Speaker 1: This is a meat eating podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening Hunt E podcast,
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators
Speaker 1: are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download
Speaker 1: the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store.
Speaker 1: Nor where you stand with on X. All right, everyone,
Speaker 1: we're joining today by our first ever We should have
Speaker 1: done this a long time ago, our first ever genuine
Speaker 1: meat scientists, Chris Calkins. Do you go by? Is that right?
Speaker 1: Meat scientists? Is that cool to say? Yeah, absolutely, that's
Speaker 1: the right way to do it. Let me test your
Speaker 1: knowledge to find out if you're legit. Do you know
Speaker 1: what a Warner? I think it's called a Warner Bruntler
Speaker 1: sheer force test is well, it's a Warner Bratsler Chan
Speaker 1: Warner and Lyman Bratsler decades ago created an objective tenderness
Speaker 1: machine and it was that share force machine you're referring to.
Speaker 1: So you passed, But let me ask you this question.
Speaker 1: How many holes does that thing punch into the steak?
Speaker 1: That's uh, it's up to the operator, but typically we
Speaker 1: would expect to get six cores from a regular beef steak,
Speaker 1: for example, in smaller animals, you have to get by
Speaker 1: with fewer cores and more steaks. Okay, good, we'll proceed now. No, now,
Speaker 1: I have faith that that Karen found us the right
Speaker 1: meat scientist. Uh what is the first? Off? Tell us? Like? What? What?
Speaker 1: What is a meeting? What is uh? What is meat science?
Speaker 1: And how does one you know get there? It's been
Speaker 1: an interesting journey to become a meat scientist. I was
Speaker 1: involved in agriculture as a high school student in the
Speaker 1: state of Washington. Had a really cool high school agg
Speaker 1: teacher who is a lifetime mentor for me, and I
Speaker 1: was lucky enough. As a senior in high school, I
Speaker 1: served as a State Future Farmers of America President State
Speaker 1: f f A president, and that same time he went
Speaker 1: to Texas and m to work on a Master of
Speaker 1: Science in meet science. And I always thought it was
Speaker 1: going to be a veterinarian. But I packed everything in
Speaker 1: a car, drove to Texas, and the day I got there,
Speaker 1: I got a job in the meat lab and I
Speaker 1: liked it well enough. Apparently I've never left since then.
Speaker 1: So eventually went on and got a like what is
Speaker 1: your You have a PhD? Like what is it? What
Speaker 1: is it? What was your dissertation? Like what sort of
Speaker 1: like how do you narrow in on this super broad
Speaker 1: meat science category and find your personal you know, expertise. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a great point because the field of
Speaker 1: meat science is really quite broad. That is, everything from
Speaker 1: the live animal all the way through to the products
Speaker 1: that we eat. And my dissertation had to do with
Speaker 1: the enzymes in meat that break up proteins in other words,
Speaker 1: the tenderization process. And I have built my career looking
Speaker 1: at quality, particularly eating quality characteristics of meat. How much
Speaker 1: how familiar familiar are you with um kind of like
Speaker 1: layman perspectives about meat? Right, Like you have to in
Speaker 1: conversation with people or in restaurants or backyard barbecues, you
Speaker 1: have to hear a lot of like theories about why
Speaker 1: this is that way, that that our way off And
Speaker 1: if you don't know if you hang out with hunters
Speaker 1: or not, but you'd probably get inundated with screwball theories
Speaker 1: about what is the way it is or why certain
Speaker 1: things are this way and why they're that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it becomes a compulsion related to try and set the
Speaker 1: record straight, make sure everybody understands what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm in addition to having ah of my
Speaker 1: time is spent on research, but the other thirty percent
Speaker 1: is spent on teaching. So I teach both undergraduate students
Speaker 1: as well as master and doctoral students as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let me hate you with Okay, Spencer's gonna hit Spencer
Speaker 1: new Hearth, our very own and special Spencer new Hearth
Speaker 1: is now going to hit you with um. This is
Speaker 1: probably the question we get the most, and this is
Speaker 1: a wild game question, but I'm sure it has so
Speaker 1: many parallels to domestic production that you'll know exactly what
Speaker 1: we're talking about. But this is sort of the leading
Speaker 1: hunter based wild game problem question. How would you put it, Spencer?
Speaker 1: Do stressed out animals taste worse? And can that stress
Speaker 1: be a factor of something like the rut for a
Speaker 1: white tailed deer or an elk um or from a
Speaker 1: bad shot where a deer is hitted then it runs
Speaker 1: a mile and it lays there for four hours and
Speaker 1: slowly dies. Can a stress like that toward the adrenaline
Speaker 1: make them taste worse? That initial burst of adrenaline does
Speaker 1: not have a real big impact, but if it's around
Speaker 1: for very long. In other words, if we have a
Speaker 1: longer term stress like the run, for example, then absolutely
Speaker 1: there are metabolic changes that take place in the meat
Speaker 1: that will impact the eating quality of that product. I'd
Speaker 1: be happy to explain that further, but we do not
Speaker 1: want to go no dig in man. We want to
Speaker 1: go way deep awesome. So think about what we know
Speaker 1: is the way the body stores energy um is through
Speaker 1: glycogen initially, and then that turns we also store energy
Speaker 1: as fat, but that glancogen is used to provide the
Speaker 1: short term burst of energy we need when an animal,
Speaker 1: for example, is running. Now it turns out that once
Speaker 1: that animal has been harvested, that glycogen gets converted to
Speaker 1: acid in the muscle. It becomes more acidic. We would
Speaker 1: say it has a lower pH that's normal, that's good.
Speaker 1: That's what we're all used to with all of the
Speaker 1: muscle foods that we eat. Is that normal h decline
Speaker 1: that occurs when an animals harvested. The problem is when
Speaker 1: you get that burst of adrenaline, or you spend five
Speaker 1: days at the runt running around acting like a teenager
Speaker 1: and not eating and all the rest of that, we
Speaker 1: exhaust the glycogen stores in the animal, and when that happens,
Speaker 1: that pH does not drop, it does not become acidic,
Speaker 1: and we get all kinds of weird, strange flavors, and
Speaker 1: the texture is different. It's dark, it's sticky. Most people
Speaker 1: find that kind of product not very desirable. And the
Speaker 1: time course of that really depends on how much stress
Speaker 1: the animal has and how long it takes place. So Spencer,
Speaker 1: your question about four hours and a long, slow death,
Speaker 1: that's probably long enough to have an impact on that animal.
Speaker 1: If that animal is injured in a while, say it
Speaker 1: breaks a leg or something, then all of those kinds
Speaker 1: of things will give long enough stress. Glycogen is houstag
Speaker 1: pH stays high, meat doesn't taste very good. You know.
Speaker 1: A good extreme of this that I think about is
Speaker 1: the um. One time, my brother rancher that my brother
Speaker 1: and his friends know, told them about a bull that
Speaker 1: he had that had broken its leg down in the
Speaker 1: bottom of some coolie and it'd been down there while
Speaker 1: and he couldn't find it, and eventually found it, and
Speaker 1: he told those guys, if you want to go get it,
Speaker 1: you can have it. This thing is huge, you know,
Speaker 1: And they went down and got it and my brother
Speaker 1: comes home and makes a steak out of it, And
Speaker 1: I mean, it was probably already a bull. It was
Speaker 1: already a bull. So that's probably a couple of strikes
Speaker 1: against it. But I mean, I'm not exaggerating when I
Speaker 1: say that it was unchewable. Yeah, it's um. Most of
Speaker 1: the stress related response has to do with taste, has
Speaker 1: to do with flavor. The fact that it was a
Speaker 1: bull and an older animal, that's what makes it tough.
Speaker 1: But we have people who contact us regularly with a
Speaker 1: very similar situation. An animal is injured, been hanging around
Speaker 1: for quite a while, and they wonder can they turn
Speaker 1: it down to a steak or ground beef, And uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's just a different taste. And so that's a
Speaker 1: pretty common complaint that people have homes. So the toughness
Speaker 1: is toughness isn't related to stress, not so much that
Speaker 1: the stress has a far bigger impact on flavor than
Speaker 1: it does on toughness. All right, So one of the
Speaker 1: things that makes certain things, like what makes certain animals
Speaker 1: inexplicably tough, like you know, I mean you could sometimes
Speaker 1: you'll have guys get whatever, like you get you know,
Speaker 1: a box or someone will get you know, ten bull
Speaker 1: elk and they're all great. In the eleventh one, it's
Speaker 1: just chewier in hell umkay wolf off and say like,
Speaker 1: oh he must have been stressed. Would be our be
Speaker 1: like a thing that we would say when you encounter
Speaker 1: that super tough animal. There's there's really three things broadly
Speaker 1: that impact toughness. One has to do with how contracted
Speaker 1: that muscle cell is, how much integrity there is in
Speaker 1: the muscle cell. The second thing has to do is
Speaker 1: something called connective tissue. That's that white, silvery tissue on
Speaker 1: the outside of the meat. And then the third part
Speaker 1: is fat. And so anything we do to impact any
Speaker 1: of those three things can impact tenderness. Uh, let me
Speaker 1: ask you one more than Spencer's gotta ask you a
Speaker 1: good question. Uh, have you ever have you ever had
Speaker 1: occasion to eat like soup, like to eat deer meat
Speaker 1: right away or any kind of meat, Okay, so whatever,
Speaker 1: Like if you if you get an animal and then
Speaker 1: cook it within a couple of hours, it's like it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a divisive taste, Like some people like it,
Speaker 1: some people don't like it. It definitely has a different texture.
Speaker 1: There's something in it that seems almost like a metallic taste.
Speaker 1: That then that's gone in a day or two. Right,
Speaker 1: So we know that once you once you shoot an
Speaker 1: animal and enough time passes, it gets rigid, it gets stiff.
Speaker 1: We call that rigor mortis, right, And that process is
Speaker 1: the process of all of the energy and the muscle
Speaker 1: dissipating once the heart stops meeting and to stop blood flow.
Speaker 1: And that is actually a toughening process. In fact, once
Speaker 1: you get to that point that's about as tough as
Speaker 1: that meat is going to be. We can then hang
Speaker 1: it longer in a cooler outside and cold air, and
Speaker 1: that allows the meat to become more tender. But if
Speaker 1: you get ahold of that meat before it's into rigor mortis,
Speaker 1: and you cut it, that cutting stimulates contraction. You put
Speaker 1: it on a hot pan or a hot grill that
Speaker 1: stimulates that contraction, and you can get meat that's literally
Speaker 1: too tough to chew. You know, every now and then
Speaker 1: somebody says, I love to shoot an animal, then immediately
Speaker 1: go kind of steak and go eat it. To me,
Speaker 1: that's disrespectful of the animal because you are you are
Speaker 1: eating that meat in the worst possible conditions to have
Speaker 1: a good eating experience. If you'll at least let that
Speaker 1: animal go through rigor mortist to get stiff uh, then
Speaker 1: you're gonna have a far better eating experience. Okay, Spencer
Speaker 1: whole type. Alright, I don't understand what you're saying, because
Speaker 1: I would like explain the rigor mortis timeline. I would
Speaker 1: think that when it's in rigor, it's all stiffened up, right,
Speaker 1: But before rigor it has the potential to contract. And
Speaker 1: if you stimulate the animal by um by, by cutting
Speaker 1: the meat, or more importantly, by putting it on a
Speaker 1: hot skillet, it will stiffen up. It will shorten more
Speaker 1: than usual. And if you wait till the animals Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's say there's an animal, whatever you're in a
Speaker 1: slaughterhouse or whatever, you kill an animal. There's an animal
Speaker 1: that just dies, Okay, struck by I don't want to
Speaker 1: say struck by lightning. It just dies. At first, you
Speaker 1: can wiggle it all around, you can grab its arm
Speaker 1: and shake it. Yes, Then a while later you can't.
Speaker 1: Then a while later you can. So during the period
Speaker 1: when it's stiffened up, that is more tender than before
Speaker 1: it stiffens up. If you could cook it without allowing
Speaker 1: it to contract, it would be tender, but you cannot
Speaker 1: do that. The when we cut the steak, we remove
Speaker 1: all the muscle bone connections, and so that muscle is
Speaker 1: free to contract, and so before riggor mortis is complete,
Speaker 1: that is a very dynamic muscle that can that can
Speaker 1: shorten and toughen as you handle the product. Once you
Speaker 1: once it goes into a rigger, then you're at a
Speaker 1: certain level of tenderness. And from that time on beyond
Speaker 1: where rigger happens, it will just get more and more
Speaker 1: the longer you keep it in the cooler. Okay, I'm
Speaker 1: mostly good on that one. So far. Your answers have
Speaker 1: a lot of conviction, which is like what I would
Speaker 1: want out of meta Year's official Meat Scientists, right, But
Speaker 1: I wonder if you lack any confidence in what you're saying,
Speaker 1: um knowing that like a lot of the studies that
Speaker 1: have been done in the literature that you're referencing has
Speaker 1: been on like domestic game cattle that was you know,
Speaker 1: ben dean cicado over the last ten thousand years, versus
Speaker 1: something like a white tailed deer or an elk, a
Speaker 1: wild animal. They're just wired differently. And so my question is, like,
Speaker 1: when they're talking about stress, how is how is do
Speaker 1: we know that stress is the same to a dear
Speaker 1: versus cattle? And then you know all the rest of
Speaker 1: your answers if they lack any confidence, no way that
Speaker 1: we're talking about b versus wild game. You know, muscle
Speaker 1: is muscle. I do not lack confidence on the science
Speaker 1: and and Spencer we could get in an argument. You
Speaker 1: got him all wrong. He's not trying to be pugnacious.
Speaker 1: He's just trying to He's trying to people at home
Speaker 1: or so there's people at home in the future listen
Speaker 1: to this. They're at home thinking, yeah, what does he know?
Speaker 1: We're talking about deer? So he's just trying to clear
Speaker 1: that up. Yes, no, I'm just getting the artime. I
Speaker 1: totally understand you're the point that you're saying, Uh have
Speaker 1: I have studied a variety of different species. I have
Speaker 1: studied product from around the world, and muscle responds the
Speaker 1: same way that some of the timelines are different. And
Speaker 1: so for example, uh, poultry, for example, a chicken, it
Speaker 1: will go into rigor mortis in an hour and a half.
Speaker 1: A beef animal might take eight or ten hours before
Speaker 1: it's fully into rigor mortis. If you take a goat
Speaker 1: or sheep there and there in four to six hours,
Speaker 1: that's about That's about what I'd anticipate for deer as well.
Speaker 1: So the biology of muscle contraction and rigor mortis and
Speaker 1: all of that that's fixed. It's it's gonna happen in
Speaker 1: all all of the different species that we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Now we have to think about most of the time.
Speaker 1: When you think about that beef steer, for example, uh,
Speaker 1: that animal has been neutered, and so it doesn't have
Speaker 1: uh the access to all of those hormones that uh
Speaker 1: uh uh and intact mail would have. And so the
Speaker 1: sensitivity to hormone fluctuations might vary a little bit from
Speaker 1: species to species, um, and depending on what sex or
Speaker 1: gender you're dealing with. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: the biology says, um, all muscles go through the same sequence,
Speaker 1: the same kind of process as what I've tried to describe.
Speaker 1: Can you you tell us explain the term I hear
Speaker 1: now and then I thought it was a red cutter,
Speaker 1: but Spencer convinced the otherwise that that's not actually a thing.
Speaker 1: And he was saying do you mean a dark cutter? Like,
Speaker 1: what is a dark cutter? So when we talked about
Speaker 1: the drop in pH that happens normally when rigor occurs,
Speaker 1: that gives us the normal call or that we're used
Speaker 1: to sing inside the muscle. If the pH stays high,
Speaker 1: then the meat is very dark in color. And so
Speaker 1: in beef cattle they call it a dark cutter. Have
Speaker 1: you heard red cutter? I've never heard red cutter until
Speaker 1: about two minutes given up on that one. But it's
Speaker 1: the it's the same way you can get that same
Speaker 1: condition in pork. If pork or stressed for too long,
Speaker 1: you can get in that case, we call it d
Speaker 1: f D dark firm and dry. And so they're all
Speaker 1: just descriptions that you just described wild. You just described
Speaker 1: wild pig, a lot of wild pig pretty well. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that when you have a dark cutter in the
Speaker 1: in the slaughter world or commercial slaughter world, is it
Speaker 1: attributable to a specific thing that happened to that animal
Speaker 1: or is it just some percentage will come out that way?
Speaker 1: Now that's uh, it is it is a response to
Speaker 1: sustained stress. But just like people, some animals are pretty
Speaker 1: chill and some animals are really tightly wired. The ones
Speaker 1: that are high strung, high stress, those are the ones
Speaker 1: that are gonna be more likely to have the problem.
Speaker 1: So the same set of conditions, whether it's UH duration
Speaker 1: or shipping or hauling or whatever, the same set of
Speaker 1: conditions will have a different impact on every animal depending
Speaker 1: on how that animal responds to the situation. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: got you there. There's a product these guys were selling,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe Spencer, maybe remember the name of it. It was,
Speaker 1: um it was a contraption where you could shoot a
Speaker 1: deer and then run over real quick and hook this
Speaker 1: thing up to your car battery and appit like how
Speaker 1: youse app them in a in a slaughterhouse? Can you explain, uh,
Speaker 1: why they do that in a in a plant? Why
Speaker 1: they's app them with electricity? And then can is that
Speaker 1: even can? Can? Is it realistic that you could replicate
Speaker 1: that in the wild? Whatever the hell you're trying to
Speaker 1: get when you do it? Yeah, So let's let's first
Speaker 1: talk about what happens when you apply electricity. You cause
Speaker 1: the muscle to contract. And and by the way, a
Speaker 1: car battery doesn't work very well because that's a constant,
Speaker 1: continuous electrical field. What you really want is alternating current.
Speaker 1: So the muscle contracts, relaxes, contracts relaxes. As you do that,
Speaker 1: you're using up glycogen, you're producing acid. You are hastening
Speaker 1: the rate at which rigor mortis occurs. That makes me
Speaker 1: more tender. And so from the from the mechanism standpoint,
Speaker 1: it works. Can we create something like that that could
Speaker 1: be used in the field. Again, as long as you
Speaker 1: have pulses of electricity rather than a continuous contraction, then
Speaker 1: you're gonna have, uh, some improvement is possible under that scenario.
Speaker 1: The other thing I would point out is, um, when
Speaker 1: when when we when we shoot a deer, the heart
Speaker 1: stops right and that's how blood is pumped through the body.
Speaker 1: So when the heart is no longer beating, we can't
Speaker 1: pump blood out. So um, some electrical impulse will help
Speaker 1: get a little bit of that blood out of the system.
Speaker 1: And so that's the other side benefit. So what is
Speaker 1: the ideal shot placement for a hunter in the head,
Speaker 1: in the neck, in the heart, in the lungs, in
Speaker 1: the spine, Like what would be your top choice? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so just in terms of meat, just limit this to like,
Speaker 1: in terms of meat quality, and get out of the
Speaker 1: and not bog it down with room for air, right,
Speaker 1: margin for air and all that. I appreciate that because
Speaker 1: that is a bit of the question. At the end
Speaker 1: of the day, you want the animal to go from
Speaker 1: being alive to no longer being alive, and heart shot
Speaker 1: ahead shot, any of those will will affect that same consequence.
Speaker 1: And so from a meat quality standpoint, um, other than
Speaker 1: damage to tissue and those kind of things, there's probably
Speaker 1: not real a real big difference among those locations. Do
Speaker 1: you have you ever seen? Um? I can't really it's
Speaker 1: hard to even explained this. Sometimes when you're when you're
Speaker 1: skinning a deer, you'll find that there's like a you
Speaker 1: know that foam, there's like a foam between the like
Speaker 1: like a bubbly foam that forms between the hide and
Speaker 1: the meat. Right, What is that stuff? Well, that's part
Speaker 1: of that connective tissue that I talked about again, That
Speaker 1: is a protein based structure that goes between the muscles
Speaker 1: and also between the muscle and the hide. Uh, no
Speaker 1: no damage, no risk, no concern on that standpoint. I
Speaker 1: might mention though that um, we we think about, well,
Speaker 1: if you've got that silver tissue on the outside of
Speaker 1: the muscle, you can always trend that off. But if
Speaker 1: you get a microscope and look at that muscle, that
Speaker 1: tissue actually goes throughout the muscle. And and that's why
Speaker 1: muscle from the leg, for example, is inherently less tender
Speaker 1: than a muscle that's from the loin or the backstrap,
Speaker 1: because those are muscles of support versus the legs, big
Speaker 1: muscles of locomotion. They need more of that connective tissue. So,
Speaker 1: by and large, if you've gotta you've got a piece
Speaker 1: of meat with a lot of connective tissue in it,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, slow roasting, uh, putting in a pot
Speaker 1: and stewart that kind of a thing is how we
Speaker 1: tend to cook that. Whereas you get the muscles that
Speaker 1: don't have very much connective tissue that tenderlins, the backstraps,
Speaker 1: all of that. We can make sticks out of those,
Speaker 1: throw them in a skellet throw them on the grill,
Speaker 1: and have a very nice eating experience. What a what
Speaker 1: happens when well, first let me ask you this. Have
Speaker 1: you have you had exposure to to your your possiverous
Speaker 1: uh counterparts like fish, fish meat? Is that a thing
Speaker 1: I'm not much on fish meat. I can't tell you
Speaker 1: too much about that. Are there people that specialize Are
Speaker 1: there people in the meat science word to specialize in fish? Yes,
Speaker 1: there are people specialize in fish. People specialize in pork
Speaker 1: or beef or poultry. Uh, yeah, we're we can be
Speaker 1: a pretty specialized group. So because this one, this question
Speaker 1: about bleeding, let's just let's just if you know about
Speaker 1: the process of bleeding fish, you can speak to that.
Speaker 1: But what are you trying to achieve when what are
Speaker 1: you trying to achieve when you bleed something? When people
Speaker 1: talk about like needing to bleed it out, like, what,
Speaker 1: what are you really getting? That's that's a that's an
Speaker 1: awesome question because a lot of people run around saying,
Speaker 1: there's all this blood in the meat um muscle, which
Speaker 1: is true. Muscle is sent water, right, So all you
Speaker 1: have to think about what's the function of blood. And
Speaker 1: one of the main things is we carry oxygen through
Speaker 1: blood right on hemoglobin molecules inside the meat is a
Speaker 1: molecule that also binds oxygen, bind better than hemoglobin actually,
Speaker 1: so it draws the oxygen out of the blood into
Speaker 1: the meat and it binds to mild globin. And so
Speaker 1: when you look at meat, and that meat is red
Speaker 1: in color. That's myad globe. There's very very little hemo
Speaker 1: globe and very little blood in the meat itself. But
Speaker 1: because meat water, everybody goes, oh my gosh, look at
Speaker 1: all the blood that's in that meat. But most of
Speaker 1: that is myo globin and water that's inside the muscle.
Speaker 1: So when you bleed, you're just trying to get rid
Speaker 1: of the bloods that's there. And probably the biggest real
Speaker 1: reason for that is um It's a great nutrient for
Speaker 1: bacterial growth and spoilage, and so we try and remove
Speaker 1: that so that we don't have to deal with it.
Speaker 1: You're saying that blood in the meat is lends itself
Speaker 1: to quicker spoilage. Not necessarily a meatles meats are pretty
Speaker 1: good bacterial medium for growth anyway, but typically in in uh,
Speaker 1: in commercial animals, we we remove the blood just so
Speaker 1: that we don't have to deal with that as we
Speaker 1: go down the line. Otherwise it tends to drip and
Speaker 1: get all over everything. Oh my god. You so once
Speaker 1: it's out it becomes problematic. Yeah, like you don't you
Speaker 1: don't want it around? Yeah? Yes, I want to back
Speaker 1: up to dark cutters. Real quick um red cutters. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Steve's red cutters. Like the obvious stressors are like taking
Speaker 1: a long time to die, uh, and like not eating.
Speaker 1: But what are some of the not so obvious stressors
Speaker 1: that hunters wouldn't think of? Like is weather something that
Speaker 1: would stress out an animal and make their meat worse,
Speaker 1: or like interacting with foreign animals things like that. Yes, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's a really good question, Spencer, And you're absolutely right.
Speaker 1: Just think about you or write. Anything that causes us
Speaker 1: stress causes that animal stress as well. And and and
Speaker 1: so part of that has to do with physical stress
Speaker 1: if it's cold and you're trying to stay warm, for example, Um,
Speaker 1: if you're we also have social stress, right you mix
Speaker 1: mix people up in an elevator and everybody gets kind
Speaker 1: of quiet and awkward and and and that kind of
Speaker 1: stress also creates circumstances or situations that can impact the animal.
Speaker 1: In the case of females, if they're cycling, then that
Speaker 1: hormonal cycle can create stress as well. That draws glycogen
Speaker 1: out of the muscles. Uh. It's that's a really tough
Speaker 1: question to it's. Uh, it's it just creates enough different uh,
Speaker 1: physiological responses to those hormones that that animal is going
Speaker 1: to need more energy and it's going to draw against
Speaker 1: that glycogen's oars to be able to supply that sort
Speaker 1: of like nervous energy if you think of it. So
Speaker 1: you never hear like hunters and fishermen complain about a
Speaker 1: spawning fish tasting bad though, or strutting turkey or anything
Speaker 1: like that. Is it just because like we're really ignorant,
Speaker 1: or is it less likely to happen in poultry and fish? Uh?
Speaker 1: I don't know about fish and poultry. It can still
Speaker 1: happen in poultry, but chances are that we're that's kind
Speaker 1: of what we expect. It's what we're used to seeing.
Speaker 1: And the best example I can give you is UH,
Speaker 1: in poultry, commercial poultry, once they're harvested and you're removed
Speaker 1: all the all the viscera, then you want to chill
Speaker 1: that carcass down quickly. And the way that happens in
Speaker 1: the industry is you take the poultry carcass and put
Speaker 1: it in an ice water bath. Now that cold shock,
Speaker 1: but or the muscle is in rigor causes immediate contraction.
Speaker 1: In comparison, you could also chill that carcass by putting
Speaker 1: it in a refrigerated cooler. And so you can go
Speaker 1: to the grocery store now and there are there is
Speaker 1: air chilled poultry and there's regular commercial poultry. And I'll
Speaker 1: tell you there's a profound difference in tenderness between those two,
Speaker 1: which the air chilled is not as contracted and is
Speaker 1: far more tender than what we traditionally do with poultry.
Speaker 1: Are these labeled like things that we can identify in
Speaker 1: the grocery store? Uh? Typically the air chilled poultry is
Speaker 1: labeled that way. The others are not their traditional normal
Speaker 1: commodity product. If you had to look at what you
Speaker 1: know is done with well, I'm gonna ask you an
Speaker 1: equivalent question to this around around red meat, but knowing
Speaker 1: what's done in uh poultry slaughter facility. Okay, what would
Speaker 1: be the closest approximation that a person could achieve if
Speaker 1: they're hunting pheasants or hunting turkeys and they have a
Speaker 1: pickup truck with them, Like, what would what would you
Speaker 1: do upon what? Like? What would you do in terms
Speaker 1: of a timeline and tools in order to replicate best practices? Yeah? So, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's there's two big things. I think one is you
Speaker 1: want to get rid of the guts UH as soon
Speaker 1: as possible. That's a that's a food safety issue. UM.
Speaker 1: If we have uh feces or fecal material spreading around
Speaker 1: the inside of that body cavity. The sooner you get
Speaker 1: all that out, the better off you are. That's number one.
Speaker 1: Number two is and we've kind of touched on this earlier,
Speaker 1: but you just give it time to go into a
Speaker 1: rigor mortis. But or you do much more with it
Speaker 1: and so you don't have to plunge it in ice water.
Speaker 1: You can allow it to go to rigger um for
Speaker 1: an hour or so once you've removed the viscera, and
Speaker 1: and you'll have a fine eating experience. It's when we go,
Speaker 1: I think too fast. It's when we try and and
Speaker 1: and you know, get the animal and stuff it with snow,
Speaker 1: or we get the animal and and and and throw
Speaker 1: it in the skillet too quickly. That's where we get
Speaker 1: quality problems being created. And you're saying it's bad to
Speaker 1: stuff with snow. Most of the time you don't need
Speaker 1: to do that. And if you're if you if you
Speaker 1: got to say a deer for example, and let's assume
Speaker 1: it's a heart shot as opposed to a head shot.
Speaker 1: So you've disrupted the internal organs, right and um, and
Speaker 1: so the best thing you can do from a food
Speaker 1: safety standpoint is to remove all those organs from the
Speaker 1: inside of the animal. Now, once you've done that, there's
Speaker 1: a chance there's some fecal material in there. And so
Speaker 1: what happens when you stuff it with snow You've just
Speaker 1: smeared all that around, and as the snow melts, you've
Speaker 1: smeared that bacteria around on the inside. The fact is
Speaker 1: the animals going to chill out at a reasonable rate anyhow. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm now, Now, if you're dealing with a very large
Speaker 1: animal and it's warm outside, um, you know it'd be
Speaker 1: nicer if you could cool that off a little quicker.
Speaker 1: But you're not going to have snow around to do
Speaker 1: that under that circumstance anyway. So I don't think it's
Speaker 1: necessary to try and accelerate the chilling rate of animals
Speaker 1: as long as you deal with the meat in a
Speaker 1: timely matter after it's hand rigor mortis. So are you
Speaker 1: saying there's such things freezing something too soon? Like if
Speaker 1: you shut a duck at nine am and you had
Speaker 1: it breast and gutted by ten am and going to freeze.
Speaker 1: Is that too quick? Completely? In fact, we actually had
Speaker 1: a had a former student in our department who went
Speaker 1: to work in Alaska and they're harvesting reindeer when it
Speaker 1: was twenty below outside. And the problem they had is
Speaker 1: they they harvest the deer, lay it on the ground,
Speaker 1: and in twenty minutes it would be frozen. Now what
Speaker 1: happens is when that when the meat thaws, then you
Speaker 1: get massive muscle contraction, way more than normal. So absolutely
Speaker 1: too fast to the freezer is not a good thing.
Speaker 1: The other dimension of that spencer that you ask about,
Speaker 1: which is interesting, I think, is that, uh, it's better
Speaker 1: if you can go into rigor with the muscles attached
Speaker 1: to the bones, because that, to some extent that limits contraction.
Speaker 1: If you remove all those connections of the muscle to
Speaker 1: the bone, that muscle is free to shorten up as
Speaker 1: much as it wants to. That's really interesting because there's
Speaker 1: a there's a real debate in the hunting world around
Speaker 1: um things like things like called the you know, the
Speaker 1: the gutless method, or you know, various ideas around deboning
Speaker 1: things right away in order to reduce weight when you
Speaker 1: have to carry it a long way, and um, a
Speaker 1: lot of people will and I've certainly done it myself,
Speaker 1: shoot an animal and then immediately debone at all and
Speaker 1: put into bags. And I always view the con of it.
Speaker 1: The con to doing this would be that it just
Speaker 1: seems to create a harder time to sort it out
Speaker 1: when you get home. It makes more surface area for
Speaker 1: there to be hair and for it to get dirty.
Speaker 1: But I never heard anybody talk about that it could
Speaker 1: even have a negative impact on the end quality in
Speaker 1: terms of toughness tenderness. Well, and that is in fact
Speaker 1: the case that if you if you bone it out
Speaker 1: while it's hot, you can compromise the contraction and therefore
Speaker 1: the tenderness. But you know, you've got to be practical.
Speaker 1: You can quarter the animal, for example, and most of
Speaker 1: the muscle bone attachments are still retained under that scenario.
Speaker 1: But if you're gonna take your knife and separate every
Speaker 1: muscle and and open it up so there are no
Speaker 1: connections at all, uh that I would say the longer
Speaker 1: you can wait to do that, the better off you're
Speaker 1: gonna be, because you'll be closer to rigor mortis when
Speaker 1: you get to that point, Spencer, was that you talking
Speaker 1: all about everybody hangs ther deer up wrong? Yes, tell
Speaker 1: him about that. So I've I've heard that like a
Speaker 1: good steakhouse or a good butcher will do the tender
Speaker 1: stretch method where they hang a car like a typical
Speaker 1: deer hunter go kill a deer, they skin it out,
Speaker 1: and then they hang it by the achilles. So it's
Speaker 1: like as long as it possibly can be. But I've
Speaker 1: heard that the tender stretch method is preferred by the
Speaker 1: beef industry where you basically put these hooks in their
Speaker 1: pelvis and then you allow their back hands to relax
Speaker 1: and hang it more of a ninety degree angle. Is
Speaker 1: that something that you hear that you promote it. It
Speaker 1: will definitely give a measurable improvement in tenderness if you
Speaker 1: use that method. It is not used in the US
Speaker 1: meat industry at all, but there are other countries that do.
Speaker 1: Is it an efficiency thing? Now, Well, it's what we're
Speaker 1: used to write. We know what the cuts look like,
Speaker 1: we know what to expect all the rest of that,
Speaker 1: and and so if you're going to go to a
Speaker 1: tender stretch strategy, it's a it's a whole different way
Speaker 1: of uh separating that carcass and of pieces, and it's
Speaker 1: just not something the U s ander Steer showing any
Speaker 1: interest in doing by and large certainly on the beat side. Um,
Speaker 1: the beef in the United States pretty tender compared to
Speaker 1: around the world. But I have been to places around
Speaker 1: the world where the entire cooler is hung through tender stretch. Interesting. Sorry,
Speaker 1: go ahead, I'm sorry. I've always heard that it's an
Speaker 1: issue of being efficient. When you hang something by the achilles,
Speaker 1: you can fit a lot more of these things in
Speaker 1: the cooler than if you hang them by the pelvis,
Speaker 1: and then they're they're taking up a lot more room.
Speaker 1: Side by side it would be about the same. But
Speaker 1: as that hind leg falls forward, then you're the distance
Speaker 1: between the animals would have to be have to be
Speaker 1: a little bit greater in order to have room for that.
Speaker 1: It might be interesting part of that, part of that
Speaker 1: whole tender stretched method was devised because uh, in New
Speaker 1: Zealand they were shipped this is years ago. They were
Speaker 1: they were freeze lambs. Uh. They would slaughter lambs, freeze
Speaker 1: the carcasses and ship them overseas. And they discovered that
Speaker 1: that freezing before rigor mortis made really really tough meat,
Speaker 1: and so one way to counteract that was to use
Speaker 1: that tender stretched method or a similar kind of hanging
Speaker 1: where the legs fall forward. That if you think about that,
Speaker 1: that causes the muscles of the leg on the back
Speaker 1: side to stretch more. And so because they're stretched more,
Speaker 1: they're less contracted. But on the inside of the leg,
Speaker 1: those muscles are actually more contracted, right, And so it's
Speaker 1: beneficial for some muscles and not so beneficial for other muscles.
Speaker 1: I want to tell you a story of guy told
Speaker 1: me and and I want you to tell me he's dead,
Speaker 1: So I want to tell me if I'm getting his
Speaker 1: story right. Yea. I used to live next story to
Speaker 1: a guy in Miles City, Montana. Who he was. He
Speaker 1: was in his nineties when I knew him, and he
Speaker 1: was telling me that his family in Montana, they used
Speaker 1: to raise turkeys, and they would raise turkeys around they
Speaker 1: would time it out in order to be selling Thanksgiving turkeys.
Speaker 1: They were shipping these turkeys by rail from Montana to Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: And he told me that they would raise the turkey
Speaker 1: up and then cut off its food supply so that
Speaker 1: it's digestive track emptied completely and they would only give
Speaker 1: it water. Then they would kill the turkeys, pluck them
Speaker 1: and not got them because that led to spoilage quicker,
Speaker 1: and that they would pack these turkeys into barrels, guts
Speaker 1: in them but no food in their system, and ship
Speaker 1: them by rail to Minneapolis for people to eat on Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: This is an I was gonna say, this was a
Speaker 1: while ago. Does that make any sense? Well, part of
Speaker 1: it does. Um. Actually, if you think about ruminants right, uh,
Speaker 1: they have a lot of gut fill and so it
Speaker 1: takes a long time for that to get gone. So
Speaker 1: you could cut off feed source to an animal for
Speaker 1: a while, um, you know, twelve twenty four hours or whatever,
Speaker 1: and biologically that animal doesn't know it. It maybe starts
Speaker 1: to get at hungry, but but biologically it's got all
Speaker 1: the energy and everything else that needs water. Access to
Speaker 1: water is huge with If you do not have access
Speaker 1: to water, that whole dark cutting condition becomes evident more quickly.
Speaker 1: Access to water is pretty important. And so I could
Speaker 1: fathom a place where you don't feed the turkeys and
Speaker 1: you have less gut fill. Um that probably um minimizes
Speaker 1: a little bit the risk. But to be honest with you, UM,
Speaker 1: I would highly recommend that they be they have the
Speaker 1: guts removed, as opposed to its zing them down and
Speaker 1: leaving the guts in there. Thereafter, after the animal dies,
Speaker 1: there is migration. I've gut bacteria that comes through the
Speaker 1: comes through the walls of the intestines into the rest
Speaker 1: of the body cavity, And of course I sing that
Speaker 1: would slow it down and all the rest of that,
Speaker 1: But why run the risk right, Just remove it and
Speaker 1: and let that natural process of cooling and aging take
Speaker 1: place after that. That's one other thing I want to
Speaker 1: mention Steve is that, UM, we've talked a lot about
Speaker 1: what happens up until rigor mortis, but I would sure
Speaker 1: want your listeners to understand that after grigor mortis, then
Speaker 1: as we store that meat in a refrigerator, that meat
Speaker 1: is going to gradually get more and more tender because
Speaker 1: of those insigns that are naturally in the meat. So
Speaker 1: I'm thinking back on your turkey question about the guy
Speaker 1: with the pickup who shoots the turkey, is what should
Speaker 1: he do? Uh? Waiting to freeze that meat, even if
Speaker 1: it's a day or two, is going to make that
Speaker 1: meat more tender and beef we've see that that muscle
Speaker 1: improves in tenderness for about seven to ten days. After
Speaker 1: that it still improves, but at a much lower rate.
Speaker 1: And so it would be you would get far better
Speaker 1: product if you age that beef two weeks before you
Speaker 1: may cut it into steaks in the case of deer
Speaker 1: or whatever, even if it's there or four days, that's
Speaker 1: gonna be better than cutting it and putting it in
Speaker 1: the fraser immediately. Similar to see turkey question talking about
Speaker 1: how those turkeys were cut off from food. Um, the
Speaker 1: guys in my hometown of South Dakota that teach me
Speaker 1: how to clean snapping turtle, they all did the same
Speaker 1: thing where they catch a snapping turtle and then they
Speaker 1: put it in a tank with water and they leave
Speaker 1: it in there for a week, and they say that
Speaker 1: it's cleansing its system. You don't want to eat them
Speaker 1: right away, the meat won't be any good, and so
Speaker 1: all they have for that week is this few inches
Speaker 1: of water that they're in. Is that a really bad practice?
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you, I don't know anything about Uh.
Speaker 1: You know what it would do, is it would it
Speaker 1: would it would remove food from the g I tractor.
Speaker 1: Of course, Uh is that good or bad? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I my instinct is it seems a little excessive, but um, possibly, Kart,
Speaker 1: I want you to find us a snapping turtle meat.
Speaker 1: Christ do you have any colleagues of yours? Are you've been?
Speaker 1: No one did a dissertation on snappers, not that I'm
Speaker 1: aware of. But that's that's out of practice you would
Speaker 1: ever do with a cow or a turkey, That's correct.
Speaker 1: I would not do that for any of those other animals.
Speaker 1: But again it raises another point. You've got to understand
Speaker 1: a little bit about the digestion system of these animals, right,
Speaker 1: And so a ruminant has bacteria in that large stomach
Speaker 1: that breaks down the food into very small components that
Speaker 1: are then absorbed in the bloodstream and converted to proteins
Speaker 1: and fats and carbohydrates. In the case of a pig
Speaker 1: or us humans, we don't have a big ruman and
Speaker 1: so that food gets absorbed through the small intestine. As
Speaker 1: a result, it doesn't have to be broken down into
Speaker 1: quite such small components. So if we feed, for example,
Speaker 1: if we have a if we have a pig that's
Speaker 1: eating acorns or peanuts, then the fats will be quite oily,
Speaker 1: the meat will be oily, and and you'll actually get
Speaker 1: some flavor from the diet. But in the case of
Speaker 1: a ruminant because all the food parts get broken down
Speaker 1: so small, the type of diet is not so critical. Now,
Speaker 1: the energy and the diet is. Because remember when we
Speaker 1: talked about three things that influenced tenderness, one of those
Speaker 1: was fat. So if you get a deer that's grazing
Speaker 1: on corn fields, for example, that's high energy. They're storing
Speaker 1: that extra energy in their body in in a form
Speaker 1: of fat, and that will we particularly in America, we
Speaker 1: love the taste of of fat in our in our
Speaker 1: meat products, and so a high energy diet helps. But
Speaker 1: whether that high energy comes from corn or we eat
Speaker 1: is probably not as critical, particularly in wild game. How
Speaker 1: quickly does that diet need to change for you to
Speaker 1: notice a change in the meat quality. I always hear
Speaker 1: people refer to wood ducks as the best tasting ducks
Speaker 1: because they eat a lot of acorns. But it's hard
Speaker 1: for me to fathom that throughout their entire migration they're
Speaker 1: finding acorns. So how how quickly would something need to
Speaker 1: start eating acorns? Or corn or something like that for
Speaker 1: you to notice the improved meat. Yeah, So the way
Speaker 1: to think about that is, first of all, you've got
Speaker 1: a deposit fat from the diet, but you also got
Speaker 1: to replace fat that's already there, right, And so, uh,
Speaker 1: you have to think about how quickly do you get
Speaker 1: rid of the old facts that are there and how
Speaker 1: quickly do you add new facts that are there? Um,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know specifically for for ducks, for example,
Speaker 1: but in the case of cattle, I'm going to bigger animals,
Speaker 1: That's what I know. In the case of cattle, they'll
Speaker 1: be in a feed lot a hundred, a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty days in order to get the high marbling, the
Speaker 1: high fat inside the muscle that really gives us. Now
Speaker 1: is fifty days enough? Well, it's certainly better than zero, right,
Speaker 1: So it's a continuum. The longer you do it, the
Speaker 1: better you're going to be. Can you explain marbling and then, uh,
Speaker 1: like what factors lead an animal to to have marbling?
Speaker 1: Because you'll often hear I don't know if you know
Speaker 1: about this or not, but you'll hear people say that, um,
Speaker 1: for instance, like that venison isn't marbled. But this is
Speaker 1: probably way outside of your expertise. But mountain goat has
Speaker 1: some marbling. Um, what is it? And is it really
Speaker 1: not universal? Ye? Well again, think how that body stores energy.
Speaker 1: When we get access energy, our nature is to store
Speaker 1: it as fat. Right are glycogen supplies are good? So
Speaker 1: we start storing energy as fat. Now that fact can
Speaker 1: be in side the muscle that's marbling, or it can
Speaker 1: be outside the muscle, either under the skin we call
Speaker 1: that subcutaneous fat, or between the muscles, which would be
Speaker 1: intertermuscular fat instead of intramuscular fat. And so depending on
Speaker 1: genetics and the type of animal, they will store energy
Speaker 1: either inside the muscle or outside the muscle, and that's
Speaker 1: probably species specific. Within a species, there are genetic differences.
Speaker 1: For example, why gub for example, has a lot more
Speaker 1: marbling than does Angus or or Herford or or another
Speaker 1: us breed of cattle. So there are some genetic differences
Speaker 1: within a within a species that also regulate how much
Speaker 1: marbling is deposited. We know this for sure that you
Speaker 1: only get marbling when you have a high energy diet,
Speaker 1: and if you don't, and marbling is least likely to
Speaker 1: be deposited. So a lot of wild game, you know,
Speaker 1: they're foraging, but they're not on they're not in the cornfield,
Speaker 1: they're not getting a high energy diet, so they're probably
Speaker 1: not gonna have as much marbling, even if they have
Speaker 1: the genetic potential to deposit it in the first place.
Speaker 1: You know, I want to back up a little bit,
Speaker 1: and this kind of goes back to gutting things and
Speaker 1: and the sort of timeline around rigor. But you hear
Speaker 1: people describe aging, which we want to get into later.
Speaker 1: But you'll hear people describe aging as like a controlled decomposition. Right,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know if that's a fair
Speaker 1: statement or not. But what happens when um, well, I'll
Speaker 1: put it another way. Sometimes someone will complain about, oh
Speaker 1: I got a deer and antelope or whatever and it
Speaker 1: didn't taste you know, it was no good, it was
Speaker 1: too gamey, whatever, And people will say, oh, yeah, but
Speaker 1: he shot the deer and in rolled around with it
Speaker 1: in the back of his truck for three days. Okay. Um, where,
Speaker 1: if if aging is is decomposition, where does rotting Like
Speaker 1: where does aging end and rotting begin? Like? What is
Speaker 1: the difference there? That's it. That's an awesome question. Um,
Speaker 1: think about dry aged beef for a moment, right, it
Speaker 1: could be aged forty fifty, sixty seventy days, and yet
Speaker 1: normally we would think if you had a steak in
Speaker 1: your refrigerator for that long, it's long gone, right, you're
Speaker 1: gonna throw it away. And so you have to differentiate
Speaker 1: between when we when we talk about aging, we're talking
Speaker 1: about the breakdown of the tissues, mostly the protein inside
Speaker 1: the meat. Whereas when I think about spoil age or rotting,
Speaker 1: I'm really thinking about back to real growth on the
Speaker 1: outside of that tissue. So if you have a way
Speaker 1: to age but to reduce bacterial growth, you can still
Speaker 1: get improvement in tenderness. Certainly, you get changes in flavor
Speaker 1: um from oxidation that normally occurs, but you could you
Speaker 1: could age for longer if you could get rid of
Speaker 1: bacterial growth. Right. And so that's why you've got to
Speaker 1: be real sanitary when you're out there working, Like you say,
Speaker 1: avoid the grass and the extra blood and everything else
Speaker 1: getting all over the meat, because all that does is
Speaker 1: help inoculate the outside surface of that meat with bacteria,
Speaker 1: and that's not a good thing when it comes to
Speaker 1: eating quality. So if you could, if you could have
Speaker 1: a hypothetical situation where you could like eliminate all life
Speaker 1: inside of a walking cooler, right, meaning there's no like,
Speaker 1: there's no bacteria, there's no fungus, like, all life is
Speaker 1: gone inside some space. You would put a deer in there,
Speaker 1: and that deer would still age, but it wouldn't rot
Speaker 1: right now, it would It would dehydrate, right, it would
Speaker 1: dry out re member meat water. And so the typical
Speaker 1: dry aging over that day period might lose ten or
Speaker 1: fifteen percent of the way, right, So there's still a
Speaker 1: lot more water that can come out, but at some
Speaker 1: point you're practically making jerky. It's just so dry that
Speaker 1: there's nothing else to do, So you couldn't do it indefinitely.
Speaker 1: The idea would be that you could safely age longer
Speaker 1: if you could get rid of the bacteria. And by
Speaker 1: the way, the bacteria wouldn't necessarily already be in the cooler.
Speaker 1: We bring it in when we bring in the carcass
Speaker 1: of animal. So so that guy who's driving around with
Speaker 1: a uh antelope on the back of his truck for
Speaker 1: a couple of days, you know he's inoculating that product
Speaker 1: is what he's doing by the time to get down
Speaker 1: on it. I recently read a book called Extra Virginity,
Speaker 1: and it was about the scandalous world of olive oil
Speaker 1: and how it's like rampant to take a ten dollar
Speaker 1: bottle of olive oil and put a five price tag
Speaker 1: on and five label. Is the world of meat exempt
Speaker 1: from that or does it happen there? What areks some
Speaker 1: examples of meat fraud in the commercial industry. All animal
Speaker 1: harvest and cutting is um overseen by employees of the
Speaker 1: federal government, and so meat fraud is very very very low.
Speaker 1: Uh that there are inspectors there to ensure safety and wholesomeness.
Speaker 1: There are agents that deal with accuracy and labeling and
Speaker 1: the rest of that kind of thing, and so um,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a lot of reasons why meat fraud
Speaker 1: would be at a minimum. Now, if I were going
Speaker 1: to cheat, I might I might cut one part of
Speaker 1: a carcass and tell you it's a different part, right,
Speaker 1: and and so I might try and take something out
Speaker 1: of the shoulder and make you think it's part of
Speaker 1: the rib, for example, because there's a dollar value there.
Speaker 1: It doesn't happen very often, but that would be one place.
Speaker 1: The other place where you simply need to be careful
Speaker 1: is some of the claims that are made about how
Speaker 1: the animal is raised and handled and so forth. And again,
Speaker 1: most of the time there are systems in place, their
Speaker 1: audits in place, their government employees in place to ensure
Speaker 1: that that's uh, that that that's accurate, and if there
Speaker 1: is deception and labeling, the consequences of that are pretty serious. So, um,
Speaker 1: I don't think there's a lot of fraud in meat
Speaker 1: quite honestly, have you? Uh you know, it's funny Spencer
Speaker 1: brings up the olevel thing because I know that there's
Speaker 1: a ton of fraud uh in the fish world. And
Speaker 1: I remember reading about this thing where you know, there's
Speaker 1: many varieties of snapper, but they don't have name brand recognition.
Speaker 1: I remember reading that these guys that just saying, we're
Speaker 1: seventies some percent of the fish being sold as red snapper.
Speaker 1: It's not red snapper. But when you people look at
Speaker 1: the men you are going to a fish market, they
Speaker 1: don't want to see mangrove snapper, red line or blue
Speaker 1: line or whatever to all these different kinds of snappers,
Speaker 1: so they just throw up like red snapper because people
Speaker 1: will think like, oh, but the difference there is it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's not nearly as a controlled system from a supply standpoint,
Speaker 1: that's correct. You know some of the guys buying filet's like,
Speaker 1: it's already out of the question. But it's hard to uh,
Speaker 1: it's probably hard to pass off one kind of carcass
Speaker 1: as another kind of carcass. Imagine the grade the grading
Speaker 1: system could be screwed up. Oh, now that that too
Speaker 1: is done by federal employees, and that right, So you
Speaker 1: don't make your own call. You don't make your own
Speaker 1: call on grading. No, if you you can self grade
Speaker 1: and establish your own grading requirements. But if you're going
Speaker 1: to call it prime choice select, then those grades are
Speaker 1: are through federal employees, federal graders, And that's a that's
Speaker 1: been a tightly controlled system for a long time. I
Speaker 1: was in a I was in a meat plant this
Speaker 1: week actually where I watched graders work. So it's still happening.
Speaker 1: Were you were you second guessing him? No? No, I
Speaker 1: you agreed with the calls they were making. Yes, I was.
Speaker 1: Actually I was actually in their buying meat for a
Speaker 1: research project. Actually, So what goes into the different grades,
Speaker 1: like what makes a prime a prime, or a choice
Speaker 1: of choice or a select a select. So there's there's
Speaker 1: two primary elements used for grade. One is how old
Speaker 1: the animal is, and the other one has to do
Speaker 1: with how much marveling, how much fat inside the muscle.
Speaker 1: It turns out in the US, we sent all the
Speaker 1: young animals to one plant and all of the old
Speaker 1: animals to a different plant, and so, uh, they're mostly
Speaker 1: Age is not a question, and it's just how much
Speaker 1: marbling is present to get prime or choice or select.
Speaker 1: One time I was, I was working on a magazine
Speaker 1: story years ago about livestock theft, like like contemporary cattle rustling,
Speaker 1: and I went, I was at a sale yard in
Speaker 1: Twin Falls, Idaho, and I was with some guys that
Speaker 1: run a cow calfe operation and they were watching what
Speaker 1: they called milked out dairy cows climbing off a truck
Speaker 1: and they expressed like a high level of disapproval about
Speaker 1: the condition of the animals and made a comment about
Speaker 1: what the beef would be like off those What were
Speaker 1: they getting at, Well, it's that it's nutrition again, right,
Speaker 1: So if you have enough energy then you can support yourself.
Speaker 1: You have enough muscle and you have enough fat to
Speaker 1: sustain body condition. In the case of dairy cows in particular,
Speaker 1: they're being milked every day. They're putting a lot of
Speaker 1: their energy into providing that milk. So you have to
Speaker 1: provide a really high plane of nutrition. If you're milking
Speaker 1: and used in the plane of nutrition lowers, then that
Speaker 1: animal is going to get a lot leaner and it
Speaker 1: might even lose a little bit of muscle mass. And
Speaker 1: so that's the body condition that they're looking at. So
Speaker 1: now so it won't be like potentially won't be as
Speaker 1: good and could be tougher. Well. Yeah, So the other
Speaker 1: issue there is those dairy cows are much older. They
Speaker 1: could be three or four or five years old, whereas
Speaker 1: young cattle to the marketplace are typically two years or less.
Speaker 1: And the older and animals sort of like us us, right,
Speaker 1: the older we get, the tougher we get, right, And
Speaker 1: that's what happens for muscle as well. Mature animals more connective, tissue,
Speaker 1: less tender than younger animals, so that when you're out
Speaker 1: hunting you see that three or four year old stag, right,
Speaker 1: it's it's not gonna be as tender as an animal
Speaker 1: that's much younger. Are there any exceptions to the rule,
Speaker 1: like does it go as far as that a fawn
Speaker 1: dear would be way more tender than an old buck? Yes,
Speaker 1: what you just said is correct. A faun would be
Speaker 1: more tender than a buck with with one caveat that
Speaker 1: fawn is so small that it would be very easy
Speaker 1: for it that muscle to get cold and contract before
Speaker 1: it goes into rigor mortis. So if you could control
Speaker 1: temperature correctly, then that faun would be way more tender
Speaker 1: than the older animal. It's the same thing with veal, right,
Speaker 1: veal is much younger than the than the twenty four
Speaker 1: month old uh steers and efforts that we buy in
Speaker 1: the grocery store every day, and veal as much more
Speaker 1: tender as well? Is veal synonymous with crate raised veal?
Speaker 1: Do you remember all the blow up years to go
Speaker 1: about create raise veal? Is there a difference? There's create
Speaker 1: raise veal a qualifier of veal. Uh No, deal is
Speaker 1: based on animal age. So most of the veal these
Speaker 1: days is raised in pens and group pins where there
Speaker 1: are a number of them together. So um that there
Speaker 1: is a welfare question that was raised, And I think
Speaker 1: the industry has responded well to it in that regard,
Speaker 1: So so that is like that is a classification. There
Speaker 1: was a classification of veal rather than just meaning the
Speaker 1: veal is create race. I think people thought it was synonymous,
Speaker 1: like if it's veal, you know, it was raised in
Speaker 1: a specific way, but it could skydive and still be vealed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that the government would say that um veal is based
Speaker 1: on animal age period, that's it. And so if someone's
Speaker 1: you know, if someone says free range veal or pin
Speaker 1: raised veal or group race veal, those descriptors are being
Speaker 1: used by the people who are marketing the product. Federal
Speaker 1: government focuses on the fact that it in fact is veal.
Speaker 1: Why is it bad to eat raw red meat? And
Speaker 1: are there less threats with something like deer meat versus
Speaker 1: cal meat. The risk of eating raw meat is primarily
Speaker 1: one of microbial issues spoilage and and pathogens that could
Speaker 1: make you sick um. In addition, if there are parasites
Speaker 1: and the meat, then if you haven't cooked it, then
Speaker 1: that's a risk as well. So I would think game
Speaker 1: meat would be perhaps more likely to have parasites. Uh
Speaker 1: in the in commercial production of animals, they're gonna do
Speaker 1: everything they can to minimize that because that reduces the
Speaker 1: growth efficiency and it's all about efficiency and commercial production.
Speaker 1: So again and lifeless uh, and that hypothetical lifeless space.
Speaker 1: You could eat the raw meat all the time. It's
Speaker 1: just like you're there's no damage from the actual meat.
Speaker 1: It's just stuff that you're ingesting that accompanies it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's a fair way to say that. I haven't.
Speaker 1: I have a question that kind of relates back also
Speaker 1: to you know, idea of great raised veal. But okay,
Speaker 1: so let's look at human beings. So somebody who doesn't
Speaker 1: do any exercise whatsoever and just kind of sits around,
Speaker 1: and then someone who lifts weights all the time and
Speaker 1: has stronger, bigger muscle. So if we look at the
Speaker 1: this is a cannibalism question their PhD next week after
Speaker 1: the turtle guy, I wanna human meat guy. I'm glad
Speaker 1: you're asking a question because I was wondering the same thing,
Speaker 1: like which people tastes better? Yeah, totally, if you haven't
Speaker 1: died of fruit loops, if you have salad um. So
Speaker 1: if we look at the equivalent of that in in animals, uh,
Speaker 1: an animal that maybe doesn't move around a lot compared
Speaker 1: to same same animal, same species, but that moves around
Speaker 1: a lot more or um or I don't know, cats
Speaker 1: climbing trees. Yeah, we hear about people talk about why
Speaker 1: is the chicken in like in rural Mexico, the chicken
Speaker 1: is so good? Be like, well, it's well exercised, right
Speaker 1: like like if it if an animal has I don't know,
Speaker 1: is stronger, has more muscle, is potentially more contracted muscle,
Speaker 1: Like how does that all or is well exercised or not?
Speaker 1: How does that have an effect if any on toughness
Speaker 1: or you can you can still manipulate the meat afterwards
Speaker 1: and the muscle fiber afterwards to to get it to
Speaker 1: be tender good. I'll answer that, but I just want
Speaker 1: to tease you, guys. I always have a conversation with
Speaker 1: my students, and that is that sooner or later when
Speaker 1: you're talking to the public, they become closet scientists, and
Speaker 1: I think they don'ts and but the basis of your
Speaker 1: question is is actually is twofold number one? Does exercise
Speaker 1: make me less tender? And then the other dimension of
Speaker 1: that is the inactivity means that they're burning up less
Speaker 1: energy and if they're consuming the same they're creating more fat.
Speaker 1: And so that latter part is true. The less exercise,
Speaker 1: the less movement, the more fat is going to be
Speaker 1: produced on the same diet. Right. In terms of exercise
Speaker 1: creating tougher connective tissue and the rest of that, those differences,
Speaker 1: if they exist, are very subtle and not meaningful. You
Speaker 1: would have, uh, are greater difference in um tenderness from
Speaker 1: one muscle to another than you would from one animal
Speaker 1: to another because of exercise. Okay, so pretty much, you know,
Speaker 1: given given more or less exercise among people in the office,
Speaker 1: we may all taste about the same. Yeah, presuming you're
Speaker 1: the same age, right, Yeah, yeah, in a real quick,
Speaker 1: simple way, what's the difference between the dark meat? You know,
Speaker 1: with poultry, what's the difference between the dark meat and
Speaker 1: the white meat? Uh, it's it's that amount of myoglobin
Speaker 1: that's present. So, um, not all muscle cells are the same.
Speaker 1: Some have more myoglobin than the other. So the dark
Speaker 1: meat just has more of that myoglobin and biologically typically
Speaker 1: has a little bit more lipid, a little bit more
Speaker 1: fat in there as well. Neither one is very fat,
Speaker 1: but there might be another percentage or to a fat
Speaker 1: in there. Mostly the color difference is just because there's
Speaker 1: more of that oxygen binding pigment in the meat. Can
Speaker 1: you explain the function of glands that you find when
Speaker 1: you're butchering something and our glands as prominent in domestic
Speaker 1: animals as they are wild ones? Well, yes, Spencer's not
Speaker 1: like you produce more glands from being domestic. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I'm thinking about like with a white tailed deer,
Speaker 1: like they use their glands to mark territory and things
Speaker 1: like that. The more active gland. Yeah, well I'll buy that,
Speaker 1: because you smell a fox and you smell your dog
Speaker 1: named close to the same thing. There. He's right. So
Speaker 1: in this case, you're talking about scent glands, and we
Speaker 1: really don't have scent glands and domestic animals to deal
Speaker 1: with too much where Yes, But if you're talking about
Speaker 1: lymph glands, those lymph nodes, lamp glands, they exist in
Speaker 1: all of the animals. They're probably a little bit more visible,
Speaker 1: easy to see in a leaner animal, and so you
Speaker 1: probably see those more often in game. And what is
Speaker 1: the function of those, Well, that's a that's an immune function.
Speaker 1: That's how the animal sustains hell when you get when
Speaker 1: you get a cold, you have an immune response that
Speaker 1: helps you fight against it. So there's a whole system
Speaker 1: in the body called the lymph system that moves that
Speaker 1: fluid around to help fight UH disease and injury and
Speaker 1: the rest of that kind of thing. So when you
Speaker 1: sprain your ankle, it swells up. That's that's lymph fluid
Speaker 1: pooling in your ankle. As a result, you know, there's
Speaker 1: a little gland. It's always hiding out in the back
Speaker 1: leg of a deer, and you actually gotta take it
Speaker 1: apart to get that thing out. Let's say you do
Speaker 1: you forget or don't or you never knew about it,
Speaker 1: and just you must have been eating him your whole life. Um,
Speaker 1: is that necessarily bad for you? I don't. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be too concerned about a health concern. I suspect it
Speaker 1: probably has a quality effect on taste and play r
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing. That same guy that told
Speaker 1: me the great Turkey story about shipping into Minneapolis and barrels,
Speaker 1: he had a little custom slaughter plant and I was
Speaker 1: down there with him one time and we were picking
Speaker 1: out uh sweetbreads. The Thamus gland. Correct, right, we're picking
Speaker 1: out sweetbreads and he was. We were. He was slaughtered
Speaker 1: a bunch of young cattle and the guy that he
Speaker 1: was slaughtering for didn't want them. So he had me
Speaker 1: down because he said, you can get all you want
Speaker 1: if you want to come down. And so he was
Speaker 1: showing me how to separate the skin and prepare them,
Speaker 1: and he was saying that that. I said, well, why
Speaker 1: are they not good on the older animals? And he
Speaker 1: said that it turns waxy. Is this something you had
Speaker 1: any exposure to? Well, I have had uh sweetbreads, and
Speaker 1: I can tell you that on the grill in particular,
Speaker 1: they can be quite delicious. They're there, it's They're incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh. And it makes sense to me that as
Speaker 1: the animal gets older that possibly the saturation of the
Speaker 1: lipids might change. I don't really know, but I think
Speaker 1: it's probably less waxy and more um dance, harder fat
Speaker 1: that's present within that area. But that's a little bit
Speaker 1: of guess on my part. Yeah, I've never met I've
Speaker 1: always thought to experiment with this, but never have. As
Speaker 1: if on a yearling deer um to find that sweetbread
Speaker 1: and prepare it and see if it's any good. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure someone listening has done this, but I've never
Speaker 1: heard of people doing sweetbreads on anything but cattle. Well, lamb,
Speaker 1: I think people do lamb sweetbreads. Now, they're they're a
Speaker 1: little bit hard to find. You gotta know what you're
Speaker 1: looking for. They're not very big, particularly in game animals,
Speaker 1: so I think that would be a bigger challenge. Why
Speaker 1: is beef tallow good and venison tale bad. Well, I've
Speaker 1: never had venison talos so, but it has to do
Speaker 1: with I would expect it's a difference in what fatty
Speaker 1: acids are made up of the tissue, right and so um,
Speaker 1: If you think about something like a chicken or pork fat,
Speaker 1: it's pretty soft. When you go to the beef carcass,
Speaker 1: it's a lot more firm, and so it's more saturated
Speaker 1: in the beef animal. Incidentally, it depends on where on
Speaker 1: the carcass you get. The fat in the brisket area
Speaker 1: is softer than fat that's over the loin and the
Speaker 1: fact that's around the kidney is harder than everything. And
Speaker 1: so there are differences within the animal as well. But
Speaker 1: if you have a if you have an unsaturated fat,
Speaker 1: a soft fat like pork, like poultry. I would expect,
Speaker 1: like game um, that fat will oxidize more quickly. It's
Speaker 1: biologically disposed to do so it interacts with sygen from
Speaker 1: the air. Oxidized lipids are described by US as rancid,
Speaker 1: and so there could very well be a flavor difference
Speaker 1: there as well. Oh no, I think you're getting I
Speaker 1: think you're you're onto it. I'll tell you some of
Speaker 1: the weird act when we talk about dear tallow like,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you some of the attributes that we find
Speaker 1: that differ from the attributes of bee fat. It is
Speaker 1: the most fat you find is over the realmp, so
Speaker 1: kind of like alongside like on on top of the romp,
Speaker 1: alongside either side of the spine, you'll find these big
Speaker 1: flat cakes of fat. It's it's firm right like you
Speaker 1: could you could cut into squares. It's kind of flaky,
Speaker 1: like when when it flakes, you can sort of when
Speaker 1: it when it's cold or whatever, you can kind of
Speaker 1: flake it away and hold it in your fingers and
Speaker 1: it doesn't melt between your fingers at all when you
Speaker 1: eat it. It's like if you take a sip, like
Speaker 1: if you were eating then some rib and then you
Speaker 1: had a sip of ice water. That fat will set
Speaker 1: up and solidify all over on the inside of your mouth, um,
Speaker 1: and to the point where you have to almost manually
Speaker 1: scrape it off the inside of your mouth. And finally
Speaker 1: it is good. It's okay fresh, but it rots in
Speaker 1: your freezer. Yeah, and you pull it out later and
Speaker 1: it's changed man like like six venice deer fat in
Speaker 1: your freezer for six months comes out way different than
Speaker 1: when it went in, but the meat is not changed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that. I'm sure that's that concentration of fats and
Speaker 1: oxidation that takes place. Oxidation happens in your freezer as well.
Speaker 1: So that's entirely consistent with what I would expect. You
Speaker 1: know what's weird. You know what really goes bad in
Speaker 1: the freezer is bear fat. I don't know why. You
Speaker 1: can render it into like really nice lard, but it
Speaker 1: goes bad unrendered. Just the straight fat will rot in
Speaker 1: your freezer. I don't know if pork fat does, but
Speaker 1: I uh, pork fat well, probably at a little bit
Speaker 1: of a slower rate. Um. But you know, this is
Speaker 1: one of those things where we could talk just briefly
Speaker 1: about packaging, right, A lot of times we we wrap
Speaker 1: it up in and that's sort of that waxy coated
Speaker 1: or plastic coated butcher paper which doesn't get it doesn't
Speaker 1: get the air out right, whereas um, if you seal
Speaker 1: it inside a vacuum bag, a plastic bag and vacuum
Speaker 1: seal that, which is how things are done commercially, you've
Speaker 1: gotten rid of almost all the air that's there, and
Speaker 1: that will extend the either the shelf life when it's
Speaker 1: fresh or the shelf life in the freezer as well,
Speaker 1: because it minimizes that oxidation process. Go ahead, Spencer, So
Speaker 1: are you replicating that when you freeze something in water?
Speaker 1: It's very common among fishermen to take a bag of
Speaker 1: filets and fill it with water and then throw that
Speaker 1: in your freezer because it doesn't allow any air to
Speaker 1: come in contact with the meat. Is that doing the
Speaker 1: same thing, That's the same principle. I would argue you
Speaker 1: probably still get some air through there, but it would
Speaker 1: certainly reduce the problem. You know, we used to in
Speaker 1: the old days, we would just wrap red meat in
Speaker 1: wax freezer paper, which created all kinds of problem, Like
Speaker 1: you just get freezer burned corners, you know right now,
Speaker 1: I'll do one or two things where I typically will
Speaker 1: wrap it in plastic wrap like saran wrap in order
Speaker 1: to get all as much of the air out as
Speaker 1: I can, and then put it in the wax freezer paper,
Speaker 1: which I think is protective, like protects it the integrity
Speaker 1: of the plastic wrap underneath when people are like jam
Speaker 1: you know, shuffling around in the freezer. And also it
Speaker 1: decreases light or eliminates light from penetrating in um. Do
Speaker 1: you feel that that system is like a good system
Speaker 1: for home use. Sure, it's not quite as effective as
Speaker 1: the vacuum packaging we're talking about, But the secret is, uh,
Speaker 1: you use the magic words surand. Like everything else, not
Speaker 1: all plastic wrap is created equal Suran. Suran is an
Speaker 1: oxygen barrier. And in fact, those those vacuum package bags
Speaker 1: I'm talking about their layered and the center layer is
Speaker 1: a surand type product to prevent oxygen from penetrating. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know that there are some plastic wrap that
Speaker 1: will let air through and we'll let oxygen through and
Speaker 1: water through, and so it depends on which which plastic
Speaker 1: wrap you're using. How do you know that you're getting
Speaker 1: the right kind um. You know, the the easiest way
Speaker 1: is to uh if it's if it's not necessarily a
Speaker 1: brand endorsement, but Saran is a brand name for the
Speaker 1: oxygen barrier film. UM. Oh, I see the other thing
Speaker 1: you can do UM. For example, if you make like
Speaker 1: if you take avocados and chop them up and you
Speaker 1: cover them with plastic wrap. Some of that plastic wrap
Speaker 1: it will turn brown very very quickly, and others it
Speaker 1: will not. And so that's an indication of oxygen permeability
Speaker 1: as well. Kind of an in home science test, if
Speaker 1: you will. When you saw out a piece of frozen
Speaker 1: meat like a backstrap and there's all that liquid in
Speaker 1: the plate, what is that just water? That's water and
Speaker 1: myl globe. There are a few other proteins that are
Speaker 1: in their water soluble enzymes. That kind of thing. It
Speaker 1: doesn't comprom eyes the nutritional quality of the product at all,
Speaker 1: but there's no reason to hold onto it. You know.
Speaker 1: The big thing I remind people is um, the rami
Speaker 1: might be on that plate once you get it cook,
Speaker 1: make sure you use a clean plate. So would it
Speaker 1: be a bad practice then to freeze something thought out
Speaker 1: refreeze it again, and then thought out again, are you
Speaker 1: creating a worse product? Yes, what happens there? Okay, go on.
Speaker 1: You're driving moisture from the product. And usually when you
Speaker 1: thought out, you're exposing it to oxygen, so you're getting
Speaker 1: more oxidation as well. So both of those things would
Speaker 1: be uh negative in terms of eating experience, but not
Speaker 1: a huge negative. Yeah, I mean you can refreez me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do. I like I've long been. I always have
Speaker 1: people tell me you can't do that. You can't do that, Well,
Speaker 1: then I should be dead or dead because we did
Speaker 1: all the time, like well thaw big bags. So if
Speaker 1: we but let's say you bone a deer like a
Speaker 1: deer shoulder out. Um, we bone the deer shoulder out,
Speaker 1: and you don't have time for whatever reason, just because
Speaker 1: of life, and you put all the meat into a
Speaker 1: gallon size zip blog bag, squeeze the air out, put
Speaker 1: in your freezer for whatever a month and then you
Speaker 1: finally get time. You're gonna make some sausage, pull it
Speaker 1: back out, thought, make sausage or burger whatever, repackage it,
Speaker 1: and then it goes back into the freezer. Now I
Speaker 1: like sure, like something must be lost. But I would
Speaker 1: if I PEPSI challenged you on it, I don't think
Speaker 1: you'd be able to pick it out for the most part,
Speaker 1: those little differences, particularly if you're going from a whole
Speaker 1: product to a to a ground product. Uh, I think
Speaker 1: you're safe by doing that. You know, you want to
Speaker 1: think a little bit about thawing if you're if you're
Speaker 1: one of those guys who throws it on the kitchen
Speaker 1: counter and lets it thaw for the rest of the day,
Speaker 1: if there's any bacteria in there that's not particularly food
Speaker 1: safety practices we'd want to encourage. I'd say, put it
Speaker 1: in the fridge, let it get partially thought, cut off
Speaker 1: what you need, and then refreeze the rest so that
Speaker 1: you know that you haven't gotten in a temperature zone
Speaker 1: where lots of extra spoilage bacteria take place. But the
Speaker 1: practice that you've talked about people take, People do that
Speaker 1: all the time. You're absolutely right, And I think I
Speaker 1: was trying to point out that it's a matter of
Speaker 1: degrees of of of differences, and it's not a binary
Speaker 1: yes no, do don't live by kind of decision on
Speaker 1: that thing. Chris, what is the science say about marinating me?
Speaker 1: Can you get a liquid to penetrate like a roast
Speaker 1: and change the flavor of it. Yeah, So there's two
Speaker 1: reasons to marinate. One is to change flavor and one
Speaker 1: is to tenderize the meat. And so if you're going
Speaker 1: to change flavor, then pretty much whatever flavor you like,
Speaker 1: you can marinate the meat for an hour or two.
Speaker 1: You'll get a nice surface coating and uh, and it
Speaker 1: will alter the taste of the product and you're cooking,
Speaker 1: and that's that's easy. You can do that with We
Speaker 1: do similar things with dry rubs, right where you just
Speaker 1: rub the spices on the outside and so forth. Um.
Speaker 1: But most of the time when we think and meat
Speaker 1: science about marinating, we're thinking about how are you making
Speaker 1: that meat more tender. The secret goes back to that
Speaker 1: connective tissue, that silvery tissue on the outside that goes
Speaker 1: throughout the whole muscle. You can think of that connective
Speaker 1: tissue like a fish net or like a harness, so
Speaker 1: that when the individual cell contracts, that connective tissue moves
Speaker 1: with it, and that's how we get movement of the
Speaker 1: whole body or the whole arm as a result of
Speaker 1: contraction in the live animal. So when you marinate, you
Speaker 1: want to tenderize that connective tissue. That works best if
Speaker 1: you have an acid based marinate, so a wine or
Speaker 1: a vinegar, or a citric kind of a base, even
Speaker 1: a soy sauce. Those kinds of marinades will enhance the
Speaker 1: tenderness of the product. The secret, as you just pointed out,
Speaker 1: is how deep and how far does that really penetrate
Speaker 1: into the muscle. And I tell you it doesn't go
Speaker 1: that far. Right, you can you can marinate for eight
Speaker 1: hours and only be an eighth or a quarter of
Speaker 1: an inch into the tissue. So it's best if you
Speaker 1: marinate thinner, smaller pieces. Uh, if you want to get
Speaker 1: real sophisticated, you can. You can get a syringe and
Speaker 1: you can actually inject some of that marinate into a
Speaker 1: larger a larger piece of meat, and that will work
Speaker 1: as well. Um. The last thing on marinades I would
Speaker 1: mention is that there are some um, some fruits that
Speaker 1: have enzymes in them that tender eyed meat. And so
Speaker 1: for example, kiwi fruit or raw pineapple, even papaya and figs,
Speaker 1: all of those have enzymes that will attack the meat.
Speaker 1: Now if it's canned pineapple, well by canning, you've inactivated
Speaker 1: the enzyme. It doesn't work anymore as a fresh product.
Speaker 1: If you add that to the to the to the dish,
Speaker 1: you can tenderize meat in that way. You know, you
Speaker 1: might give me an answer here that I don't believe,
Speaker 1: and Noah's wrong. But can you increase moisture by marinating
Speaker 1: or brining? This is a hot debate in the culinary world.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure whether you would increase for marinating. You
Speaker 1: might be able to get a little bit more moisture
Speaker 1: in there, but you know you're trying to get water
Speaker 1: to move from to a place that's already moisture. So
Speaker 1: I wouldn't think you get very much of an effect
Speaker 1: just by marinating to enhance moisture. If you're brining, look,
Speaker 1: salt drives out meat, right, That's how we used to
Speaker 1: preserve meat years and years ago. It's packet and salt,
Speaker 1: and so salt tends to draw moisture out of the product. Now,
Speaker 1: if you mix up a salt solution and you injected
Speaker 1: in the meat, okay, you've added more moisture there. But
Speaker 1: if you're just putting a piece of meat into a brine,
Speaker 1: the the you're getting a reverse effect. You're getting moisture
Speaker 1: pulled out. But don't they like don't they sell you
Speaker 1: know how? Sometimes Uh, you can get a turkey and
Speaker 1: it actually has an ingredients list because they've they've they
Speaker 1: injected with us A brine, yes, and and that's like
Speaker 1: specifically to make it moist right, But that's just you're
Speaker 1: just like physically sticking water there. Yes, but you're you're
Speaker 1: also adding salt, which is a great flavor potentiator, right.
Speaker 1: It enhances flavor. And so if you give somebody a
Speaker 1: piece of meat with salt and without salt most of
Speaker 1: the time, and they'll tell you the one with salt
Speaker 1: taste better, is more tender, more juicy, more flavorful. Plus
Speaker 1: there are other ingredients that go into that that turkey
Speaker 1: that would help the moistures stay in the meat instead
Speaker 1: of just run out. So it's a it's I think
Speaker 1: we're dealing with the difference in terminology here and what
Speaker 1: you're really doing and how it's getting done. What if
Speaker 1: you like pulverize kiwi and pineapple and you put some
Speaker 1: meat in a bowl of that, so there's no sodium,
Speaker 1: so you're not having water come out of it, but
Speaker 1: you're having it in an enzyme bath of liquid. You
Speaker 1: I tell you that I have cooked meat with on
Speaker 1: a skillet with kiwi. Before that I could eat with
Speaker 1: a spoon. Maybe that's it wasn't very good because because
Speaker 1: it was much, it was much by aging. Um it
Speaker 1: must be real like dry aging is beneficial. It us
Speaker 1: with some dues and don't well so. Um, when you
Speaker 1: are aging, you are allowing the enzymes that are naturally
Speaker 1: present within the meat to break down the protein that
Speaker 1: enhances tenderness. So if you you could age in one
Speaker 1: of those vacuum bags where almost no moisture comes out,
Speaker 1: or you can age in air. If you're aging in air,
Speaker 1: we call it dry aging. If you're aging in one
Speaker 1: of those vacuum packages, we call it wet aging. And
Speaker 1: in both cases the tenderization process is the same. And
Speaker 1: as I said earlier, you'll get the great benefit and
Speaker 1: the first week or so or two, and then after
Speaker 1: that the benefits of aging are reduced. You don't see,
Speaker 1: you've already tender eye it to a large extent, to
Speaker 1: the to the most that it will occur. It will
Speaker 1: continue to improve, but not very much. Um so from
Speaker 1: an aging standpoint. For tenderness. It's enzymes do the work.
Speaker 1: When we dry age, We're putting meat, typically on a rack,
Speaker 1: and we leave it set for a period of time.
Speaker 1: And what happens is the moisture on the surface of
Speaker 1: that evaporates fairly quickly. In fact, over three or four days, Uh,
Speaker 1: you will you can get a very nice dry crust
Speaker 1: on the outside of that meat. The longer you store
Speaker 1: after that, you will still lose moisture. And um. Two
Speaker 1: things happened during that aging period from a taste standpoint,
Speaker 1: One is you're concentrating the flavors because you're removing water
Speaker 1: and everything else stays behind. But the other thing is
Speaker 1: is you're actually creating flavors. Proteins get broken down into
Speaker 1: amino acids, and some amino acids are like the ingredients
Speaker 1: in MSG. There there their flavor potentiators as well enhancers. Uh.
Speaker 1: You get some oxidation flavors that go on as you
Speaker 1: dry age as well. So the taste of a dry
Speaker 1: age piece of meat is profoundly different than the taste
Speaker 1: of a wet aged piece of meat. So I think, uh,
Speaker 1: like a lot of other things, if someone says I'm
Speaker 1: going to dry age, they need to understand why they're
Speaker 1: dry aging, what they're going to accomplish when they do that. Now,
Speaker 1: when you dry age, you lose the weight I mentioned
Speaker 1: before cent or more. But then you've also got this
Speaker 1: hard crust on the outside that you've got to trim
Speaker 1: off and throw away. Do you guys ever call that
Speaker 1: the rind? Yeah? That it's so you're talking about maybe
Speaker 1: another fiftent. So you're probably gonna lose of the weight
Speaker 1: of that muscle when you dry age. You know. A
Speaker 1: guy once served me a piece of ad dad. It
Speaker 1: was like he had an odd dad shoulder that he
Speaker 1: had aged for eighteen months, And once you got through
Speaker 1: all the dried out stuff, there was a strip of
Speaker 1: meat inside there. There was about the size of a
Speaker 1: cigar and it tastes like blue cheese. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was the cheesiest, strongest, most potent thing. Um. He was
Speaker 1: just kind of experiment with how long can you how
Speaker 1: long can you go? But that felt like a real
Speaker 1: Petrie dish, you know, but no ill effect. We ate
Speaker 1: it raw. My goodness, your ban is mold always a
Speaker 1: bad sign when you're dry aging something. No, um, but
Speaker 1: it makes me nervous. Some mold can be toxic, particularly
Speaker 1: the black molds. There is a gray mold that tends
Speaker 1: to come on, and some dry aging experts will say
Speaker 1: that that enhances or alters the flavor. Incidentally, they've done
Speaker 1: some testing on some molds and one of them is
Speaker 1: associated with blue cheese. It's the same kind of mold
Speaker 1: that can take place. But I would emphasize you don't
Speaker 1: have to have mold to have a very good dry
Speaker 1: age product. In fact, I sort of feel like if
Speaker 1: you've got mold, to me, that's an indication that maybe
Speaker 1: you don't have the most sanitary cleaning system set up
Speaker 1: before you started to dry edge in the first place.
Speaker 1: I'm not a big fan of mold, but I'll tell
Speaker 1: you there are some scientists who say it does accentuate
Speaker 1: and add a little bit to the flavor as well.
Speaker 1: A friend of mine who is a chef, he always
Speaker 1: advised me that the only mold that there's him is
Speaker 1: the black fuzzy kind, So that that's that's true, not
Speaker 1: the only one with that black fuzzy is bad. That's correct.
Speaker 1: What about aging temperature, I always hear uh Butcher stress
Speaker 1: that you shouldn't let the ambient temperature get below freezing
Speaker 1: because it slows down the aging process, so you're not
Speaker 1: accomplishing what you're trying to do. What is like the
Speaker 1: ideal temperature for aging meat. Yeah, that's exactly right. If
Speaker 1: it's frozen water, it's not gonna move right very easily,
Speaker 1: and so you want to be above freezing. I would
Speaker 1: say thirty four or thirty five degrees or somewhere in
Speaker 1: that ballpark would be about right. If you get much
Speaker 1: higher than that, then you start to get bacterial growth
Speaker 1: and the rest of that. What's it what's the real
Speaker 1: danger zone? Well, anything over forty for certain would be
Speaker 1: too high. Um, but but if you're gonna aren't for
Speaker 1: a week or two, I would I would shoot for
Speaker 1: the mid thirties frankly, for that very reason. If you
Speaker 1: have here's the secret. If it starts to get slimy,
Speaker 1: that's bacterial growth. And if it's dry then um, and
Speaker 1: it's not slimy, then you have less bacterial growth. It's
Speaker 1: not zero, but you have much less spoilage bacteria growing.
Speaker 1: If it's not slimy, then if it is, you know,
Speaker 1: there are certain little tricks that people try where um,
Speaker 1: they'll say, like out in the field, you can rub
Speaker 1: black pepper all over a quarter to help preserve it.
Speaker 1: Or do people make these little packages. It's some kind
Speaker 1: of I don't know what. It's, some kind of acid
Speaker 1: or something. It looks like a little drink package and
Speaker 1: you mix that in the water bottle and shake it up.
Speaker 1: I've messed and stuff and isn't happy with the results
Speaker 1: because it kind of look like if you put lime
Speaker 1: juice all over meat. But anyways, they shake it up
Speaker 1: and you bathe a quarter meat and that stuff and
Speaker 1: it's supposed to inhibit inhibit bacterial growth or any do
Speaker 1: you think do you would you have faith in any
Speaker 1: of these methods as actually accomplishing anything. I'm not too
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about pepper from a preservative standpoint, but I will
Speaker 1: tell you that in fact, light organic acid will reduce
Speaker 1: bacteria on the surface. In fact that that's commercially done
Speaker 1: as well. A light mist usually a lactic acid or
Speaker 1: a citric acid for example, could work as well. Tends
Speaker 1: to reduce spoilia bacteria and um. I know that sometimes
Speaker 1: the surface of the meat will get that lime juice
Speaker 1: appearance you're talking about, where it kind of looks washed
Speaker 1: out and the most of that, but that's only surface.
Speaker 1: By the time you hook it, you won't even know
Speaker 1: that that acid was there. You know, I realized I
Speaker 1: misspoke and I didn't, and I caught it when you
Speaker 1: mentioned it is when we did this, you were right.
Speaker 1: It was in the spray bottle. Yeah, it was. It
Speaker 1: was a product that you mix in a spray bottle.
Speaker 1: And and it's funny because what turned me off was
Speaker 1: that lime juicy look. But I didn't think about the
Speaker 1: fact that that was very surface level. Yeah that's pretty
Speaker 1: it's pretty thin layer. But that's really all you need.
Speaker 1: The bigger challenge for me is you could do that,
Speaker 1: but now you've got a carcass that's low in bacteria load,
Speaker 1: what do you do with it? Right If you're gonna
Speaker 1: go lay it in the bed of a pickup and
Speaker 1: drive it home, you sort of kind of worked against
Speaker 1: yourself right now. Maybe a better way would be take
Speaker 1: it home and hang it and then spray right once
Speaker 1: you're done transporting it. Once you're done with transport, i'llternatively,
Speaker 1: alternatively go ahead and get the animal, but leave the
Speaker 1: hide on and don't take the hide off till you
Speaker 1: get home. Then when you take the hide off, you
Speaker 1: can spray it and be ready to go. I realized that, uh,
Speaker 1: an animal that's gone into rigor mortis is harder to skin,
Speaker 1: of course, so there's the downside of that. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: man is getting nice when they're brand new. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: bet um, Chris, what do you mind talking a bit
Speaker 1: about some of the research that you've been doing and
Speaker 1: some of the work you've been doing recently in any
Speaker 1: new discoveries there. So yeah, there's two, probably three or
Speaker 1: four things I can talk about here. I'll do this briefly,
Speaker 1: and if you have questions, we can go deeper. We
Speaker 1: have built in our laboratory twelve dry aging chambers that
Speaker 1: are um the most tightly controlled dry aging chambers in
Speaker 1: the world. We can control relative humidity, we can control airspeed,
Speaker 1: we can control level of oxygen. We can measure the
Speaker 1: weight of the meat once a second for six weeks
Speaker 1: if we want to do that, and of course it's
Speaker 1: in a cooler where we can control temperature. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of lore about dry age, a lot of art,
Speaker 1: if you will, but we're trying to push science forward,
Speaker 1: and so we've learned a lot about how moisture moves
Speaker 1: out of that meat, a lot of people think, for example,
Speaker 1: that rind or that crust prevents moisture loss. It does not.
Speaker 1: We're learning a lot of different things about dry agent
Speaker 1: that has not been seen before, and we continue to
Speaker 1: do that kind of work. We also have some work
Speaker 1: we just finished up, uh that if you if you
Speaker 1: think about these meal kit services, um, you get a
Speaker 1: you get a package of meeting there and must time
Speaker 1: that package meat is brown. It's not very attractive in color.
Speaker 1: And so we did a whole project on how do
Speaker 1: you maintain bright red color in frozen meat? And so
Speaker 1: there's some tricks you can do if you understand the
Speaker 1: biology to do that. We have uh, A lot of
Speaker 1: people feed different kinds of feed to animals, and we
Speaker 1: are where this is really deep biochemistry. But we're looking
Speaker 1: at the chemistry now of what happens during that rigor
Speaker 1: mortis process and right after that that tenderizes meat. So
Speaker 1: we're looking at the enzymes and how that whole process
Speaker 1: gets controlled. And then lastly, UM, we did a project
Speaker 1: here um it's been a number of years now where
Speaker 1: we went through and characterized with a group of scientists,
Speaker 1: not just me. We characterize a lot of different muscles
Speaker 1: in the beef carcass. Out of that, the flat iron
Speaker 1: steak was identified. There were a number of other cuts
Speaker 1: as well, but that's probably the one that's most well known.
Speaker 1: And so when when we do research in my laboratory,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a quality oriented scientists in meats, and so
Speaker 1: I'm looking at meat quality from the standpoint of of
Speaker 1: what makes that product taste better, what, what gives it
Speaker 1: better flavor, what makes it more tender, what makes it
Speaker 1: longer shelf life, what gives us the right color, what
Speaker 1: gives us the optimal use of that animal? And we
Speaker 1: talked before about respecting the products that we get, and um,
Speaker 1: I get frustrated when we use the wrong muscle for
Speaker 1: the wrong recipe because you are either undervaluing one or
Speaker 1: overvaluing the other one. And so trying to make sure
Speaker 1: that we use the right part in the right place,
Speaker 1: in the right way. And and to me, that is
Speaker 1: a win win win. It's a win for the people
Speaker 1: who produce the animals, it's a it's a win for
Speaker 1: the people that are marketing those products, and best of all,
Speaker 1: it's a win for those people who are consuming those products.
Speaker 1: I think the same thing about your listeners quite Honestly,
Speaker 1: they've They've gone to expense, they've gone to energy, they've
Speaker 1: gone to effort to go out and get them an animal.
Speaker 1: And part of it is the experience which we all enjoy,
Speaker 1: hiking and being outside and all the rest of that.
Speaker 1: But I would love for them to end up with
Speaker 1: the highest quality product they can so that the ultimate
Speaker 1: end of the experience is a very satisfying one as well.
Speaker 1: You know, Chris, you I don't think we talked about this.
Speaker 1: What school are you at? University? I'm at the University
Speaker 1: of Nebraska in the Animal science department. Okay, so I
Speaker 1: know you guys got snapper turtles there. Now, when you
Speaker 1: steer you talk about different muscle groups, right, like different
Speaker 1: the qualities of different muscles. When you dear one of
Speaker 1: your graduate students you have graduate students, yes, okay, when
Speaker 1: you steer one of them into snapping turtle work, I
Speaker 1: want you to remind them that it is lower amongst
Speaker 1: snapping turtle people that there are is it five or seven?
Speaker 1: There are there are seven distinct meats inside of a
Speaker 1: snapping turtle. So since it's low all low hanging fruit
Speaker 1: and snapping turtle meat research, that might be a good
Speaker 1: dissertation would be like you'll have to think of how
Speaker 1: to how you have to think of a good title
Speaker 1: for the dissertation, but it would be something like, um uh,
Speaker 1: testing the qualitative. Yeah, they're out of the seven kinds
Speaker 1: of snapping turtle meat. Well, I first of all, I
Speaker 1: have to locate the Snapping Turtle Meat Foundation. They have
Speaker 1: deep pockets, Chris, don't worry, Spencer and I will start
Speaker 1: that organization now and do some fundraising so we can
Speaker 1: fund the research. I've never known what they mean by
Speaker 1: the seven times. I don't like pork, chicken, beef, things
Speaker 1: like that. But there's there's well to their credit, to
Speaker 1: their credit, to the to the to the it looks
Speaker 1: like I'm talking just looking at it, like you know
Speaker 1: the backstraps that run down the inside of a turtle,
Speaker 1: inside that little honeycomb bone, very very white, very string.
Speaker 1: You can tear it apart by hand. Then like their
Speaker 1: legs have some intensely dark meat. The neck is visually
Speaker 1: very different. There's something there. Chris, as student will find
Speaker 1: it and you'll report back to us, and then Chris
Speaker 1: probably do some dry aging on turtle studies. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm also tell you this story that I was contacted
Speaker 1: a number of years ago by scientists who is working
Speaker 1: in Latin America, and he was looking at, uh, what
Speaker 1: was the motivation for hunters. They would go out hunt
Speaker 1: saying bush meat, and they would go out hunting monkeys,
Speaker 1: and they would walk by holler monkeys and they would
Speaker 1: hike for a week in order to get spider monkeys,
Speaker 1: and and he was trying to figure out how much
Speaker 1: energy it took them to go harvest one type over another,
Speaker 1: and he couldn't figure out what was the difference in
Speaker 1: these two animals. Well, it turns out spider monkeys eat
Speaker 1: fruit and holler monkeys eat a lot of tree bark
Speaker 1: rich in tannins. And we actually came very close to
Speaker 1: having a research project on monkey meat taste because I'm
Speaker 1: convinced those holler monkeys had very bitter flavored meat and
Speaker 1: the spider monkeys was going to be, you know, much
Speaker 1: more desirable meat products. However, like everything else, the funding
Speaker 1: fell through for that project and we didn't get to
Speaker 1: do it. But that's too bad. I was with I
Speaker 1: was with the Chimana and we went monkey hunting. They
Speaker 1: their favorite is the spider monkey. Second favorite was red howler.
Speaker 1: We got a red howler and ate it. But then
Speaker 1: the way they cook things that really everything winds up
Speaker 1: being very similar because they'll dry it, you know that
Speaker 1: they like smoke it, then boil it, and they do
Speaker 1: a lot of processes to it that really change it.
Speaker 1: There were other monkeys that I thought when we encountered them,
Speaker 1: I thought, man, his monkeys in trouble, but they're very
Speaker 1: dismissive of it. And then we encountered a possum after
Speaker 1: they got a red Howler, and I thought, man, this like,
Speaker 1: no one wants to see monkeys. There are people that
Speaker 1: at least like possums. This possum is doomed. And they
Speaker 1: were very dismissive of anyone that would ever go near
Speaker 1: a possum and stroll down past it. It would be
Speaker 1: a real rich area of inquiry for someone to look
Speaker 1: into the qualitative nature of how it's viewed, uh, what
Speaker 1: tastes good, and how culturally subjective that is well. I
Speaker 1: one time I spent some time with the chupic Askimos.
Speaker 1: They like tougher meat when butchering an animal, like this
Speaker 1: part is good, it's very chewy. This part is not good.
Speaker 1: It's very tender. They especially like the tendon that supports
Speaker 1: the head that comes off the spine. That's good because
Speaker 1: that's nice and chewy and um. They'd be fascinated to understand,
Speaker 1: like how much of this stuff is culturally overlaid and
Speaker 1: if there really is any sort of human you know,
Speaker 1: any sort of objective reality about what tastes good. That's
Speaker 1: a great questions that there are cultures in the world
Speaker 1: that that favor the less tender product, there are also
Speaker 1: cultures in the world that favor the stronger, more intense
Speaker 1: flavors that come from pasture raised beef or wild game
Speaker 1: for example. Uh. And interesting on our monkey meat conversation,
Speaker 1: you touched on I think a really critical point, and
Speaker 1: that was not only would they kind of dismiss the monkeys,
Speaker 1: but if some hunter actually shot one, then that person
Speaker 1: was widely disparaged as well. Yeah, so there was a
Speaker 1: definitely a social aspect to it to go on top
Speaker 1: of everything else. As you mentioned, Krin, let's close out
Speaker 1: with the future. Okay, this is Chris Crins. This this
Speaker 1: is Cris been Diana talk about this well. Okay, so
Speaker 1: we've done some blind taste testing around here with fake
Speaker 1: meat and I think overwhelmingly as soon as you have
Speaker 1: a bite of the impostor meat. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: so obvious taste, texture, smell, everything that would go into
Speaker 1: you know, one's experience of eating something, it's just so
Speaker 1: clearly not any kind of meat. So how much meat
Speaker 1: science goes into the development of these products? And from
Speaker 1: your perspective, how possible is it on a cellular level
Speaker 1: to really create uh, animal flesh out of nothing that
Speaker 1: is animal material? How much time do we have? Well, uh,
Speaker 1: first of all, most there have been food scientists who
Speaker 1: have contributed to those products. Not too many meat scientists,
Speaker 1: but there are too bad. But you know, within that
Speaker 1: if you we started our conversation talking about Warner Bratchler
Speaker 1: shear an objective measure of tenderness. If you look at
Speaker 1: the muscles and a beef carcass, there is more than
Speaker 1: a twofold difference in sure force from one muscle to
Speaker 1: the other. So even within an animal, there's a wide
Speaker 1: range of tenderness and texture. I tend to agree with
Speaker 1: you every one of those non meat products that we've
Speaker 1: talked about, UM, has not met my standard for what
Speaker 1: I care to eat. I like to say sort of
Speaker 1: tongue in cheek. Um. Everybody is entitled to their own
Speaker 1: stupid opinion, right, And as a as a food industry,
Speaker 1: I don't object to offering a variety of products, even
Speaker 1: if I myself don't care for this. But mostly the
Speaker 1: comments I've just made are relevant regarding plant based substitutes
Speaker 1: for meat. There is some effort going on to use
Speaker 1: cells and grow cells to create a meat product like
Speaker 1: you're talking about. But just as we have a twofold
Speaker 1: difference in tenderness within the body itself, uh in tenderness um,
Speaker 1: the structures and cellular architecture it takes to build those muscles,
Speaker 1: they are very very far away from being able to
Speaker 1: mimic a meat like structure in in my judgment, and
Speaker 1: so certainly as a meat scientist, I don't feel threatened
Speaker 1: by those products. Mostly I am. I guess I'm a
Speaker 1: little disappointed and frustrated by the marketing claims that are
Speaker 1: made regarding those kinds of products. Time and again people
Speaker 1: talk about, oh, these products are They're healthier for the environment,
Speaker 1: they're greener. But the reality is when you do a
Speaker 1: full life cycle analysis, uh, live animal production is a
Speaker 1: very efficient way to convert plants to meet and uh.
Speaker 1: In Nebraska, we've been a state for over one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years, we have we have farms in the
Speaker 1: state that have been in families for more than seven generations.
Speaker 1: You can't possibly produce animals for seven generations if it's
Speaker 1: not done in a sustainable way. And so I my
Speaker 1: frustration with the product line is more along the disparagement
Speaker 1: of what takes place with agricultural production and frame clee.
Speaker 1: I think it's a little bit deceiving in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways compared to what we have, whether it's game
Speaker 1: animals or whether it's commercially raised animals. Those animals are
Speaker 1: out there grazing pasture, they're they're eating grain, and they
Speaker 1: have the opportunity to give us this wonderful, desirable eating
Speaker 1: experience if we all respect and take care and manage
Speaker 1: those animals appropriately. That's, frankly, that's what my whole career
Speaker 1: has been about, is managing the product. Chris, thanks for
Speaker 1: coming on. It's it's truly been a pleasure. I honestly
Speaker 1: appreciate so much the chance to talk about this. As
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier, we have a lot of misconceptions going
Speaker 1: on out there and Uh, it's uh, it's enjoyable for
Speaker 1: me to to kind of explain and educate a little bit.
Speaker 1: So well, I'm gonna warn you that I'm probably gonna
Speaker 1: steal traffic and misconceptions because it's such a it's such
Speaker 1: a big out of our lives to speculate about why
Speaker 1: things taste good and bad. But we'll build up, we'll
Speaker 1: build up another list of things we've heard from people,
Speaker 1: and we'll come back and check with you. That'd be great.
Speaker 1: I'd be happy to do it. Thank you, Thank you
Speaker 1: very much.