"Ellie C" > wrote in message
...
> I've been wondering what happens to meat between the slaughterhouse and
> the meat counter. Why? Well, here in France meat tastes completely
> different than it does in the US. It's stronger flavored. It's also a lot
> tougher. Now, I'm guessing that the meat is often from older animals here,
> since shops will often indicate that the steak is from a "vache" - a cow,
> rather than a steer, and I'm guessing that maybe this is a dairy cow
> that's no longer producing and so gets sent to the butcher.


That may well be the case. The US has vast amounts of prairie land to
support herds of steers, we have lots of grain and corn to feed them and
fatten them up before slaughter. We also have lots of chemicals tof eed
them but I don't know that it is an "advantage" other that profit.

Old dairy cows will end up in pet food or hamburgers, never a steak.

You can probably find the tenderizer under a different name, perhaps the
chemical name.papain, a derivitive of th e papaya plant. Papain acts on the
protien to break it down.

>
> Meat cooked using it tastes more like meat I was used to in the US, where
> I rarely used tenderizer. So, is it possible that something like
> tenderizer is used in US meat before it gets to the supermarket?

To my knowledge, nothing is allowed to be put on the meat once slaughtered
and only approved medication or food additives before. Some pork and
chicken is processed and injected with a saline solution, but that is on the
label.
Ed

http://pages.cthome.net/edhome