I'm No Butcher

I found this article in today NY Times very interesting. In short the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association spend $1.5 million and five years searching for both cuts of meat, and ways to market them, cut from cattle that I thought we had pretty well worked over already. The grocery store meat case is something special. Pre-packaged, shrink wrapped, gassed, brined, marinated pieces of meat with little or no apparent connection to the animal from which it was taken. With the sheer quantity of product available at your average grocery store it lulls your senses that might normally connect an animal to that piece of meat. So when you start to think, there are only two hams on every pig, only two rib roasts or 20 rib-eyes on a single cow. Now you look at the meat case with 20 hams, and a huge stack of steaks, this should awaken some sense of responsibility in most people. This is one reason I think it's a good thing the cattle industry is marketing these new cut, and making available more of the type of cuts consumers want. While taking the long road, it is a means to using more and more animal from nose to tail.