Story of a steak...

I dusted off the meat science rust from the K-State days and stepped into a meat cooler for the first time in about 15 years. It still fascinates me.

This really cool job I have gives me the opportunity to be involved with some really cool projects. One of those projects was "Story of a steak: Responsible Beef."  The brainchild of the team at High Plains Journal that took a raw idea to Merck Animal Health, who jumped on the chance to tell the remarkable story of the beef industry. This particular project followed a set of reputation cattle from the V Ranch in Thermopolis, Wyo., to the Knight Feedyard in Lyons, Kan., and to the processing plant - ultimately to the plate of the consumer like you and me.



To wrap up this project we took a trip to Canyon, Texas and West Texas A&M University where the Beef Carcass Research Center does some pretty amazing things on the front of meat science. Dr. Ty Lawrence is a leader in meat science and an expert in the field, and we were fortunate enough to have Lawrence and his team of undergraduate and graduate students show us the carcasses of four of the lot of cattle that we followed.

It was pretty cool.

Here are a few facts:

• The tongue is one of the most valuable portions
• The hide is the most valuable by-product of the harvesting process
• Check your cosmetics, and if you see stearate anywhere in the label it's made with inedible tallow (fat)
• Lean cuts are 95-percent of a carcass
• The top quarter of the animal is mostly used for ground meat (hamburger)
• Hormones in beef are negligible - you would have to eat 18,421 3 oz. steaks to equal the same amount of hormones in one birth control pill

Here are some photos from our day in the meat lab.