Ep. 227: Red Cutter

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is a meat eating podcast coming at you shirtless,
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(00:29):
Nor where you stand with on X. All right, everyone,
we're joining today by our first ever We should have
done this a long time ago, our first ever genuine
meat scientists, Chris Calkins. Do you go by? Is that right?

(00:51):
Meat scientists? Is that cool to say? Yeah, absolutely, that's
the right way to do it. Let me test your
knowledge to find out if you're legit. Do you know
what a Warner? I think it's called a Warner Bruntler
sheer force test is well, it's a Warner Bratsler Chan

(01:13):
Warner and Lyman Bratsler decades ago created an objective tenderness
machine and it was that share force machine you're referring to.
So you passed, But let me ask you this question.
How many holes does that thing punch into the steak?

(01:35):
That's uh, it's up to the operator, but typically we
would expect to get six cores from a regular beef steak,
for example, in smaller animals, you have to get by
with fewer cores and more steaks. Okay, good, we'll proceed now. No, now,
I have faith that that Karen found us the right
meat scientist. Uh what is the first? Off? Tell us? Like? What? What?

(02:00):
What is a meeting? What is uh? What is meat science?
And how does one you know get there? It's been
an interesting journey to become a meat scientist. I was
involved in agriculture as a high school student in the
state of Washington. Had a really cool high school agg

(02:21):
teacher who is a lifetime mentor for me, and I
was lucky enough. As a senior in high school, I
served as a State Future Farmers of America President State
f f A president, and that same time he went
to Texas and m to work on a Master of
Science in meet science. And I always thought it was

(02:44):
going to be a veterinarian. But I packed everything in
a car, drove to Texas, and the day I got there,
I got a job in the meat lab and I
liked it well enough. Apparently I've never left since then.
So eventually went on and got a like what is
your You have a PhD? Like what is it? What
is it? What was your dissertation? Like what sort of

(03:07):
like how do you narrow in on this super broad
meat science category and find your personal you know, expertise. Well,
that's a that's a great point because the field of
meat science is really quite broad. That is, everything from
the live animal all the way through to the products
that we eat. And my dissertation had to do with

(03:28):
the enzymes in meat that break up proteins in other words,
the tenderization process. And I have built my career looking
at quality, particularly eating quality characteristics of meat. How much
how familiar familiar are you with um kind of like

(03:54):
layman perspectives about meat? Right, Like you have to in
conversation with people or in restaurants or backyard barbecues, you
have to hear a lot of like theories about why
this is that way, that that our way off And
if you don't know if you hang out with hunters
or not, but you'd probably get inundated with screwball theories

(04:18):
about what is the way it is or why certain
things are this way and why they're that way. Yeah,
it becomes a compulsion related to try and set the
record straight, make sure everybody understands what we're talking about.
So I'm I'm in addition to having ah of my

(04:38):
time is spent on research, but the other thirty percent
is spent on teaching. So I teach both undergraduate students
as well as master and doctoral students as well. Yeah,
let me hate you with Okay, Spencer's gonna hit Spencer
new Hearth, our very own and special Spencer new Hearth
is now going to hit you with um. This is

(05:01):
probably the question we get the most, and this is
a wild game question, but I'm sure it has so
many parallels to domestic production that you'll know exactly what
we're talking about. But this is sort of the leading
hunter based wild game problem question. How would you put it, Spencer?

(05:23):
Do stressed out animals taste worse? And can that stress
be a factor of something like the rut for a
white tailed deer or an elk um or from a
bad shot where a deer is hitted then it runs
a mile and it lays there for four hours and
slowly dies. Can a stress like that toward the adrenaline

(05:44):
make them taste worse? That initial burst of adrenaline does
not have a real big impact, but if it's around
for very long. In other words, if we have a
longer term stress like the run, for example, then absolutely
there are metabolic changes that take place in the meat

(06:07):
that will impact the eating quality of that product. I'd
be happy to explain that further, but we do not
want to go no dig in man. We want to
go way deep awesome. So think about what we know
is the way the body stores energy um is through
glycogen initially, and then that turns we also store energy

(06:29):
as fat, but that glancogen is used to provide the
short term burst of energy we need when an animal,
for example, is running. Now it turns out that once
that animal has been harvested, that glycogen gets converted to
acid in the muscle. It becomes more acidic. We would

(06:50):
say it has a lower pH that's normal, that's good.
That's what we're all used to with all of the
muscle foods that we eat. Is that normal h decline
that occurs when an animals harvested. The problem is when
you get that burst of adrenaline, or you spend five
days at the runt running around acting like a teenager

(07:11):
and not eating and all the rest of that, we
exhaust the glycogen stores in the animal, and when that happens,
that pH does not drop, it does not become acidic,
and we get all kinds of weird, strange flavors, and
the texture is different. It's dark, it's sticky. Most people

(07:31):
find that kind of product not very desirable. And the
time course of that really depends on how much stress
the animal has and how long it takes place. So Spencer,
your question about four hours and a long, slow death,
that's probably long enough to have an impact on that animal.
If that animal is injured in a while, say it

(07:52):
breaks a leg or something, then all of those kinds
of things will give long enough stress. Glycogen is houstag
pH stays high, meat doesn't taste very good. You know.
A good extreme of this that I think about is
the um. One time, my brother rancher that my brother

(08:12):
and his friends know, told them about a bull that
he had that had broken its leg down in the
bottom of some coolie and it'd been down there while
and he couldn't find it, and eventually found it, and
he told those guys, if you want to go get it,
you can have it. This thing is huge, you know,
And they went down and got it and my brother

(08:33):
comes home and makes a steak out of it, And
I mean, it was probably already a bull. It was
already a bull. So that's probably a couple of strikes
against it. But I mean, I'm not exaggerating when I
say that it was unchewable. Yeah, it's um. Most of
the stress related response has to do with taste, has
to do with flavor. The fact that it was a

(08:54):
bull and an older animal, that's what makes it tough.
But we have people who contact us regularly with a
very similar situation. An animal is injured, been hanging around
for quite a while, and they wonder can they turn
it down to a steak or ground beef, And uh,
it's it's just a different taste. And so that's a

(09:16):
pretty common complaint that people have homes. So the toughness
is toughness isn't related to stress, not so much that
the stress has a far bigger impact on flavor than
it does on toughness. All right, So one of the
things that makes certain things, like what makes certain animals

(09:38):
inexplicably tough, like you know, I mean you could sometimes
you'll have guys get whatever, like you get you know,
a box or someone will get you know, ten bull
elk and they're all great. In the eleventh one, it's
just chewier in hell umkay wolf off and say like,
oh he must have been stressed. Would be our be

(10:00):
like a thing that we would say when you encounter
that super tough animal. There's there's really three things broadly
that impact toughness. One has to do with how contracted
that muscle cell is, how much integrity there is in
the muscle cell. The second thing has to do is

(10:20):
something called connective tissue. That's that white, silvery tissue on
the outside of the meat. And then the third part
is fat. And so anything we do to impact any
of those three things can impact tenderness. Uh, let me
ask you one more than Spencer's gotta ask you a
good question. Uh, have you ever have you ever had

(10:43):
occasion to eat like soup, like to eat deer meat
right away or any kind of meat, Okay, so whatever,
Like if you if you get an animal and then
cook it within a couple of hours, it's like it's
kind of like a divisive taste, Like some people like it,
some people don't like it. It definitely has a different texture.
There's something in it that seems almost like a metallic taste.

(11:08):
That then that's gone in a day or two. Right,
So we know that once you once you shoot an
animal and enough time passes, it gets rigid, it gets stiff.
We call that rigor mortis, right, And that process is
the process of all of the energy and the muscle

(11:30):
dissipating once the heart stops meeting and to stop blood flow.
And that is actually a toughening process. In fact, once
you get to that point that's about as tough as
that meat is going to be. We can then hang
it longer in a cooler outside and cold air, and

(11:51):
that allows the meat to become more tender. But if
you get ahold of that meat before it's into rigor mortis,
and you cut it, that cutting stimulates contraction. You put
it on a hot pan or a hot grill that
stimulates that contraction, and you can get meat that's literally
too tough to chew. You know, every now and then

(12:13):
somebody says, I love to shoot an animal, then immediately
go kind of steak and go eat it. To me,
that's disrespectful of the animal because you are you are
eating that meat in the worst possible conditions to have
a good eating experience. If you'll at least let that
animal go through rigor mortist to get stiff uh, then

(12:36):
you're gonna have a far better eating experience. Okay, Spencer
whole type. Alright, I don't understand what you're saying, because
I would like explain the rigor mortis timeline. I would
think that when it's in rigor, it's all stiffened up, right,
But before rigor it has the potential to contract. And

(13:00):
if you stimulate the animal by um by, by cutting
the meat, or more importantly, by putting it on a
hot skillet, it will stiffen up. It will shorten more
than usual. And if you wait till the animals Okay,
so let's say there's an animal, whatever you're in a
slaughterhouse or whatever, you kill an animal. There's an animal

(13:22):
that just dies, Okay, struck by I don't want to
say struck by lightning. It just dies. At first, you
can wiggle it all around, you can grab its arm
and shake it. Yes, Then a while later you can't.
Then a while later you can. So during the period
when it's stiffened up, that is more tender than before
it stiffens up. If you could cook it without allowing

(13:46):
it to contract, it would be tender, but you cannot
do that. The when we cut the steak, we remove
all the muscle bone connections, and so that muscle is
free to contract, and so before riggor mortis is complete,
that is a very dynamic muscle that can that can

(14:08):
shorten and toughen as you handle the product. Once you
once it goes into a rigger, then you're at a
certain level of tenderness. And from that time on beyond
where rigger happens, it will just get more and more
the longer you keep it in the cooler. Okay, I'm

(14:29):
mostly good on that one. So far. Your answers have
a lot of conviction, which is like what I would
want out of meta Year's official Meat Scientists, right, But
I wonder if you lack any confidence in what you're saying,
um knowing that like a lot of the studies that

(14:50):
have been done in the literature that you're referencing has
been on like domestic game cattle that was you know,
ben dean cicado over the last ten thousand years, versus
something like a white tailed deer or an elk, a
wild animal. They're just wired differently. And so my question is, like,
when they're talking about stress, how is how is do

(15:13):
we know that stress is the same to a dear
versus cattle? And then you know all the rest of
your answers if they lack any confidence, no way that
we're talking about b versus wild game. You know, muscle
is muscle. I do not lack confidence on the science
and and Spencer we could get in an argument. You

(15:36):
got him all wrong. He's not trying to be pugnacious.
He's just trying to He's trying to people at home
or so there's people at home in the future listen
to this. They're at home thinking, yeah, what does he know?
We're talking about deer? So he's just trying to clear
that up. Yes, no, I'm just getting the artime. I

(15:56):
totally understand you're the point that you're saying, Uh have
I have studied a variety of different species. I have
studied product from around the world, and muscle responds the
same way that some of the timelines are different. And
so for example, uh, poultry, for example, a chicken, it

(16:19):
will go into rigor mortis in an hour and a half.
A beef animal might take eight or ten hours before
it's fully into rigor mortis. If you take a goat
or sheep there and there in four to six hours,
that's about That's about what I'd anticipate for deer as well.
So the biology of muscle contraction and rigor mortis and

(16:42):
all of that that's fixed. It's it's gonna happen in
all all of the different species that we're talking about.
Now we have to think about most of the time.
When you think about that beef steer, for example, uh,
that animal has been neutered, and so it doesn't have
uh the access to all of those hormones that uh

(17:05):
uh uh and intact mail would have. And so the
sensitivity to hormone fluctuations might vary a little bit from
species to species, um, and depending on what sex or
gender you're dealing with. But at the end of the day,
the biology says, um, all muscles go through the same sequence,

(17:27):
the same kind of process as what I've tried to describe.
Can you you tell us explain the term I hear
now and then I thought it was a red cutter,
but Spencer convinced the otherwise that that's not actually a thing.
And he was saying do you mean a dark cutter? Like,

(17:48):
what is a dark cutter? So when we talked about
the drop in pH that happens normally when rigor occurs,
that gives us the normal call or that we're used
to sing inside the muscle. If the pH stays high,
then the meat is very dark in color. And so

(18:09):
in beef cattle they call it a dark cutter. Have
you heard red cutter? I've never heard red cutter until
about two minutes given up on that one. But it's
the it's the same way you can get that same
condition in pork. If pork or stressed for too long,
you can get in that case, we call it d

(18:31):
f D dark firm and dry. And so they're all
just descriptions that you just described wild. You just described
wild pig, a lot of wild pig pretty well. Yeah.
So that when you have a dark cutter in the
in the slaughter world or commercial slaughter world, is it

(18:55):
attributable to a specific thing that happened to that animal
or is it just some percentage will come out that way?
Now that's uh, it is it is a response to
sustained stress. But just like people, some animals are pretty
chill and some animals are really tightly wired. The ones

(19:20):
that are high strung, high stress, those are the ones
that are gonna be more likely to have the problem.
So the same set of conditions, whether it's UH duration
or shipping or hauling or whatever, the same set of
conditions will have a different impact on every animal depending
on how that animal responds to the situation. Yeah, I

(19:42):
got you there. There's a product these guys were selling,
maybe maybe Spencer, maybe remember the name of it. It was,
um it was a contraption where you could shoot a
deer and then run over real quick and hook this
thing up to your car battery and appit like how
youse app them in a in a slaughterhouse? Can you explain, uh,

(20:08):
why they do that in a in a plant? Why
they's app them with electricity? And then can is that
even can? Can? Is it realistic that you could replicate
that in the wild? Whatever the hell you're trying to
get when you do it? Yeah, So let's let's first
talk about what happens when you apply electricity. You cause
the muscle to contract. And and by the way, a

(20:33):
car battery doesn't work very well because that's a constant,
continuous electrical field. What you really want is alternating current.
So the muscle contracts, relaxes, contracts relaxes. As you do that,
you're using up glycogen, you're producing acid. You are hastening

(20:53):
the rate at which rigor mortis occurs. That makes me
more tender. And so from the from the mechanism standpoint,
it works. Can we create something like that that could
be used in the field. Again, as long as you
have pulses of electricity rather than a continuous contraction, then

(21:16):
you're gonna have, uh, some improvement is possible under that scenario.
The other thing I would point out is, um, when
when when we when we shoot a deer, the heart
stops right and that's how blood is pumped through the body.
So when the heart is no longer beating, we can't

(21:39):
pump blood out. So um, some electrical impulse will help
get a little bit of that blood out of the system.
And so that's the other side benefit. So what is
the ideal shot placement for a hunter in the head,
in the neck, in the heart, in the lungs, in

(22:02):
the spine, Like what would be your top choice? Yeah,
so just in terms of meat, just limit this to like,
in terms of meat quality, and get out of the
and not bog it down with room for air, right,
margin for air and all that. I appreciate that because
that is a bit of the question. At the end

(22:24):
of the day, you want the animal to go from
being alive to no longer being alive, and heart shot
ahead shot, any of those will will affect that same consequence.
And so from a meat quality standpoint, um, other than
damage to tissue and those kind of things, there's probably

(22:44):
not real a real big difference among those locations. Do
you have you ever seen? Um? I can't really it's
hard to even explained this. Sometimes when you're when you're
skinning a deer, you'll find that there's like a you
know that foam, there's like a foam between the like

(23:07):
like a bubbly foam that forms between the hide and
the meat. Right, What is that stuff? Well, that's part
of that connective tissue that I talked about again, That
is a protein based structure that goes between the muscles
and also between the muscle and the hide. Uh, no
no damage, no risk, no concern on that standpoint. I

(23:31):
might mention though that um, we we think about, well,
if you've got that silver tissue on the outside of
the muscle, you can always trend that off. But if
you get a microscope and look at that muscle, that
tissue actually goes throughout the muscle. And and that's why
muscle from the leg, for example, is inherently less tender

(23:54):
than a muscle that's from the loin or the backstrap,
because those are muscles of support versus the legs, big
muscles of locomotion. They need more of that connective tissue. So,
by and large, if you've gotta you've got a piece
of meat with a lot of connective tissue in it,
you know, uh, slow roasting, uh, putting in a pot

(24:16):
and stewart that kind of a thing is how we
tend to cook that. Whereas you get the muscles that
don't have very much connective tissue that tenderlins, the backstraps,
all of that. We can make sticks out of those,
throw them in a skellet throw them on the grill,
and have a very nice eating experience. What a what
happens when well, first let me ask you this. Have

(24:38):
you have you had exposure to to your your possiverous
uh counterparts like fish, fish meat? Is that a thing
I'm not much on fish meat. I can't tell you
too much about that. Are there people that specialize Are
there people in the meat science word to specialize in fish? Yes,
there are people specialize in fish. People specialize in pork

(25:00):
or beef or poultry. Uh, yeah, we're we can be
a pretty specialized group. So because this one, this question
about bleeding, let's just let's just if you know about
the process of bleeding fish, you can speak to that.
But what are you trying to achieve when what are
you trying to achieve when you bleed something? When people

(25:21):
talk about like needing to bleed it out, like, what,
what are you really getting? That's that's a that's an
awesome question because a lot of people run around saying,
there's all this blood in the meat um muscle, which
is true. Muscle is sent water, right, So all you

(25:45):
have to think about what's the function of blood. And
one of the main things is we carry oxygen through
blood right on hemoglobin molecules inside the meat is a
molecule that also binds oxygen, bind better than hemoglobin actually,
so it draws the oxygen out of the blood into
the meat and it binds to mild globin. And so

(26:09):
when you look at meat, and that meat is red
in color. That's myad globe. There's very very little hemo
globe and very little blood in the meat itself. But
because meat water, everybody goes, oh my gosh, look at
all the blood that's in that meat. But most of
that is myo globin and water that's inside the muscle.

(26:32):
So when you bleed, you're just trying to get rid
of the bloods that's there. And probably the biggest real
reason for that is um It's a great nutrient for
bacterial growth and spoilage, and so we try and remove
that so that we don't have to deal with it.
You're saying that blood in the meat is lends itself

(26:57):
to quicker spoilage. Not necessarily a meatles meats are pretty
good bacterial medium for growth anyway, but typically in in uh,
in commercial animals, we we remove the blood just so
that we don't have to deal with that as we
go down the line. Otherwise it tends to drip and

(27:18):
get all over everything. Oh my god. You so once
it's out it becomes problematic. Yeah, like you don't you
don't want it around? Yeah? Yes, I want to back
up to dark cutters. Real quick um red cutters. Yeah, yeah,
Steve's red cutters. Like the obvious stressors are like taking
a long time to die, uh, and like not eating.

(27:39):
But what are some of the not so obvious stressors
that hunters wouldn't think of? Like is weather something that
would stress out an animal and make their meat worse,
or like interacting with foreign animals things like that. Yes, Uh,
it's a really good question, Spencer, And you're absolutely right.
Just think about you or write. Anything that causes us

(28:02):
stress causes that animal stress as well. And and and
so part of that has to do with physical stress
if it's cold and you're trying to stay warm, for example, Um,
if you're we also have social stress, right you mix
mix people up in an elevator and everybody gets kind
of quiet and awkward and and and that kind of

(28:24):
stress also creates circumstances or situations that can impact the animal.
In the case of females, if they're cycling, then that
hormonal cycle can create stress as well. That draws glycogen
out of the muscles. Uh. It's that's a really tough

(28:45):
question to it's. Uh, it's it just creates enough different uh,
physiological responses to those hormones that that animal is going
to need more energy and it's going to draw against
that glycogen's oars to be able to supply that sort
of like nervous energy if you think of it. So

(29:06):
you never hear like hunters and fishermen complain about a
spawning fish tasting bad though, or strutting turkey or anything
like that. Is it just because like we're really ignorant,
or is it less likely to happen in poultry and fish? Uh?
I don't know about fish and poultry. It can still
happen in poultry, but chances are that we're that's kind

(29:29):
of what we expect. It's what we're used to seeing.
And the best example I can give you is UH,
in poultry, commercial poultry, once they're harvested and you're removed
all the all the viscera, then you want to chill
that carcass down quickly. And the way that happens in

(29:51):
the industry is you take the poultry carcass and put
it in an ice water bath. Now that cold shock,
but or the muscle is in rigor causes immediate contraction.
In comparison, you could also chill that carcass by putting
it in a refrigerated cooler. And so you can go

(30:13):
to the grocery store now and there are there is
air chilled poultry and there's regular commercial poultry. And I'll
tell you there's a profound difference in tenderness between those two,
which the air chilled is not as contracted and is
far more tender than what we traditionally do with poultry.

(30:33):
Are these labeled like things that we can identify in
the grocery store? Uh? Typically the air chilled poultry is
labeled that way. The others are not their traditional normal
commodity product. If you had to look at what you
know is done with well, I'm gonna ask you an

(30:54):
equivalent question to this around around red meat, but knowing
what's done in uh poultry slaughter facility. Okay, what would
be the closest approximation that a person could achieve if
they're hunting pheasants or hunting turkeys and they have a
pickup truck with them, Like, what would what would you

(31:16):
do upon what? Like? What would you do in terms
of a timeline and tools in order to replicate best practices? Yeah? So, Uh,
there's there's two big things. I think one is you
want to get rid of the guts UH as soon
as possible. That's a that's a food safety issue. UM.

(31:40):
If we have uh feces or fecal material spreading around
the inside of that body cavity. The sooner you get
all that out, the better off you are. That's number one.
Number two is and we've kind of touched on this earlier,
but you just give it time to go into a
rigor mortis. But or you do much more with it

(32:01):
and so you don't have to plunge it in ice water.
You can allow it to go to rigger um for
an hour or so once you've removed the viscera, and
and you'll have a fine eating experience. It's when we go,
I think too fast. It's when we try and and
and you know, get the animal and stuff it with snow,

(32:25):
or we get the animal and and and and throw
it in the skillet too quickly. That's where we get
quality problems being created. And you're saying it's bad to
stuff with snow. Most of the time you don't need
to do that. And if you're if you if you
got to say a deer for example, and let's assume

(32:45):
it's a heart shot as opposed to a head shot.
So you've disrupted the internal organs, right and um, and
so the best thing you can do from a food
safety standpoint is to remove all those organs from the
inside of the animal. Now, once you've done that, there's
a chance there's some fecal material in there. And so

(33:08):
what happens when you stuff it with snow You've just
smeared all that around, and as the snow melts, you've
smeared that bacteria around on the inside. The fact is
the animals going to chill out at a reasonable rate anyhow. Um.
I'm now, Now, if you're dealing with a very large
animal and it's warm outside, um, you know it'd be

(33:31):
nicer if you could cool that off a little quicker.
But you're not going to have snow around to do
that under that circumstance anyway. So I don't think it's
necessary to try and accelerate the chilling rate of animals
as long as you deal with the meat in a
timely matter after it's hand rigor mortis. So are you
saying there's such things freezing something too soon? Like if

(33:52):
you shut a duck at nine am and you had
it breast and gutted by ten am and going to freeze.
Is that too quick? Completely? In fact, we actually had
a had a former student in our department who went
to work in Alaska and they're harvesting reindeer when it
was twenty below outside. And the problem they had is

(34:16):
they they harvest the deer, lay it on the ground,
and in twenty minutes it would be frozen. Now what
happens is when that when the meat thaws, then you
get massive muscle contraction, way more than normal. So absolutely
too fast to the freezer is not a good thing.

(34:37):
The other dimension of that spencer that you ask about,
which is interesting, I think, is that, uh, it's better
if you can go into rigor with the muscles attached
to the bones, because that, to some extent that limits contraction.
If you remove all those connections of the muscle to
the bone, that muscle is free to shorten up as

(35:00):
much as it wants to. That's really interesting because there's
a there's a real debate in the hunting world around
um things like things like called the you know, the
the gutless method, or you know, various ideas around deboning
things right away in order to reduce weight when you

(35:20):
have to carry it a long way, and um, a
lot of people will and I've certainly done it myself,
shoot an animal and then immediately debone at all and
put into bags. And I always view the con of it.
The con to doing this would be that it just
seems to create a harder time to sort it out

(35:41):
when you get home. It makes more surface area for
there to be hair and for it to get dirty.
But I never heard anybody talk about that it could
even have a negative impact on the end quality in
terms of toughness tenderness. Well, and that is in fact
the case that if you if you bone it out

(36:02):
while it's hot, you can compromise the contraction and therefore
the tenderness. But you know, you've got to be practical.
You can quarter the animal, for example, and most of
the muscle bone attachments are still retained under that scenario.
But if you're gonna take your knife and separate every

(36:23):
muscle and and open it up so there are no
connections at all, uh that I would say the longer
you can wait to do that, the better off you're
gonna be, because you'll be closer to rigor mortis when
you get to that point, Spencer, was that you talking
all about everybody hangs ther deer up wrong? Yes, tell

(36:44):
him about that. So I've I've heard that like a
good steakhouse or a good butcher will do the tender
stretch method where they hang a car like a typical
deer hunter go kill a deer, they skin it out,
and then they hang it by the achilles. So it's
like as long as it possibly can be. But I've

(37:04):
heard that the tender stretch method is preferred by the
beef industry where you basically put these hooks in their
pelvis and then you allow their back hands to relax
and hang it more of a ninety degree angle. Is
that something that you hear that you promote it. It
will definitely give a measurable improvement in tenderness if you

(37:28):
use that method. It is not used in the US
meat industry at all, but there are other countries that do.
Is it an efficiency thing? Now, Well, it's what we're
used to write. We know what the cuts look like,
we know what to expect all the rest of that,
and and so if you're going to go to a

(37:48):
tender stretch strategy, it's a it's a whole different way
of uh separating that carcass and of pieces, and it's
just not something the U s ander Steer showing any
interest in doing by and large certainly on the beat side. Um,
the beef in the United States pretty tender compared to
around the world. But I have been to places around

(38:10):
the world where the entire cooler is hung through tender stretch. Interesting. Sorry,
go ahead, I'm sorry. I've always heard that it's an
issue of being efficient. When you hang something by the achilles,
you can fit a lot more of these things in
the cooler than if you hang them by the pelvis,
and then they're they're taking up a lot more room.
Side by side it would be about the same. But

(38:33):
as that hind leg falls forward, then you're the distance
between the animals would have to be have to be
a little bit greater in order to have room for that.
It might be interesting part of that, part of that
whole tender stretched method was devised because uh, in New

(38:54):
Zealand they were shipped this is years ago. They were
they were freeze lambs. Uh. They would slaughter lambs, freeze
the carcasses and ship them overseas. And they discovered that
that freezing before rigor mortis made really really tough meat,
and so one way to counteract that was to use
that tender stretched method or a similar kind of hanging

(39:17):
where the legs fall forward. That if you think about that,
that causes the muscles of the leg on the back
side to stretch more. And so because they're stretched more,
they're less contracted. But on the inside of the leg,
those muscles are actually more contracted, right, And so it's
beneficial for some muscles and not so beneficial for other muscles.

(39:51):
I want to tell you a story of guy told
me and and I want you to tell me he's dead,
So I want to tell me if I'm getting his
story right. Yea. I used to live next story to
a guy in Miles City, Montana. Who he was. He
was in his nineties when I knew him, and he
was telling me that his family in Montana, they used
to raise turkeys, and they would raise turkeys around they

(40:16):
would time it out in order to be selling Thanksgiving turkeys.
They were shipping these turkeys by rail from Montana to Minneapolis.
And he told me that they would raise the turkey
up and then cut off its food supply so that
it's digestive track emptied completely and they would only give

(40:37):
it water. Then they would kill the turkeys, pluck them
and not got them because that led to spoilage quicker,
and that they would pack these turkeys into barrels, guts
in them but no food in their system, and ship
them by rail to Minneapolis for people to eat on Thanksgiving.

(40:59):
This is an I was gonna say, this was a
while ago. Does that make any sense? Well, part of
it does. Um. Actually, if you think about ruminants right, uh,
they have a lot of gut fill and so it
takes a long time for that to get gone. So

(41:21):
you could cut off feed source to an animal for
a while, um, you know, twelve twenty four hours or whatever,
and biologically that animal doesn't know it. It maybe starts
to get at hungry, but but biologically it's got all
the energy and everything else that needs water. Access to

(41:41):
water is huge with If you do not have access
to water, that whole dark cutting condition becomes evident more quickly.
Access to water is pretty important. And so I could
fathom a place where you don't feed the turkeys and
you have less gut fill. Um that probably um minimizes

(42:06):
a little bit the risk. But to be honest with you, UM,
I would highly recommend that they be they have the
guts removed, as opposed to its zing them down and
leaving the guts in there. Thereafter, after the animal dies,
there is migration. I've gut bacteria that comes through the

(42:27):
comes through the walls of the intestines into the rest
of the body cavity, And of course I sing that
would slow it down and all the rest of that,
But why run the risk right, Just remove it and
and let that natural process of cooling and aging take
place after that. That's one other thing I want to

(42:47):
mention Steve is that, UM, we've talked a lot about
what happens up until rigor mortis, but I would sure
want your listeners to understand that after grigor mortis, then
as we store that meat in a refrigerator, that meat
is going to gradually get more and more tender because

(43:08):
of those insigns that are naturally in the meat. So
I'm thinking back on your turkey question about the guy
with the pickup who shoots the turkey, is what should
he do? Uh? Waiting to freeze that meat, even if
it's a day or two, is going to make that
meat more tender and beef we've see that that muscle

(43:30):
improves in tenderness for about seven to ten days. After
that it still improves, but at a much lower rate.
And so it would be you would get far better
product if you age that beef two weeks before you
may cut it into steaks in the case of deer

(43:51):
or whatever, even if it's there or four days, that's
gonna be better than cutting it and putting it in
the fraser immediately. Similar to see turkey question talking about
how those turkeys were cut off from food. Um, the
guys in my hometown of South Dakota that teach me
how to clean snapping turtle, they all did the same
thing where they catch a snapping turtle and then they

(44:13):
put it in a tank with water and they leave
it in there for a week, and they say that
it's cleansing its system. You don't want to eat them
right away, the meat won't be any good, and so
all they have for that week is this few inches
of water that they're in. Is that a really bad practice?
I gotta tell you, I don't know anything about Uh.

(44:36):
You know what it would do, is it would it
would it would remove food from the g I tractor.
Of course, Uh is that good or bad? I don't know.
I my instinct is it seems a little excessive, but um, possibly, Kart,
I want you to find us a snapping turtle meat.

(44:56):
Christ do you have any colleagues of yours? Are you've been?
No one did a dissertation on snappers, not that I'm
aware of. But that's that's out of practice you would
ever do with a cow or a turkey, That's correct.
I would not do that for any of those other animals.
But again it raises another point. You've got to understand

(45:17):
a little bit about the digestion system of these animals, right,
And so a ruminant has bacteria in that large stomach
that breaks down the food into very small components that
are then absorbed in the bloodstream and converted to proteins
and fats and carbohydrates. In the case of a pig

(45:41):
or us humans, we don't have a big ruman and
so that food gets absorbed through the small intestine. As
a result, it doesn't have to be broken down into
quite such small components. So if we feed, for example,
if we have a if we have a pig that's

(46:02):
eating acorns or peanuts, then the fats will be quite oily,
the meat will be oily, and and you'll actually get
some flavor from the diet. But in the case of
a ruminant because all the food parts get broken down
so small, the type of diet is not so critical. Now,

(46:29):
the energy and the diet is. Because remember when we
talked about three things that influenced tenderness, one of those
was fat. So if you get a deer that's grazing
on corn fields, for example, that's high energy. They're storing
that extra energy in their body in in a form
of fat, and that will we particularly in America, we

(46:50):
love the taste of of fat in our in our
meat products, and so a high energy diet helps. But
whether that high energy comes from corn or we eat
is probably not as critical, particularly in wild game. How
quickly does that diet need to change for you to
notice a change in the meat quality. I always hear
people refer to wood ducks as the best tasting ducks

(47:13):
because they eat a lot of acorns. But it's hard
for me to fathom that throughout their entire migration they're
finding acorns. So how how quickly would something need to
start eating acorns? Or corn or something like that for
you to notice the improved meat. Yeah, So the way
to think about that is, first of all, you've got
a deposit fat from the diet, but you also got

(47:34):
to replace fat that's already there, right, And so, uh,
you have to think about how quickly do you get
rid of the old facts that are there and how
quickly do you add new facts that are there? Um,
I don't I don't know specifically for for ducks, for example,
but in the case of cattle, I'm going to bigger animals,

(47:55):
That's what I know. In the case of cattle, they'll
be in a feed lot a hundred, a hundred and
fifty days in order to get the high marbling, the
high fat inside the muscle that really gives us. Now
is fifty days enough? Well, it's certainly better than zero, right,
So it's a continuum. The longer you do it, the
better you're going to be. Can you explain marbling and then, uh,

(48:20):
like what factors lead an animal to to have marbling?
Because you'll often hear I don't know if you know
about this or not, but you'll hear people say that, um,
for instance, like that venison isn't marbled. But this is
probably way outside of your expertise. But mountain goat has
some marbling. Um, what is it? And is it really

(48:43):
not universal? Ye? Well again, think how that body stores energy.
When we get access energy, our nature is to store
it as fat. Right are glycogen supplies are good? So
we start storing energy as fat. Now that fact can
be in side the muscle that's marbling, or it can
be outside the muscle, either under the skin we call

(49:06):
that subcutaneous fat, or between the muscles, which would be
intertermuscular fat instead of intramuscular fat. And so depending on
genetics and the type of animal, they will store energy
either inside the muscle or outside the muscle, and that's
probably species specific. Within a species, there are genetic differences.

(49:31):
For example, why gub for example, has a lot more
marbling than does Angus or or Herford or or another
us breed of cattle. So there are some genetic differences
within a within a species that also regulate how much
marbling is deposited. We know this for sure that you

(49:55):
only get marbling when you have a high energy diet,
and if you don't, and marbling is least likely to
be deposited. So a lot of wild game, you know,
they're foraging, but they're not on they're not in the cornfield,
they're not getting a high energy diet, so they're probably
not gonna have as much marbling, even if they have

(50:15):
the genetic potential to deposit it in the first place.
You know, I want to back up a little bit,
and this kind of goes back to gutting things and
and the sort of timeline around rigor. But you hear
people describe aging, which we want to get into later.
But you'll hear people describe aging as like a controlled decomposition. Right,

(50:38):
I don't know, I don't know if that's a fair
statement or not. But what happens when um, well, I'll
put it another way. Sometimes someone will complain about, oh
I got a deer and antelope or whatever and it
didn't taste you know, it was no good, it was
too gamey, whatever, And people will say, oh, yeah, but
he shot the deer and in rolled around with it

(51:01):
in the back of his truck for three days. Okay. Um, where,
if if aging is is decomposition, where does rotting Like
where does aging end and rotting begin? Like? What is
the difference there? That's it. That's an awesome question. Um,

(51:24):
think about dry aged beef for a moment, right, it
could be aged forty fifty, sixty seventy days, and yet
normally we would think if you had a steak in
your refrigerator for that long, it's long gone, right, you're
gonna throw it away. And so you have to differentiate
between when we when we talk about aging, we're talking

(51:47):
about the breakdown of the tissues, mostly the protein inside
the meat. Whereas when I think about spoil age or rotting,
I'm really thinking about back to real growth on the
outside of that tissue. So if you have a way
to age but to reduce bacterial growth, you can still

(52:10):
get improvement in tenderness. Certainly, you get changes in flavor
um from oxidation that normally occurs, but you could you
could age for longer if you could get rid of
bacterial growth. Right. And so that's why you've got to
be real sanitary when you're out there working, Like you say,
avoid the grass and the extra blood and everything else

(52:33):
getting all over the meat, because all that does is
help inoculate the outside surface of that meat with bacteria,
and that's not a good thing when it comes to
eating quality. So if you could, if you could have
a hypothetical situation where you could like eliminate all life

(52:55):
inside of a walking cooler, right, meaning there's no like,
there's no bacteria, there's no fungus, like, all life is
gone inside some space. You would put a deer in there,
and that deer would still age, but it wouldn't rot
right now, it would It would dehydrate, right, it would

(53:18):
dry out re member meat water. And so the typical
dry aging over that day period might lose ten or
fifteen percent of the way, right, So there's still a
lot more water that can come out, but at some
point you're practically making jerky. It's just so dry that

(53:39):
there's nothing else to do, So you couldn't do it indefinitely.
The idea would be that you could safely age longer
if you could get rid of the bacteria. And by
the way, the bacteria wouldn't necessarily already be in the cooler.
We bring it in when we bring in the carcass

(53:59):
of animal. So so that guy who's driving around with
a uh antelope on the back of his truck for
a couple of days, you know he's inoculating that product
is what he's doing by the time to get down
on it. I recently read a book called Extra Virginity,
and it was about the scandalous world of olive oil

(54:20):
and how it's like rampant to take a ten dollar
bottle of olive oil and put a five price tag
on and five label. Is the world of meat exempt
from that or does it happen there? What areks some
examples of meat fraud in the commercial industry. All animal
harvest and cutting is um overseen by employees of the

(54:48):
federal government, and so meat fraud is very very very low.
Uh that there are inspectors there to ensure safety and wholesomeness.
There are agents that deal with accuracy and labeling and
the rest of that kind of thing, and so um,

(55:09):
there's a there's a lot of reasons why meat fraud
would be at a minimum. Now, if I were going
to cheat, I might I might cut one part of
a carcass and tell you it's a different part, right,
and and so I might try and take something out
of the shoulder and make you think it's part of

(55:31):
the rib, for example, because there's a dollar value there.
It doesn't happen very often, but that would be one place.
The other place where you simply need to be careful
is some of the claims that are made about how
the animal is raised and handled and so forth. And again,

(55:52):
most of the time there are systems in place, their
audits in place, their government employees in place to ensure
that that's uh, that that that's accurate, and if there
is deception and labeling, the consequences of that are pretty serious. So, um,
I don't think there's a lot of fraud in meat
quite honestly, have you? Uh you know, it's funny Spencer

(56:14):
brings up the olevel thing because I know that there's
a ton of fraud uh in the fish world. And
I remember reading about this thing where you know, there's
many varieties of snapper, but they don't have name brand recognition.
I remember reading that these guys that just saying, we're
seventies some percent of the fish being sold as red snapper.

(56:38):
It's not red snapper. But when you people look at
the men you are going to a fish market, they
don't want to see mangrove snapper, red line or blue
line or whatever to all these different kinds of snappers,
so they just throw up like red snapper because people
will think like, oh, but the difference there is it's uh,
it's not nearly as a controlled system from a supply standpoint,

(57:00):
that's correct. You know some of the guys buying filet's like,
it's already out of the question. But it's hard to uh,
it's probably hard to pass off one kind of carcass
as another kind of carcass. Imagine the grade the grading
system could be screwed up. Oh, now that that too
is done by federal employees, and that right, So you

(57:20):
don't make your own call. You don't make your own
call on grading. No, if you you can self grade
and establish your own grading requirements. But if you're going
to call it prime choice select, then those grades are
are through federal employees, federal graders, And that's a that's

(57:43):
been a tightly controlled system for a long time. I
was in a I was in a meat plant this
week actually where I watched graders work. So it's still happening.
Were you were you second guessing him? No? No, I
you agreed with the calls they were making. Yes, I was.

(58:04):
Actually I was actually in their buying meat for a
research project. Actually, So what goes into the different grades,
like what makes a prime a prime, or a choice
of choice or a select a select. So there's there's
two primary elements used for grade. One is how old
the animal is, and the other one has to do

(58:25):
with how much marveling, how much fat inside the muscle.
It turns out in the US, we sent all the
young animals to one plant and all of the old
animals to a different plant, and so, uh, they're mostly
Age is not a question, and it's just how much

(58:47):
marbling is present to get prime or choice or select.
One time I was, I was working on a magazine
story years ago about livestock theft, like like contemporary cattle rustling,
and I went, I was at a sale yard in
Twin Falls, Idaho, and I was with some guys that

(59:09):
run a cow calfe operation and they were watching what
they called milked out dairy cows climbing off a truck
and they expressed like a high level of disapproval about
the condition of the animals and made a comment about

(59:34):
what the beef would be like off those What were
they getting at, Well, it's that it's nutrition again, right,
So if you have enough energy then you can support yourself.
You have enough muscle and you have enough fat to
sustain body condition. In the case of dairy cows in particular,

(59:58):
they're being milked every day. They're putting a lot of
their energy into providing that milk. So you have to
provide a really high plane of nutrition. If you're milking
and used in the plane of nutrition lowers, then that
animal is going to get a lot leaner and it
might even lose a little bit of muscle mass. And

(01:00:19):
so that's the body condition that they're looking at. So
now so it won't be like potentially won't be as
good and could be tougher. Well. Yeah, So the other
issue there is those dairy cows are much older. They
could be three or four or five years old, whereas
young cattle to the marketplace are typically two years or less.

(01:00:42):
And the older and animals sort of like us us, right,
the older we get, the tougher we get, right, And
that's what happens for muscle as well. Mature animals more connective, tissue,
less tender than younger animals, so that when you're out
hunting you see that three or four year old stag, right,
it's it's not gonna be as tender as an animal

(01:01:05):
that's much younger. Are there any exceptions to the rule,
like does it go as far as that a fawn
dear would be way more tender than an old buck? Yes,
what you just said is correct. A faun would be
more tender than a buck with with one caveat that
fawn is so small that it would be very easy

(01:01:29):
for it that muscle to get cold and contract before
it goes into rigor mortis. So if you could control
temperature correctly, then that faun would be way more tender
than the older animal. It's the same thing with veal, right,
veal is much younger than the than the twenty four
month old uh steers and efforts that we buy in

(01:01:51):
the grocery store every day, and veal as much more
tender as well? Is veal synonymous with crate raised veal?
Do you remember all the blow up years to go
about create raise veal? Is there a difference? There's create
raise veal a qualifier of veal. Uh No, deal is
based on animal age. So most of the veal these
days is raised in pens and group pins where there

(01:02:13):
are a number of them together. So um that there
is a welfare question that was raised, And I think
the industry has responded well to it in that regard,
So so that is like that is a classification. There
was a classification of veal rather than just meaning the
veal is create race. I think people thought it was synonymous,
like if it's veal, you know, it was raised in

(01:02:37):
a specific way, but it could skydive and still be vealed. Yeah,
that the government would say that um veal is based
on animal age period, that's it. And so if someone's
you know, if someone says free range veal or pin
raised veal or group race veal, those descriptors are being

(01:03:00):
used by the people who are marketing the product. Federal
government focuses on the fact that it in fact is veal.
Why is it bad to eat raw red meat? And
are there less threats with something like deer meat versus
cal meat. The risk of eating raw meat is primarily

(01:03:21):
one of microbial issues spoilage and and pathogens that could
make you sick um. In addition, if there are parasites
and the meat, then if you haven't cooked it, then
that's a risk as well. So I would think game
meat would be perhaps more likely to have parasites. Uh

(01:03:45):
in the in commercial production of animals, they're gonna do
everything they can to minimize that because that reduces the
growth efficiency and it's all about efficiency and commercial production.
So again and lifeless uh, and that hypothetical lifeless space.
You could eat the raw meat all the time. It's

(01:04:06):
just like you're there's no damage from the actual meat.
It's just stuff that you're ingesting that accompanies it. Yeah,
I think that's a fair way to say that. I haven't.
I have a question that kind of relates back also
to you know, idea of great raised veal. But okay,
so let's look at human beings. So somebody who doesn't

(01:04:31):
do any exercise whatsoever and just kind of sits around,
and then someone who lifts weights all the time and
has stronger, bigger muscle. So if we look at the
this is a cannibalism question their PhD next week after

(01:04:52):
the turtle guy, I wanna human meat guy. I'm glad
you're asking a question because I was wondering the same thing,
like which people tastes better? Yeah, totally, if you haven't
died of fruit loops, if you have salad um. So
if we look at the equivalent of that in in animals, uh,
an animal that maybe doesn't move around a lot compared

(01:05:16):
to same same animal, same species, but that moves around
a lot more or um or I don't know, cats
climbing trees. Yeah, we hear about people talk about why
is the chicken in like in rural Mexico, the chicken
is so good? Be like, well, it's well exercised, right
like like if it if an animal has I don't know,

(01:05:39):
is stronger, has more muscle, is potentially more contracted muscle,
Like how does that all or is well exercised or not?
How does that have an effect if any on toughness
or you can you can still manipulate the meat afterwards
and the muscle fiber afterwards to to get it to
be tender good. I'll answer that, but I just want

(01:06:03):
to tease you, guys. I always have a conversation with
my students, and that is that sooner or later when
you're talking to the public, they become closet scientists, and
I think they don'ts and but the basis of your
question is is actually is twofold number one? Does exercise

(01:06:24):
make me less tender? And then the other dimension of
that is the inactivity means that they're burning up less
energy and if they're consuming the same they're creating more fat.
And so that latter part is true. The less exercise,
the less movement, the more fat is going to be

(01:06:44):
produced on the same diet. Right. In terms of exercise
creating tougher connective tissue and the rest of that, those differences,
if they exist, are very subtle and not meaningful. You
would have, uh, are greater difference in um tenderness from

(01:07:04):
one muscle to another than you would from one animal
to another because of exercise. Okay, so pretty much, you know,
given given more or less exercise among people in the office,
we may all taste about the same. Yeah, presuming you're
the same age, right, Yeah, yeah, in a real quick,

(01:07:25):
simple way, what's the difference between the dark meat? You know,
with poultry, what's the difference between the dark meat and
the white meat? Uh, it's it's that amount of myoglobin
that's present. So, um, not all muscle cells are the same.
Some have more myoglobin than the other. So the dark
meat just has more of that myoglobin and biologically typically

(01:07:48):
has a little bit more lipid, a little bit more
fat in there as well. Neither one is very fat,
but there might be another percentage or to a fat
in there. Mostly the color difference is just because there's
more of that oxygen binding pigment in the meat. Can
you explain the function of glands that you find when
you're butchering something and our glands as prominent in domestic

(01:08:11):
animals as they are wild ones? Well, yes, Spencer's not
like you produce more glands from being domestic. Well, I
don't know. I'm thinking about like with a white tailed deer,
like they use their glands to mark territory and things
like that. The more active gland. Yeah, well I'll buy that,
because you smell a fox and you smell your dog

(01:08:33):
named close to the same thing. There. He's right. So
in this case, you're talking about scent glands, and we
really don't have scent glands and domestic animals to deal
with too much where Yes, But if you're talking about
lymph glands, those lymph nodes, lamp glands, they exist in

(01:08:55):
all of the animals. They're probably a little bit more visible,
easy to see in a leaner animal, and so you
probably see those more often in game. And what is
the function of those, Well, that's a that's an immune function.
That's how the animal sustains hell when you get when

(01:09:15):
you get a cold, you have an immune response that
helps you fight against it. So there's a whole system
in the body called the lymph system that moves that
fluid around to help fight UH disease and injury and
the rest of that kind of thing. So when you
sprain your ankle, it swells up. That's that's lymph fluid
pooling in your ankle. As a result, you know, there's

(01:09:37):
a little gland. It's always hiding out in the back
leg of a deer, and you actually gotta take it
apart to get that thing out. Let's say you do
you forget or don't or you never knew about it,
and just you must have been eating him your whole life. Um,
is that necessarily bad for you? I don't. I wouldn't
be too concerned about a health concern. I suspect it
probably has a quality effect on taste and play r

(01:10:00):
and that kind of thing. That same guy that told
me the great Turkey story about shipping into Minneapolis and barrels,
he had a little custom slaughter plant and I was
down there with him one time and we were picking
out uh sweetbreads. The Thamus gland. Correct, right, we're picking
out sweetbreads and he was. We were. He was slaughtered

(01:10:21):
a bunch of young cattle and the guy that he
was slaughtering for didn't want them. So he had me
down because he said, you can get all you want
if you want to come down. And so he was
showing me how to separate the skin and prepare them,
and he was saying that that. I said, well, why
are they not good on the older animals? And he
said that it turns waxy. Is this something you had

(01:10:44):
any exposure to? Well, I have had uh sweetbreads, and
I can tell you that on the grill in particular,
they can be quite delicious. They're there, it's They're incredible. Yeah,
it's uh. And it makes sense to me that as
the animal gets older that possibly the saturation of the

(01:11:06):
lipids might change. I don't really know, but I think
it's probably less waxy and more um dance, harder fat
that's present within that area. But that's a little bit
of guess on my part. Yeah, I've never met I've
always thought to experiment with this, but never have. As
if on a yearling deer um to find that sweetbread

(01:11:31):
and prepare it and see if it's any good. And
I'm sure someone listening has done this, but I've never
heard of people doing sweetbreads on anything but cattle. Well, lamb,
I think people do lamb sweetbreads. Now, they're they're a
little bit hard to find. You gotta know what you're
looking for. They're not very big, particularly in game animals,
so I think that would be a bigger challenge. Why

(01:11:51):
is beef tallow good and venison tale bad. Well, I've
never had venison talos so, but it has to do
with I would expect it's a difference in what fatty
acids are made up of the tissue, right and so um,
If you think about something like a chicken or pork fat,

(01:12:12):
it's pretty soft. When you go to the beef carcass,
it's a lot more firm, and so it's more saturated
in the beef animal. Incidentally, it depends on where on
the carcass you get. The fat in the brisket area
is softer than fat that's over the loin and the

(01:12:33):
fact that's around the kidney is harder than everything. And
so there are differences within the animal as well. But
if you have a if you have an unsaturated fat,
a soft fat like pork, like poultry. I would expect,
like game um, that fat will oxidize more quickly. It's

(01:12:56):
biologically disposed to do so it interacts with sygen from
the air. Oxidized lipids are described by US as rancid,
and so there could very well be a flavor difference
there as well. Oh no, I think you're getting I
think you're you're onto it. I'll tell you some of
the weird act when we talk about dear tallow like,

(01:13:16):
I'll tell you some of the attributes that we find
that differ from the attributes of bee fat. It is
the most fat you find is over the realmp, so
kind of like alongside like on on top of the romp,
alongside either side of the spine, you'll find these big

(01:13:37):
flat cakes of fat. It's it's firm right like you
could you could cut into squares. It's kind of flaky,
like when when it flakes, you can sort of when
it when it's cold or whatever, you can kind of
flake it away and hold it in your fingers and
it doesn't melt between your fingers at all when you
eat it. It's like if you take a sip, like

(01:13:59):
if you were eating then some rib and then you
had a sip of ice water. That fat will set
up and solidify all over on the inside of your mouth, um,
and to the point where you have to almost manually
scrape it off the inside of your mouth. And finally
it is good. It's okay fresh, but it rots in

(01:14:23):
your freezer. Yeah, and you pull it out later and
it's changed man like like six venice deer fat in
your freezer for six months comes out way different than
when it went in, but the meat is not changed. Yeah,
it's that. I'm sure that's that concentration of fats and

(01:14:43):
oxidation that takes place. Oxidation happens in your freezer as well.
So that's entirely consistent with what I would expect. You
know what's weird. You know what really goes bad in
the freezer is bear fat. I don't know why. You
can render it into like really nice lard, but it
goes bad unrendered. Just the straight fat will rot in

(01:15:05):
your freezer. I don't know if pork fat does, but
I uh, pork fat well, probably at a little bit
of a slower rate. Um. But you know, this is
one of those things where we could talk just briefly
about packaging, right, A lot of times we we wrap
it up in and that's sort of that waxy coated
or plastic coated butcher paper which doesn't get it doesn't

(01:15:30):
get the air out right, whereas um, if you seal
it inside a vacuum bag, a plastic bag and vacuum
seal that, which is how things are done commercially, you've
gotten rid of almost all the air that's there, and
that will extend the either the shelf life when it's
fresh or the shelf life in the freezer as well,

(01:15:52):
because it minimizes that oxidation process. Go ahead, Spencer, So
are you replicating that when you freeze something in water?
It's very common among fishermen to take a bag of
filets and fill it with water and then throw that
in your freezer because it doesn't allow any air to
come in contact with the meat. Is that doing the
same thing, That's the same principle. I would argue you

(01:16:16):
probably still get some air through there, but it would
certainly reduce the problem. You know, we used to in
the old days, we would just wrap red meat in
wax freezer paper, which created all kinds of problem, Like
you just get freezer burned corners, you know right now,

(01:16:37):
I'll do one or two things where I typically will
wrap it in plastic wrap like saran wrap in order
to get all as much of the air out as
I can, and then put it in the wax freezer paper,
which I think is protective, like protects it the integrity
of the plastic wrap underneath when people are like jam
you know, shuffling around in the freezer. And also it

(01:16:59):
decreases light or eliminates light from penetrating in um. Do
you feel that that system is like a good system
for home use. Sure, it's not quite as effective as
the vacuum packaging we're talking about, But the secret is, uh,
you use the magic words surand. Like everything else, not

(01:17:22):
all plastic wrap is created equal Suran. Suran is an
oxygen barrier. And in fact, those those vacuum package bags
I'm talking about their layered and the center layer is
a surand type product to prevent oxygen from penetrating. Oh,
I don't know that there are some plastic wrap that

(01:17:43):
will let air through and we'll let oxygen through and
water through, and so it depends on which which plastic
wrap you're using. How do you know that you're getting
the right kind um. You know, the the easiest way
is to uh if it's if it's not necessarily a

(01:18:03):
brand endorsement, but Saran is a brand name for the
oxygen barrier film. UM. Oh, I see the other thing
you can do UM. For example, if you make like
if you take avocados and chop them up and you
cover them with plastic wrap. Some of that plastic wrap
it will turn brown very very quickly, and others it

(01:18:24):
will not. And so that's an indication of oxygen permeability
as well. Kind of an in home science test, if
you will. When you saw out a piece of frozen

(01:18:45):
meat like a backstrap and there's all that liquid in
the plate, what is that just water? That's water and
myl globe. There are a few other proteins that are
in their water soluble enzymes. That kind of thing. It
doesn't comprom eyes the nutritional quality of the product at all,
but there's no reason to hold onto it. You know.

(01:19:06):
The big thing I remind people is um, the rami
might be on that plate once you get it cook,
make sure you use a clean plate. So would it
be a bad practice then to freeze something thought out
refreeze it again, and then thought out again, are you
creating a worse product? Yes, what happens there? Okay, go on.

(01:19:28):
You're driving moisture from the product. And usually when you
thought out, you're exposing it to oxygen, so you're getting
more oxidation as well. So both of those things would
be uh negative in terms of eating experience, but not
a huge negative. Yeah, I mean you can refreez me. Yeah,

(01:19:49):
I do. I like I've long been. I always have
people tell me you can't do that. You can't do that, Well,
then I should be dead or dead because we did
all the time, like well thaw big bags. So if
we but let's say you bone a deer like a
deer shoulder out. Um, we bone the deer shoulder out,
and you don't have time for whatever reason, just because

(01:20:10):
of life, and you put all the meat into a
gallon size zip blog bag, squeeze the air out, put
in your freezer for whatever a month and then you
finally get time. You're gonna make some sausage, pull it
back out, thought, make sausage or burger whatever, repackage it,
and then it goes back into the freezer. Now I

(01:20:34):
like sure, like something must be lost. But I would
if I PEPSI challenged you on it, I don't think
you'd be able to pick it out for the most part,
those little differences, particularly if you're going from a whole
product to a to a ground product. Uh, I think
you're safe by doing that. You know, you want to
think a little bit about thawing if you're if you're

(01:20:56):
one of those guys who throws it on the kitchen
counter and lets it thaw for the rest of the day,
if there's any bacteria in there that's not particularly food
safety practices we'd want to encourage. I'd say, put it
in the fridge, let it get partially thought, cut off
what you need, and then refreeze the rest so that
you know that you haven't gotten in a temperature zone

(01:21:18):
where lots of extra spoilage bacteria take place. But the
practice that you've talked about people take, People do that
all the time. You're absolutely right, And I think I
was trying to point out that it's a matter of
degrees of of of differences, and it's not a binary
yes no, do don't live by kind of decision on
that thing. Chris, what is the science say about marinating me?

(01:21:42):
Can you get a liquid to penetrate like a roast
and change the flavor of it. Yeah, So there's two
reasons to marinate. One is to change flavor and one
is to tenderize the meat. And so if you're going
to change flavor, then pretty much whatever flavor you like,

(01:22:04):
you can marinate the meat for an hour or two.
You'll get a nice surface coating and uh, and it
will alter the taste of the product and you're cooking,
and that's that's easy. You can do that with We
do similar things with dry rubs, right where you just
rub the spices on the outside and so forth. Um.
But most of the time when we think and meat

(01:22:25):
science about marinating, we're thinking about how are you making
that meat more tender. The secret goes back to that
connective tissue, that silvery tissue on the outside that goes
throughout the whole muscle. You can think of that connective
tissue like a fish net or like a harness, so
that when the individual cell contracts, that connective tissue moves

(01:22:46):
with it, and that's how we get movement of the
whole body or the whole arm as a result of
contraction in the live animal. So when you marinate, you
want to tenderize that connective tissue. That works best if
you have an acid based marinate, so a wine or
a vinegar, or a citric kind of a base, even

(01:23:09):
a soy sauce. Those kinds of marinades will enhance the
tenderness of the product. The secret, as you just pointed out,
is how deep and how far does that really penetrate
into the muscle. And I tell you it doesn't go
that far. Right, you can you can marinate for eight
hours and only be an eighth or a quarter of

(01:23:29):
an inch into the tissue. So it's best if you
marinate thinner, smaller pieces. Uh, if you want to get
real sophisticated, you can. You can get a syringe and
you can actually inject some of that marinate into a
larger a larger piece of meat, and that will work
as well. Um. The last thing on marinades I would
mention is that there are some um, some fruits that

(01:23:54):
have enzymes in them that tender eyed meat. And so
for example, kiwi fruit or raw pineapple, even papaya and figs,
all of those have enzymes that will attack the meat.
Now if it's canned pineapple, well by canning, you've inactivated
the enzyme. It doesn't work anymore as a fresh product.

(01:24:19):
If you add that to the to the to the dish,
you can tenderize meat in that way. You know, you
might give me an answer here that I don't believe,
and Noah's wrong. But can you increase moisture by marinating
or brining? This is a hot debate in the culinary world.
I'm not sure whether you would increase for marinating. You

(01:24:43):
might be able to get a little bit more moisture
in there, but you know you're trying to get water
to move from to a place that's already moisture. So
I wouldn't think you get very much of an effect
just by marinating to enhance moisture. If you're brining, look,
salt drives out meat, right, That's how we used to

(01:25:04):
preserve meat years and years ago. It's packet and salt,
and so salt tends to draw moisture out of the product. Now,
if you mix up a salt solution and you injected
in the meat, okay, you've added more moisture there. But
if you're just putting a piece of meat into a brine,
the the you're getting a reverse effect. You're getting moisture

(01:25:25):
pulled out. But don't they like don't they sell you
know how? Sometimes Uh, you can get a turkey and
it actually has an ingredients list because they've they've they
injected with us A brine, yes, and and that's like
specifically to make it moist right, But that's just you're
just like physically sticking water there. Yes, but you're you're

(01:25:47):
also adding salt, which is a great flavor potentiator, right.
It enhances flavor. And so if you give somebody a
piece of meat with salt and without salt most of
the time, and they'll tell you the one with salt
taste better, is more tender, more juicy, more flavorful. Plus
there are other ingredients that go into that that turkey

(01:26:11):
that would help the moistures stay in the meat instead
of just run out. So it's a it's I think
we're dealing with the difference in terminology here and what
you're really doing and how it's getting done. What if
you like pulverize kiwi and pineapple and you put some
meat in a bowl of that, so there's no sodium,

(01:26:32):
so you're not having water come out of it, but
you're having it in an enzyme bath of liquid. You
I tell you that I have cooked meat with on
a skillet with kiwi. Before that I could eat with
a spoon. Maybe that's it wasn't very good because because

(01:26:56):
it was much, it was much by aging. Um it
must be real like dry aging is beneficial. It us
with some dues and don't well so. Um, when you
are aging, you are allowing the enzymes that are naturally

(01:27:19):
present within the meat to break down the protein that
enhances tenderness. So if you you could age in one
of those vacuum bags where almost no moisture comes out,
or you can age in air. If you're aging in air,
we call it dry aging. If you're aging in one
of those vacuum packages, we call it wet aging. And

(01:27:42):
in both cases the tenderization process is the same. And
as I said earlier, you'll get the great benefit and
the first week or so or two, and then after
that the benefits of aging are reduced. You don't see,
you've already tender eye it to a large extent, to
the to the most that it will occur. It will

(01:28:05):
continue to improve, but not very much. Um so from
an aging standpoint. For tenderness. It's enzymes do the work.
When we dry age, We're putting meat, typically on a rack,
and we leave it set for a period of time.
And what happens is the moisture on the surface of

(01:28:28):
that evaporates fairly quickly. In fact, over three or four days, Uh,
you will you can get a very nice dry crust
on the outside of that meat. The longer you store
after that, you will still lose moisture. And um. Two
things happened during that aging period from a taste standpoint,

(01:28:52):
One is you're concentrating the flavors because you're removing water
and everything else stays behind. But the other thing is
is you're actually creating flavors. Proteins get broken down into
amino acids, and some amino acids are like the ingredients
in MSG. There there their flavor potentiators as well enhancers. Uh.

(01:29:16):
You get some oxidation flavors that go on as you
dry age as well. So the taste of a dry
age piece of meat is profoundly different than the taste
of a wet aged piece of meat. So I think, uh,
like a lot of other things, if someone says I'm
going to dry age, they need to understand why they're

(01:29:39):
dry aging, what they're going to accomplish when they do that. Now,
when you dry age, you lose the weight I mentioned
before cent or more. But then you've also got this
hard crust on the outside that you've got to trim
off and throw away. Do you guys ever call that
the rind? Yeah? That it's so you're talking about maybe

(01:30:01):
another fiftent. So you're probably gonna lose of the weight
of that muscle when you dry age. You know. A
guy once served me a piece of ad dad. It
was like he had an odd dad shoulder that he
had aged for eighteen months, And once you got through

(01:30:22):
all the dried out stuff, there was a strip of
meat inside there. There was about the size of a
cigar and it tastes like blue cheese. I mean, it
was the cheesiest, strongest, most potent thing. Um. He was
just kind of experiment with how long can you how
long can you go? But that felt like a real

(01:30:42):
Petrie dish, you know, but no ill effect. We ate
it raw. My goodness, your ban is mold always a
bad sign when you're dry aging something. No, um, but
it makes me nervous. Some mold can be toxic, particularly

(01:31:05):
the black molds. There is a gray mold that tends
to come on, and some dry aging experts will say
that that enhances or alters the flavor. Incidentally, they've done
some testing on some molds and one of them is
associated with blue cheese. It's the same kind of mold

(01:31:26):
that can take place. But I would emphasize you don't
have to have mold to have a very good dry
age product. In fact, I sort of feel like if
you've got mold, to me, that's an indication that maybe
you don't have the most sanitary cleaning system set up
before you started to dry edge in the first place.

(01:31:47):
I'm not a big fan of mold, but I'll tell
you there are some scientists who say it does accentuate
and add a little bit to the flavor as well.
A friend of mine who is a chef, he always
advised me that the only mold that there's him is
the black fuzzy kind, So that that's that's true, not
the only one with that black fuzzy is bad. That's correct.

(01:32:10):
What about aging temperature, I always hear uh Butcher stress
that you shouldn't let the ambient temperature get below freezing
because it slows down the aging process, so you're not
accomplishing what you're trying to do. What is like the
ideal temperature for aging meat. Yeah, that's exactly right. If

(01:32:30):
it's frozen water, it's not gonna move right very easily,
and so you want to be above freezing. I would
say thirty four or thirty five degrees or somewhere in
that ballpark would be about right. If you get much
higher than that, then you start to get bacterial growth
and the rest of that. What's it what's the real
danger zone? Well, anything over forty for certain would be

(01:32:54):
too high. Um, but but if you're gonna aren't for
a week or two, I would I would shoot for
the mid thirties frankly, for that very reason. If you
have here's the secret. If it starts to get slimy,
that's bacterial growth. And if it's dry then um, and

(01:33:21):
it's not slimy, then you have less bacterial growth. It's
not zero, but you have much less spoilage bacteria growing.
If it's not slimy, then if it is, you know,
there are certain little tricks that people try where um,
they'll say, like out in the field, you can rub

(01:33:42):
black pepper all over a quarter to help preserve it.
Or do people make these little packages. It's some kind
of I don't know what. It's, some kind of acid
or something. It looks like a little drink package and
you mix that in the water bottle and shake it up.
I've messed and stuff and isn't happy with the results
because it kind of look like if you put lime

(01:34:03):
juice all over meat. But anyways, they shake it up
and you bathe a quarter meat and that stuff and
it's supposed to inhibit inhibit bacterial growth or any do
you think do you would you have faith in any
of these methods as actually accomplishing anything. I'm not too
enthusiastic about pepper from a preservative standpoint, but I will

(01:34:26):
tell you that in fact, light organic acid will reduce
bacteria on the surface. In fact that that's commercially done
as well. A light mist usually a lactic acid or
a citric acid for example, could work as well. Tends
to reduce spoilia bacteria and um. I know that sometimes

(01:34:49):
the surface of the meat will get that lime juice
appearance you're talking about, where it kind of looks washed
out and the most of that, but that's only surface.
By the time you hook it, you won't even know
that that acid was there. You know, I realized I
misspoke and I didn't, and I caught it when you
mentioned it is when we did this, you were right.

(01:35:09):
It was in the spray bottle. Yeah, it was. It
was a product that you mix in a spray bottle.
And and it's funny because what turned me off was
that lime juicy look. But I didn't think about the
fact that that was very surface level. Yeah that's pretty
it's pretty thin layer. But that's really all you need.
The bigger challenge for me is you could do that,

(01:35:33):
but now you've got a carcass that's low in bacteria load,
what do you do with it? Right If you're gonna
go lay it in the bed of a pickup and
drive it home, you sort of kind of worked against
yourself right now. Maybe a better way would be take
it home and hang it and then spray right once

(01:35:56):
you're done transporting it. Once you're done with transport, i'llternatively,
alternatively go ahead and get the animal, but leave the
hide on and don't take the hide off till you
get home. Then when you take the hide off, you
can spray it and be ready to go. I realized that, uh,
an animal that's gone into rigor mortis is harder to skin,

(01:36:17):
of course, so there's the downside of that. Oh yeah,
man is getting nice when they're brand new. Yeah, you
bet um, Chris, what do you mind talking a bit
about some of the research that you've been doing and
some of the work you've been doing recently in any
new discoveries there. So yeah, there's two, probably three or

(01:36:38):
four things I can talk about here. I'll do this briefly,
and if you have questions, we can go deeper. We
have built in our laboratory twelve dry aging chambers that
are um the most tightly controlled dry aging chambers in
the world. We can control relative humidity, we can control airspeed,

(01:37:00):
we can control level of oxygen. We can measure the
weight of the meat once a second for six weeks
if we want to do that, and of course it's
in a cooler where we can control temperature. There's a
lot of lore about dry age, a lot of art,

(01:37:22):
if you will, but we're trying to push science forward,
and so we've learned a lot about how moisture moves
out of that meat, a lot of people think, for example,
that rind or that crust prevents moisture loss. It does not.
We're learning a lot of different things about dry agent

(01:37:43):
that has not been seen before, and we continue to
do that kind of work. We also have some work
we just finished up, uh that if you if you
think about these meal kit services, um, you get a
you get a package of meeting there and must time
that package meat is brown. It's not very attractive in color.

(01:38:04):
And so we did a whole project on how do
you maintain bright red color in frozen meat? And so
there's some tricks you can do if you understand the
biology to do that. We have uh, A lot of
people feed different kinds of feed to animals, and we

(01:38:25):
are where this is really deep biochemistry. But we're looking
at the chemistry now of what happens during that rigor
mortis process and right after that that tenderizes meat. So
we're looking at the enzymes and how that whole process
gets controlled. And then lastly, UM, we did a project
here um it's been a number of years now where

(01:38:48):
we went through and characterized with a group of scientists,
not just me. We characterize a lot of different muscles
in the beef carcass. Out of that, the flat iron
steak was identified. There were a number of other cuts
as well, but that's probably the one that's most well known.
And so when when we do research in my laboratory,

(01:39:11):
I'm I'm a quality oriented scientists in meats, and so
I'm looking at meat quality from the standpoint of of
what makes that product taste better, what, what gives it
better flavor, what makes it more tender, what makes it
longer shelf life, what gives us the right color, what

(01:39:32):
gives us the optimal use of that animal? And we
talked before about respecting the products that we get, and um,
I get frustrated when we use the wrong muscle for
the wrong recipe because you are either undervaluing one or
overvaluing the other one. And so trying to make sure

(01:39:55):
that we use the right part in the right place,
in the right way. And and to me, that is
a win win win. It's a win for the people
who produce the animals, it's a it's a win for
the people that are marketing those products, and best of all,
it's a win for those people who are consuming those products.
I think the same thing about your listeners quite Honestly,

(01:40:19):
they've They've gone to expense, they've gone to energy, they've
gone to effort to go out and get them an animal.
And part of it is the experience which we all enjoy,
hiking and being outside and all the rest of that.
But I would love for them to end up with
the highest quality product they can so that the ultimate
end of the experience is a very satisfying one as well.

(01:40:41):
You know, Chris, you I don't think we talked about this.
What school are you at? University? I'm at the University
of Nebraska in the Animal science department. Okay, so I
know you guys got snapper turtles there. Now, when you
steer you talk about different muscle groups, right, like different
the qualities of different muscles. When you dear one of
your graduate students you have graduate students, yes, okay, when

(01:41:04):
you steer one of them into snapping turtle work, I
want you to remind them that it is lower amongst
snapping turtle people that there are is it five or seven?
There are there are seven distinct meats inside of a
snapping turtle. So since it's low all low hanging fruit

(01:41:27):
and snapping turtle meat research, that might be a good
dissertation would be like you'll have to think of how
to how you have to think of a good title
for the dissertation, but it would be something like, um uh,
testing the qualitative. Yeah, they're out of the seven kinds
of snapping turtle meat. Well, I first of all, I

(01:41:47):
have to locate the Snapping Turtle Meat Foundation. They have
deep pockets, Chris, don't worry, Spencer and I will start
that organization now and do some fundraising so we can
fund the research. I've never known what they mean by
the seven times. I don't like pork, chicken, beef, things

(01:42:08):
like that. But there's there's well to their credit, to
their credit, to the to the to the it looks
like I'm talking just looking at it, like you know
the backstraps that run down the inside of a turtle,
inside that little honeycomb bone, very very white, very string.
You can tear it apart by hand. Then like their
legs have some intensely dark meat. The neck is visually

(01:42:32):
very different. There's something there. Chris, as student will find
it and you'll report back to us, and then Chris
probably do some dry aging on turtle studies. You know,
I'm also tell you this story that I was contacted
a number of years ago by scientists who is working
in Latin America, and he was looking at, uh, what

(01:42:55):
was the motivation for hunters. They would go out hunt
saying bush meat, and they would go out hunting monkeys,
and they would walk by holler monkeys and they would
hike for a week in order to get spider monkeys,
and and he was trying to figure out how much
energy it took them to go harvest one type over another,

(01:43:19):
and he couldn't figure out what was the difference in
these two animals. Well, it turns out spider monkeys eat
fruit and holler monkeys eat a lot of tree bark
rich in tannins. And we actually came very close to
having a research project on monkey meat taste because I'm

(01:43:42):
convinced those holler monkeys had very bitter flavored meat and
the spider monkeys was going to be, you know, much
more desirable meat products. However, like everything else, the funding
fell through for that project and we didn't get to
do it. But that's too bad. I was with I
was with the Chimana and we went monkey hunting. They

(01:44:06):
their favorite is the spider monkey. Second favorite was red howler.
We got a red howler and ate it. But then
the way they cook things that really everything winds up
being very similar because they'll dry it, you know that
they like smoke it, then boil it, and they do
a lot of processes to it that really change it.
There were other monkeys that I thought when we encountered them,

(01:44:28):
I thought, man, his monkeys in trouble, but they're very
dismissive of it. And then we encountered a possum after
they got a red Howler, and I thought, man, this like,
no one wants to see monkeys. There are people that
at least like possums. This possum is doomed. And they
were very dismissive of anyone that would ever go near

(01:44:49):
a possum and stroll down past it. It would be
a real rich area of inquiry for someone to look
into the qualitative nature of how it's viewed, uh, what
tastes good, and how culturally subjective that is well. I
one time I spent some time with the chupic Askimos.

(01:45:14):
They like tougher meat when butchering an animal, like this
part is good, it's very chewy. This part is not good.
It's very tender. They especially like the tendon that supports
the head that comes off the spine. That's good because
that's nice and chewy and um. They'd be fascinated to understand,

(01:45:36):
like how much of this stuff is culturally overlaid and
if there really is any sort of human you know,
any sort of objective reality about what tastes good. That's
a great questions that there are cultures in the world
that that favor the less tender product, there are also

(01:45:57):
cultures in the world that favor the stronger, more intense
flavors that come from pasture raised beef or wild game
for example. Uh. And interesting on our monkey meat conversation,
you touched on I think a really critical point, and
that was not only would they kind of dismiss the monkeys,

(01:46:21):
but if some hunter actually shot one, then that person
was widely disparaged as well. Yeah, so there was a
definitely a social aspect to it to go on top
of everything else. As you mentioned, Krin, let's close out

(01:46:43):
with the future. Okay, this is Chris Crins. This this
is Cris been Diana talk about this well. Okay, so
we've done some blind taste testing around here with fake
meat and I think overwhelmingly as soon as you have

(01:47:04):
a bite of the impostor meat. I mean, it's just
so obvious taste, texture, smell, everything that would go into
you know, one's experience of eating something, it's just so
clearly not any kind of meat. So how much meat
science goes into the development of these products? And from

(01:47:29):
your perspective, how possible is it on a cellular level
to really create uh, animal flesh out of nothing that
is animal material? How much time do we have? Well, uh,

(01:47:52):
first of all, most there have been food scientists who
have contributed to those products. Not too many meat scientists,
but there are too bad. But you know, within that
if you we started our conversation talking about Warner Bratchler
shear an objective measure of tenderness. If you look at

(01:48:15):
the muscles and a beef carcass, there is more than
a twofold difference in sure force from one muscle to
the other. So even within an animal, there's a wide
range of tenderness and texture. I tend to agree with
you every one of those non meat products that we've
talked about, UM, has not met my standard for what

(01:48:42):
I care to eat. I like to say sort of
tongue in cheek. Um. Everybody is entitled to their own
stupid opinion, right, And as a as a food industry,
I don't object to offering a variety of products, even
if I myself don't care for this. But mostly the

(01:49:05):
comments I've just made are relevant regarding plant based substitutes
for meat. There is some effort going on to use
cells and grow cells to create a meat product like
you're talking about. But just as we have a twofold
difference in tenderness within the body itself, uh in tenderness um,

(01:49:32):
the structures and cellular architecture it takes to build those muscles,
they are very very far away from being able to
mimic a meat like structure in in my judgment, and
so certainly as a meat scientist, I don't feel threatened
by those products. Mostly I am. I guess I'm a

(01:49:54):
little disappointed and frustrated by the marketing claims that are
made regarding those kinds of products. Time and again people
talk about, oh, these products are They're healthier for the environment,
they're greener. But the reality is when you do a
full life cycle analysis, uh, live animal production is a

(01:50:19):
very efficient way to convert plants to meet and uh.
In Nebraska, we've been a state for over one hundred
and fifty years, we have we have farms in the
state that have been in families for more than seven generations.
You can't possibly produce animals for seven generations if it's

(01:50:45):
not done in a sustainable way. And so I my
frustration with the product line is more along the disparagement
of what takes place with agricultural production and frame clee.
I think it's a little bit deceiving in a lot
of ways compared to what we have, whether it's game

(01:51:07):
animals or whether it's commercially raised animals. Those animals are
out there grazing pasture, they're they're eating grain, and they
have the opportunity to give us this wonderful, desirable eating
experience if we all respect and take care and manage
those animals appropriately. That's, frankly, that's what my whole career

(01:51:28):
has been about, is managing the product. Chris, thanks for
coming on. It's it's truly been a pleasure. I honestly
appreciate so much the chance to talk about this. As
you mentioned earlier, we have a lot of misconceptions going
on out there and Uh, it's uh, it's enjoyable for
me to to kind of explain and educate a little bit.

(01:51:51):
So well, I'm gonna warn you that I'm probably gonna
steal traffic and misconceptions because it's such a it's such
a big out of our lives to speculate about why
things taste good and bad. But we'll build up, we'll
build up another list of things we've heard from people,
and we'll come back and check with you. That'd be great.

(01:52:12):
I'd be happy to do it. Thank you, Thank you
very much.

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