As I am getting older and not in the meat store anymore, I actually enjoy what we used to call a bus drivers holiday. For those of you not familiar with this expression, that is when a city bus driver on his day off goes for a ride and is driven around on the bus he usually drives. Yes, I really love to go shopping and roaming around the grocery stores and meat markets.

This brings me to some of my resent observations.

At one of the stores the meat tags in the counter were marked with USDA and the subtitle on the counter claimed that their beef was “Premium”. Yes, they were not lying with the USDA as all meat has to be inspected as stated in my previous post, but I never ever heard of a grade “Premium” especially as the meat looked like ‘USDA Select’ quality. So if the label does not state USDA combined with Choice or Prime, which would be two words right next to each other as ‘USDA Choice’ or ‘USDA Prime’, it might be that they try to convince you that their meat is a higher grade and with that more expensive, than what they actually sell you.

Next observation at an independent supermarket: The printed sale sign actually stated “USDA Choice” on whole beef tenderloins and the price was a heck of a deal. Looking through the about 15 tenders they had in the counter, there were only 6 of the larger ones stamped “USDA Select” by the meat processor and the rest had no grade stamp whatsoever and had the feel of a wet noodle, meaning no quality behind it at all and I would guess they were what we used to call in the industry a “cow tender” which puts them somewhere in the commercial grades. I will admit that the price, if you selected one of the “select” tenders, was very decent and I have never had a ‘USDA Select’ tenderloin which was not tender and as they are from steers or heifers they even had an excellent taste, but they were still miss-advertised. Now on the other hand those “wet noodle” one’s I used to come across sometimes actually had a slight taste like liver.

Staying on the subject of beef let’s also mention the corned beef brisket written about in a previous article and please check for the amount of water added as stated on the label.

The next article will be about the “new” old cuts they found .