Did You Have a Point?

A few days ago I ran across yet another article making fun of the USDA grading system for beef – you know, the kind of thing where they think it’s somehow clever to say things about “Utility” grade beef. I’d be the first to admit that grades like “Utility” or “Commercial” don’t sound all that appealing, while things like “Cutter” and “Canner” make you wonder if they are used for prison food or passed along to whoever makes dog food or hotdogs. I even made jokes like that, back when I was in my early 20s and food safety wasn’t something you could just look up on the Internet (because you couldn’t look anything up on the Internet yet). But today, all this does is obscure a serious business issue with silly wordplay…

I’m not going to link to the article, but if you’d care to see the actual beef grades used by the USDA you can find the link to the official web page here. There are three things you actually need to know about the system, even if you’re just a casual consumer. First, the USDA rating system has nothing to do with food safety. If whatever you are buying (or eating) has a USDA rating in the first place, it has already been inspected and is safe to eat. Second, the eight ratings are based on a variety of measures that should result in better flavor from a piece of beef when you cook it on a grill or a griddle – amount of fat marbling, age and size of the animal it came from, and so on. There’s no way to be sure of how any given cut of beef will actually taste; these are just industry standard estimates. And third, the rating system is a voluntary program…

The upshot is that the only cuts you are going to see in the supermarket, or in a quality restaurant, are going to be from the top three grades: Prime, Choice, and Select. The other five are just as safe to eat (or not; ask your cardiologist about that), but are not going to broil up into something people will pay $12 for at Applebee’s, $20 for at Outback, or $40 for at an actual steakhouse. On the other hand, if you grind them into hamburger, soak them in marinade, braise them in some strong sauce, or slice them up and package them as part of a canned soup or stew (along with the appropriate seasonings) they’ll taste just fine. Or, at least, no worse than those foods usually do…

Where all of this stops being an amusing Internet story (or perhaps a sophomoric joke) is that food safety really isn’t funny, and the rise in international trade is making the whole issue that much more complicated. Consider, if you will, that the US has banned importation of beef from several countries because of the threat of BSE/Mad Cow disease, while several other countries have banned importation of American beef because USDA supervision does not comply with their own national standards for food safety. In the last few years we’ve seen food recalls on everything from romaine lettuce to strawberries to breakfast cereals, for everything from e coli contamination to metal shavings, and who’s even mentioned the whole “Pink Slime” and ammonia controversy yet?

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with silly Internet articles making fun of the official terminology for something we’d all prefer to ignore. Heaven only knows, if we outlawed silly wordplay on the Internet half of these posts would just be the word “NO!” written over and over again in progressively larger and more elaborate fonts. But the official USDA terminology isn’t really any funnier than most of our Federal regulations. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d hate to live in a place where the USDA inspectors weren’t doing their jobs…

At the very least, I’d have to stop going out to lunch…