be unusually dark or pale in color and may have an off flavor. The handling right before the slaughter is also really important for meat tenderness,” Mills tells me, as we are standing among the various hooks, chains, and knives—the “harvesting instruments.” What the meat industry is particularly worried about is the so-called PSE meat, short for pale, soft, and exudative (oozing fluid), a condition that can mostly be seen in pork but can also occur in other types of meat, like turkey and chicken. Next time you cook a piece of pork that is pale pink and tastes quite bad, you may well assume it came from a pig that suffered acute stress just before it got killed. In its final moment, it was likely panting with its mouth wide open, squealing and trembling, its skin covered in blotches. In the US, 16 percent of all pork is PSE. In the UK, up to one-quarter is, and in Australia, even as much as 32 percent. Stressed by the restraining conveyors, which immobilize them and carry them forward to the slaughter point, poked with electric prodders, and killed alive after an inefficient stun, no pig’s meat will end up tasting good, regardless of its breed. Once “they die piece by piece,” in the words of a slaughterhouse worker in an interview with the Washington Post, stress hormones like adrenaline will flood the body, and the temperature of the animal will rise above normal. Setting aside the matter of cruelty, this poses a real problem for meat quality.
Making matters worse, after death the muscles acidify. This is essentially the same process that happens when you run really fast for a short distance: your muscles work without adequate oxygen, causing the formation of lactic acid. Once you stop running, your liver will clear the lactic acid from your body. You may be sore the next day, but you will otherwise be fine. In a dead farm animal whose liver is not working anymore, the lactic acid will lower the pH of the muscles far below normal. Such acidification, if combined with elevated temperature (due to acute stress), will cause the meat proteins to lose their normal structure—the same thing that happens in the body of a very sick person when his or her fever rises above 107.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Denaturation of proteins makes them less efficient at binding water. Instead of staying inside the meat and making it moist and juicy once cooked, the water drips out. It also takes with it the water-soluble red pigment, myoglobin, so that the muscle will lose its appetizing color. In meat-science lingo, such meat has low WHC—water-holding capacity. You probably have seen quite a few examples of that problem on the supermarket shelves: these are the packages of meat that have accumulated a pool of bloodish slop at the bottom of the Styrofoam tray. That slop, called purge or weep by the industry, is a solution of water and proteins—and a sign that the meat may have come from an animal that suffered even more than average. To avoid its unappetizing sight, meat producers add absorbent pads at the bottom of containers to soak up the liquid. It may work to make the product look better, but if you cook a meat with low WHC, it will likely end up tough and dry.
If an animal spent its life chronically stressed and experienced acute stress just before death, the result will be decidedly unappetizing. Some of its muscles will be pale and drippy, while others will turn dark and dry. As a result, one would quite reasonably conclude that, not just morally, but in the interest of producing a high-quality product, it would be best if animals suffered no stress in their lives at all and if the killing process was swift and painless. But the high incidence of PSE and DFD meat reveals that there are other dynamics driving meat producers. Though there are many ways to lessen the stress of farm animals, they are often just not cost efficient. There would be less PSE meat out there if the speeds at which animals are stunned and killed were slowed down, allowing more time for precision. But this would raise the costs, and making meat is a business, just like making furniture or mascara. The numbers have to add up.
Meat producers constantly struggle to balance quantity against quality. Keeping consumers hungry for meat means playing a game of tug-of-war between price and taste: the meat has to be flavorful, juicy, and tender, but it can’t be too expensive. Humphreys’s cattle live as stress-free lives as meat cattle can, and the massages and the beer may help keep them even calmer, making DFD profoundly unlikely. But their meat is expensive, at thirty-seven dollars for a single six-ounce fillet steak. Not everyone is willing to pay the price for stress-free meat. And so the struggle—cost versus quality—continues.
As Mills and I stand within the sterile whiteness of the coolers, only the reddish carcasses of pigs hanging from the ceiling add a splash of color to the room. They look naked, these animals—naked and cold. The chill is creeping into my bones, and the sweet scent of dead muscles, of fat and blood, is making me dizzy. I want to move on, but Mills has a story to tell me, and the best place to tell this story is here, in the coolers.
If you end up with a piece of pork or beef on your plate that is unpleasantly tough, Mills tells me, it doesn’t necessarily mean the animal suffered excessive stress just before death (it was most likely stressed, mind you, just maybe not unbearably stressed). The problem may have arrived postmortem. A few years ago Mills was asked by a pork producer to solve his meat-tenderness problem. His customers seemed to be losing the taste for pork. According to Mills, the meat was truly horrible. Yet it didn’t take him long to figure out what the problem was: cold shortening, as bad as it gets. Cold shortening happens when you chill the carcass too fast and too much: the muscles contract considerably more than they usually would after death, which leads to lack of tenderness after cooking. “Imagine taking a bundle of rubber bands that you are somehow able to bite through—that’s the texture of cold-shortened meat,” Mills told me. The Pennsylvania producer was blast chilling the dead pigs with ultracold air to speed up the lines and get a ready product in eighteen hours instead of the usual twenty-four. Mills told him to raise the temperature in the chillers—and voilà—problem solved. The loin chops became tender again.
Sometimes meat producers try to chill the carcasses faster than advisable to make up for the fact that their meat comes from acutely overstressed, scared animals. The reasoning here is that if they manage to get the adrenaline-induced heat out of the animal’s body before the muscles acidify, the meat will be just fine. But that often backfires, leading to cold shortening instead, and the consumer still ends up with tough, chewy steaks or chops. There is just no escape, it seems. Miserable, suffering animals generally equal bad meat.
There are exceptions, however. Some animal suffering actually results in better-tasting meat. For one, there is the androstenone-free pork from male pigs that endured castration without pain relief. But the classic example is pale veal. This doesn’t come from any specific breed of cattle; it’s all in the upbringing. To produce pale veal, you take young animals from their mothers soon after birth, stuff them into tiny cages that don’t allow for any movement, chain them at the neck, and feed them milk formula that is so deficient in iron they will become anemic and extremely weak. Such calves can’t move around, can’t stretch their legs, and if released, may not even be able to walk anymore, not even to the slaughterhouse. But meat produced this way will be tender and delicate, with creamy white fat. Why is the meat so good? The paleness is due to the animal’s anemia—their red blood cells don’t contain enough hemoglobin, a protein responsible for carrying oxygen throughout the body and for the red color of the blood. It is tender because the animals never move, so the muscles are low in collagen. The veal crates designed to keep baby cows immobile were banned in the EU in 2007. The American Veal Association is “encouraging” farmers to adopt group housing methods by 2017, but as long as customers want their veal pale and tender, and the law doesn’t say no, the veal crates will likely stay.
For years Temple Grandin has been working with the meat industry to improve the ways in which animals are treated—and which would also improve the taste of meat. An animal-wellness advocate born with autism, she was listed by Time magazine in 2010 among the hundred most influential people in the world. That same year HBO released a movie about her, which was nominated for fifteen Emmy awards and won seven.
Grandin has taken on many animal welfare issues: she has opposed electric prods, overcrowded pens, overloaded trucks, and rough handling. Now one of her pet projects involves opposing the use of beta-adrenergic agonists, a type of hormone-like drug. If fed to cattle, Merck’s Zilmax or Eli Lilly’s Optaflexx makes the animals get much more muscular. Add some Optaflexx to the feed just before slaughter, and your cow can gain an additional twenty-two pounds. But the problem with beta-adrenergic agonists is that although they boost quantity of meat, they may destroy quality. Meat from animals fed these drugs is often dry, dull in color, and far from tender. Again, chances are good that if you buy a piece of meat in the US and, after cooking it, discover it is not as succulent as you expected, it came from an animal raised with the help of beta-adrenergic agonists. Seventy percent of US cattle are given such drugs to promote growth. These animals often truly suffer. “Hot weather makes it worse,” Grandin once told me. “I’ve seen groups of cattle in slaughterhouses in hot weather. They acted like their muscles were stiff; they didn’t want to move. In rare extreme situations, their feet may fall off.” Such cows, whose feet—as one animal science professor once described—are “basically coming apart,” would not make a mouthwatering steak, that’s for sure.
Yet the meat industry doesn’t want to lose your taste buds to soy steaks and meatless meatballs—they want you to find their products delicious, tender, and juicy. At the same time, they want to grow as much muscle as fast and cheap as possible, and then “harvest” it as fast and cheap as possible. But what if because of all this rushing and pushing and growth promoting, the meat ends up being tough and dry? Luckily (for the meat producers, at least), not everything is lost, even if the carcass has already been dressed and chilled and is ready to be packed onto Styrofoam trays. What you need at this point is a needle and a chemical solution, a solution you can inject into the meat to make it tender once again, or at least tender enough. To achieve this, you can insert a solution of salt, phosphate, and lactate into the meat, which will improve both tenderness and juiciness. You can also infuse it with special enzymes that break down proteins. There are many chemicals that get injected into fresh meat in North America and Australia. According to the beef industry, “Enhancement generally ranges from 6% to 12% of initial weight.” It may include substances such as hexametaphosphate, sodium tripolyphosphate, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, sodium lactate, and calcium lactate. They not only make the meat more tender, but also boost juiciness and add “meaty” flavors.
If injecting the meat with brines doesn’t work, you can always mince or flake the muscle into a pulp and, with the help of a glue, shape a new, better steak or a chop out of it. The glue can be sodium alginate, a gel made from brown seaweeds, or transglutaminase, a bacteria-synthesized white powder you can dust over pieces of meat to stick them together into a “steak.” (If you want to trick your dinner guests into thinking that you are serving expensive cuts and not cheap mince, you can buy some under the brand name Activa from www.amazon.com.) Some processes of this so-called meat restructuring are so efficient that you may not even be able to tell that the “steak” you are eating is not really a steak. You are most likely to encounter such products in chain restaurants and cafeterias and in frozen-meat cases in supermarkets. Restructured meats are usually rib- or steak-shaped and often breaded or sold as part of ready-made dinners. A survey in the UK showed that some such “meats” contain only 55 percent actual meat (the rest is soy and other compounds), so if you eat them, you could say you are already halfway to being vegetarian—and switching to 100 percent soy burgers wouldn’t be much of a culinary shock to you.
People want the meat on their plates to be tender, juicy, and bursting with flavors. Meat producers want this, too. For them, whether or not we keep buying meat is a matter of survival. And so they breed the animals for marbling, massage them with sake, keep them imprisoned in tiny cages, shock their bodies with electric currents, and inject them with brines. Every day, they look for new ways to make the meat tastier and keep us craving for more. They research feeding green tea to turkeys, offering garlic to lambs to improve meat quality, and using gas to kill chickens to make the meat less tough.
But the meat producers are torn because we, the consumers, want our meat to be both cheap and delicious, and we can rarely have it both ways. For all the legions of meat scientists seeking out ways to keep us loving meat, their work is only partly about the flavors and textures. They are also working to find a perfect balance between the taste of meat and its price. Yet all too often meat that is cheap is of poor quality because it comes from animals that suffered much more than average, as if their fears leaked into the steaks and chops on our plates, making them tough and with an off flavor.
In a better world, all animals would be treated at least as well as Humphreys treats his “boys.” In a better world, all meat would be juicy and tender and tasty—and still affordable. That’s not the world we live in, or a world in which we will live in any near future. Although the taste of meat is important, for now it’s price, not quality, that matters more in keeping us hooked on meat—no matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise. For the meat industry, keeping meat’s price low is one of the time-tested ways to ensure we will continue buying its products. But, as we shall see, the meat industry has other ways, too: devising savvy marketing and advertising, lobbying, threatening lawsuits, sponsoring research, and intimidating critics.