A couple of weekends ago, we went to a barbeque at my wife's sisters for which we bought the meat, some rump steak and a few bratwursts. When we all sat down to the steaks the compliments started rolling, not for me who cooked the steaks but for the meat itself. It didn't really surprise for we rarely buy any supermarket meat, preferring to buy from butchers that know how to handle meat and in particular beef, properly. By properly, I mean those butchers that age meat their beef for no less than 14 days but up to a month, compared to supermarkets that takes beef from the paddock and has it for sale within the week.

Ever notice how the supermarkets are putting their meat into sealed plastic containers with a little absorbent pad underneath to soak up the blood? Ever noticed that over the last twenty years or so that beef is getting pinker and pinker? The real reason supermarkets are packaging meat this way is that it's better for their profits. As unprotected meat ages it loses weight through evaporation, if profit is your prime imperative rather than flavour, you need to get the cattle processed into cuts and sealed in plastic boxes as soon as possible to retain as much weight as possible and then sold as quickly as possible, this gives the supermarkets a price advantage over High Street butchers. But what happens when the High Street butcher closes? The supermarkets up the price.

Doubt it?

Look what's happening during our latest drought. Farmers are destocking as the land cannot support the cattle and record numbers are being sent to market. This month it's twenty percent higher than the corresponding period last year. Has anyone noticed that the price of meat has not fallen? The farmers are certainly getting a lot less for their livestock, the abattoirs aren't charging any more, so who is making the money? What do you think will happen when the drought breaks and farmers rebuild their herds, sending less to the market? There were huge complaints here when the supermarkets, who control the petrol pumps, didn't drop the pump price for some weeks after the price of crude oil had fallen, but seemingly put up the price of petrol as soon as there is any upward movement in the price of crude.

Now the thing with supermarkets moving meat meat so quickly is that it is no longer aged to allow the cow's enzymes and natural bacteria to soften the meat. So the problem is now, how to get tender beef when aging is out of the question? What about buying younger cattle that have had no time to toughen, say at about one year of age? That is exactly what's happening. In my lifetime the age of cattle at market has dropped from about two years old to one, so that the darker coloured meat that is the sign of well aged, older cattle is no longer prevalent. It is as far as I know completely unheard of in Australia to have cows up to seven years old as they do in France, though not on any large scale. But the point is they do have older cattle.

The way cattle are handled has changed completely to suit the supermarkets and in doing so has changed our perceptions of what good beef actually is, to the point where if there were two identical cuts, one nicely pink and the other a dark, dark blood red colour, how many would know to choose the well aged cut over the meat that was barely out of kindergarten? Not many, one would think. What has happened is that so many people have forgotten what a great steak actually tastes like and when they get one, like at my sister-in-law's barbeque, there are invariably comments about how good the meat is and the thing is, my sister-in-law pays exactly the same as me for rump steak at her supermarket.

I know who I'd rather support.

Labels: aged beef, supermarkets