how does meat inspection actually work?

Question

There is a bunch of fresh meat inside hundreds of grocery stores all across the US. I have never, ever, been inside a grocery store in my life and have seen meat not USDA prime.

First off who is actually rating this meat? I cannot fathom that every farm is shipping their meat to an USDA lab where each carcass is tested, graded, then sent to the grocer/butcher.

So how does meat actually get its grade? What happens to meat that doesn’t pass? And how does the consumer actually believe that every cut of meat truly *is* being inspected and that the “USDA” sticker isn’t just the equivalent of slapping a meaningless “organic” label on the package.

In: Economics

Answer 1

Every farm *is* shipping off their meat to a USDA lab. Well, sorta.

Farms don’t usually slaughter their own meat. Instead, when the time comes, they send the cow to an abattoir or slaughterhouse, which is a facility where cows are killed and the carcasses are processed into the meat products which will eventually make their way to stores and restaurants. Abattoirs can *voluntarily* have a trained evaluator from the USDA grade each cow based on how old it is and how much marbling (or fat) is in the meat from it. Based on these factors, a grade is assigned to the meat. When you consider how much meat you get from a cow and how much effort goes into turning a cow to meat products, it’s not that hard to have it assessed like this. Now, this *is* a voluntary process, but it’s a common one.

There’s eight grades used in USDA classification. Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter and Canner. About 2.9% of meat ends up as Prime, *but* Choice is really common in retail too, and about half of cows end up as Choice – because farms can choose how they raise their cows and when they send them to the abattoir in order to maximise the amount of cows that end up here. Select is pretty common in stores too, but Standard and below are usually not in stores – which is why the names imply that. Of course, these aren’t useless – if you’ve ever bought tinned beef soup, you probably got a lower grade for cost reasons.