Try the Chicken

I was reading a story on the Lifestyles page of the Forbes site about how real Kobe beef is not available for sale in the United States, and therefore anyone who has paid the absurdly high prices that some eateries charge for the stuff has been bilked, and reflecting that if you are rich enough to pay $50 for a burger (or $200 for a steak) then you don’t really have a problem yet. For millions of Americans, $200 is an entire month’s grocery budget, and in much of the world that’s enough to cover the total living expenses of a family of five for a month, which makes it seem a bit ungrateful for people to be carping about whether or not their super-luxury food products are the genuine article. But I think the more important point the author is making is about how this fraud is being perpetrated in the first place – and specifically how our Federal government is making it all possible…

First off, it’s important to understand that Kobe beef isn’t just a type of cow (like Angus), a cut of meat (like a porterhouse or skirt steak) or a style of dish (like a Florentine steak); genuine Kobe beef is raised in a single district in Japan (Hyogo, of which Kobe is the capital) from a base stock of cattle so elite that there are only about 3,000 head in the world, and all of them can be identified by genetic lines going back hundreds of years. The name “Kobe beef” is a trademark in Japan, along with Kobe Meat and Kobe Cattle, and using the name for any meat that wasn’t genuine would be considered fraud, at least by the Japanese. Currently there are no slaughterhouses or meat-packing companies in Hyogo that are licensed to export meat to the United States; in fact, there have been no imports of Japanese beef to the U.S. over the past two years. So if none of this stuff would be importable into the U.S. if you tried, why are there dozens of high-end restaurants in this country offering to sell you some?

Well, according to the Forbes article, a large part of it is because the U.S. does not recognize the trademark, or the patents for how the meat is bred, selected, raised, fed, or prepared. As far as the USDA is concerned, if the meat meets their standards for food safety and purity, they really don’t care if it is Kobe beef or not. The USDA maintains nine categories for beef, which just means that it is safe for human consumption; the top three grades in descending order are Prime, Choice and Select, and they’re the ones you’re probably used to seeing in the supermarket. Since there is no USDA standard for Kobe, sellers in the U.S. are free to call any old cut of beef “Kobe beef,” although a lot of people will try to leave themselves some leeway by calling it “Kobe-style” beef, or claiming that it’s an equivalent product, “recreated” in America using the same methods and techniques, or whatever. None of which changes the fact that most of this product is just ordinary beef with an elaborate back-story being used to jack up the price…

Now, as I said at the top of this post, I’m not terribly sympathetic to people who spend more on a meal with four of their friends than my household spends on food in a month. But I do think this story presents an interesting take on how much harm International patent and trademark violations can actually do. It may not matter to you if some Hollywood studio doesn’t get all of the money it wants because somebody bootlegged a movie and sold it on the street in Hong Kong, and it may not matter to you if some cattle farmers in Hyogo Prefecture get their trademark ripped off or not – but how would you feel if you spent extra to get some Kobe beef for a special occasion, and got some random cut of meat from Montana? The truth is, this sort of business practice hurts people on both sides of the Pacific – and the U.S. government that complains endlessly about foreign countries pirating works made in America apparently has no problem with people here defrauding a handful of Japanese cattlemen in exactly the same way…

It's enough to make you want to order the Free-Range Chicken instead - but that's a story for another day...