00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is a meat eating podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening Hunt E podcast, You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X. All right, everyone, we're joining today by our first ever We should have done this a long time ago, our first ever genuine meat scientists, Chris Calkins. Do you go by? Is that right? Meat scientists? Is that cool to say? Yeah, absolutely, that's the right way to do it. Let me test your knowledge to find out if you're legit. Do you know what a Warner? I think it's called a Warner Bruntler sheer force test is well, it's a Warner Bratsler Chan Warner and Lyman Bratsler decades ago created an objective tenderness machine and it was that share force machine you're referring to. So you passed, But let me ask you this question. How many holes does that thing punch into the steak? That's uh, it's up to the operator, but typically we would expect to get six cores from a regular beef steak, for example, in smaller animals, you have to get by with fewer cores and more steaks. Okay, good, we'll proceed now. No, now, I have faith that that Karen found us the right meat scientist. Uh what is the first? Off? Tell us? Like? What? What? What is a meeting? What is uh? What is meat science? And how does one you know get there? It's been an interesting journey to become a meat scientist. I was involved in agriculture as a high school student in the state of Washington. Had a really cool high school agg teacher who is a lifetime mentor for me, and I was lucky enough. As a senior in high school, I served as a State Future Farmers of America President State f f A president, and that same time he went to Texas and m to work on a Master of Science in meet science. And I always thought it was going to be a veterinarian. But I packed everything in a car, drove to Texas, and the day I got there, I got a job in the meat lab and I liked it well enough. Apparently I've never left since then. So eventually went on and got a like what is your You have a PhD? Like what is it? What is it? What was your dissertation? Like what sort of like how do you narrow in on this super broad meat science category and find your personal you know, expertise. Well, that's a that's a great point because the field of meat science is really quite broad. That is, everything from the live animal all the way through to the products that we eat. And my dissertation had to do with the enzymes in meat that break up proteins in other words, the tenderization process. And I have built my career looking at quality, particularly eating quality characteristics of meat. How much how familiar familiar are you with um kind of like layman perspectives about meat? Right, Like you have to in conversation with people or in restaurants or backyard barbecues, you have to hear a lot of like theories about why this is that way, that that our way off And if you don't know if you hang out with hunters or not, but you'd probably get inundated with screwball theories about what is the way it is or why certain things are this way and why they're that way. Yeah, it becomes a compulsion related to try and set the record straight, make sure everybody understands what we're talking about. So I'm I'm in addition to having ah of my time is spent on research, but the other thirty percent is spent on teaching. So I teach both undergraduate students as well as master and doctoral students as well. Yeah, let me hate you with Okay, Spencer's gonna hit Spencer new Hearth, our very own and special Spencer new Hearth is now going to hit you with um. This is probably the question we get the most, and this is a wild game question, but I'm sure it has so many parallels to domestic production that you'll know exactly what we're talking about. But this is sort of the leading hunter based wild game problem question. How would you put it, Spencer? Do stressed out animals taste worse? And can that stress be a factor of something like the rut for a white tailed deer or an elk um or from a bad shot where a deer is hitted then it runs a mile and it lays there for four hours and slowly dies. Can a stress like that toward the adrenaline make them taste worse? That initial burst of adrenaline does not have a real big impact, but if it's around for very long. In other words, if we have a longer term stress like the run, for example, then absolutely there are metabolic changes that take place in the meat that will impact the eating quality of that product. I'd be happy to explain that further, but we do not want to go no dig in man. We want to go way deep awesome. So think about what we know is the way the body stores energy um is through glycogen initially, and then that turns we also store energy as fat, but that glancogen is used to provide the short term burst of energy we need when an animal, for example, is running. Now it turns out that once that animal has been harvested, that glycogen gets converted to acid in the muscle. It becomes more acidic. We would say it has a lower pH that's normal, that's good. That's what we're all used to with all of the muscle foods that we eat. Is that normal h decline that occurs when an animals harvested. The problem is when you get that burst of adrenaline, or you spend five days at the runt running around acting like a teenager and not eating and all the rest of that, we exhaust the glycogen stores in the animal, and when that happens, that pH does not drop, it does not become acidic, and we get all kinds of weird, strange flavors, and the texture is different. It's dark, it's sticky. Most people find that kind of product not very desirable. And the time course of that really depends on how much stress the animal has and how long it takes place. So Spencer, your question about four hours and a long, slow death, that's probably long enough to have an impact on that animal. If that animal is injured in a while, say it breaks a leg or something, then all of those kinds of things will give long enough stress. Glycogen is houstag pH stays high, meat doesn't taste very good. You know. A good extreme of this that I think about is the um. One time, my brother rancher that my brother and his friends know, told them about a bull that he had that had broken its leg down in the bottom of some coolie and it'd been down there while and he couldn't find it, and eventually found it, and he told those guys, if you want to go get it, you can have it. This thing is huge, you know, And they went down and got it and my brother comes home and makes a steak out of it, And I mean, it was probably already a bull. It was already a bull. So that's probably a couple of strikes against it. But I mean, I'm not exaggerating when I say that it was unchewable. Yeah, it's um. Most of the stress related response has to do with taste, has to do with flavor. The fact that it was a bull and an older animal, that's what makes it tough. But we have people who contact us regularly with a very similar situation. An animal is injured, been hanging around for quite a while, and they wonder can they turn it down to a steak or ground beef, And uh, it's it's just a different taste. And so that's a pretty common complaint that people have homes. So the toughness is toughness isn't related to stress, not so much that the stress has a far bigger impact on flavor than it does on toughness. All right, So one of the things that makes certain things, like what makes certain animals inexplicably tough, like you know, I mean you could sometimes you'll have guys get whatever, like you get you know, a box or someone will get you know, ten bull elk and they're all great. In the eleventh one, it's just chewier in hell umkay wolf off and say like, oh he must have been stressed. Would be our be like a thing that we would say when you encounter that super tough animal. There's there's really three things broadly that impact toughness. One has to do with how contracted that muscle cell is, how much integrity there is in the muscle cell. The second thing has to do is something called connective tissue. That's that white, silvery tissue on the outside of the meat. And then the third part is fat. And so anything we do to impact any of those three things can impact tenderness. Uh, let me ask you one more than Spencer's gotta ask you a good question. Uh, have you ever have you ever had occasion to eat like soup, like to eat deer meat right away or any kind of meat, Okay, so whatever, Like if you if you get an animal and then cook it within a couple of hours, it's like it's kind of like a divisive taste, Like some people like it, some people don't like it. It definitely has a different texture. There's something in it that seems almost like a metallic taste. That then that's gone in a day or two. Right, So we know that once you once you shoot an animal and enough time passes, it gets rigid, it gets stiff. We call that rigor mortis, right, And that process is the process of all of the energy and the muscle dissipating once the heart stops meeting and to stop blood flow. And that is actually a toughening process. In fact, once you get to that point that's about as tough as that meat is going to be. We can then hang it longer in a cooler outside and cold air, and that allows the meat to become more tender. But if you get ahold of that meat before it's into rigor mortis, and you cut it, that cutting stimulates contraction. You put it on a hot pan or a hot grill that stimulates that contraction, and you can get meat that's literally too tough to chew. You know, every now and then somebody says, I love to shoot an animal, then immediately go kind of steak and go eat it. To me, that's disrespectful of the animal because you are you are eating that meat in the worst possible conditions to have a good eating experience. If you'll at least let that animal go through rigor mortist to get stiff uh, then you're gonna have a far better eating experience. Okay, Spencer whole type. Alright, I don't understand what you're saying, because I would like explain the rigor mortis timeline. I would think that when it's in rigor, it's all stiffened up, right, But before rigor it has the potential to contract. And if you stimulate the animal by um by, by cutting the meat, or more importantly, by putting it on a hot skillet, it will stiffen up. It will shorten more than usual. And if you wait till the animals Okay, so let's say there's an animal, whatever you're in a slaughterhouse or whatever, you kill an animal. There's an animal that just dies, Okay, struck by I don't want to say struck by lightning. It just dies. At first, you can wiggle it all around, you can grab its arm and shake it. Yes, Then a while later you can't. Then a while later you can. So during the period when it's stiffened up, that is more tender than before it stiffens up. If you could cook it without allowing it to contract, it would be tender, but you cannot do that. The when we cut the steak, we remove all the muscle bone connections, and so that muscle is free to contract, and so before riggor mortis is complete, that is a very dynamic muscle that can that can shorten and toughen as you handle the product. Once you once it goes into a rigger, then you're at a certain level of tenderness. And from that time on beyond where rigger happens, it will just get more and more the longer you keep it in the cooler. Okay, I'm mostly good on that one. So far. Your answers have a lot of conviction, which is like what I would want out of meta Year's official Meat Scientists, right, But I wonder if you lack any confidence in what you're saying, um knowing that like a lot of the studies that have been done in the literature that you're referencing has been on like domestic game cattle that was you know, ben dean cicado over the last ten thousand years, versus something like a white tailed deer or an elk, a wild animal. They're just wired differently. And so my question is, like, when they're talking about stress, how is how is do we know that stress is the same to a dear versus cattle? And then you know all the rest of your answers if they lack any confidence, no way that we're talking about b versus wild game. You know, muscle is muscle. I do not lack confidence on the science and and Spencer we could get in an argument. You got him all wrong. He's not trying to be pugnacious. He's just trying to He's trying to people at home or so there's people at home in the future listen to this. They're at home thinking, yeah, what does he know? We're talking about deer? So he's just trying to clear that up. Yes, no, I'm just getting the artime. I totally understand you're the point that you're saying, Uh have I have studied a variety of different species. I have studied product from around the world, and muscle responds the same way that some of the timelines are different. And so for example, uh, poultry, for example, a chicken, it will go into rigor mortis in an hour and a half. A beef animal might take eight or ten hours before it's fully into rigor mortis. If you take a goat or sheep there and there in four to six hours, that's about That's about what I'd anticipate for deer as well. So the biology of muscle contraction and rigor mortis and all of that that's fixed. It's it's gonna happen in all all of the different species that we're talking about. Now we have to think about most of the time. When you think about that beef steer, for example, uh, that animal has been neutered, and so it doesn't have uh the access to all of those hormones that uh uh uh and intact mail would have. And so the sensitivity to hormone fluctuations might vary a little bit from species to species, um, and depending on what sex or gender you're dealing with. But at the end of the day, the biology says, um, all muscles go through the same sequence, the same kind of process as what I've tried to describe. Can you you tell us explain the term I hear now and then I thought it was a red cutter, but Spencer convinced the otherwise that that's not actually a thing. And he was saying do you mean a dark cutter? Like, what is a dark cutter? So when we talked about the drop in pH that happens normally when rigor occurs, that gives us the normal call or that we're used to sing inside the muscle. If the pH stays high, then the meat is very dark in color. And so in beef cattle they call it a dark cutter. Have you heard red cutter? I've never heard red cutter until about two minutes given up on that one. But it's the it's the same way you can get that same condition in pork. If pork or stressed for too long, you can get in that case, we call it d f D dark firm and dry. And so they're all just descriptions that you just described wild. You just described wild pig, a lot of wild pig pretty well. Yeah. So that when you have a dark cutter in the in the slaughter world or commercial slaughter world, is it attributable to a specific thing that happened to that animal or is it just some percentage will come out that way? Now that's uh, it is it is a response to sustained stress. But just like people, some animals are pretty chill and some animals are really tightly wired. The ones that are high strung, high stress, those are the ones that are gonna be more likely to have the problem. So the same set of conditions, whether it's UH duration or shipping or hauling or whatever, the same set of conditions will have a different impact on every animal depending on how that animal responds to the situation. Yeah, I got you there. There's a product these guys were selling, maybe maybe Spencer, maybe remember the name of it. It was, um it was a contraption where you could shoot a deer and then run over real quick and hook this thing up to your car battery and appit like how youse app them in a in a slaughterhouse? Can you explain, uh, why they do that in a in a plant? Why they's app them with electricity? And then can is that even can? Can? Is it realistic that you could replicate that in the wild? Whatever the hell you're trying to get when you do it? Yeah, So let's let's first talk about what happens when you apply electricity. You cause the muscle to contract. And and by the way, a car battery doesn't work very well because that's a constant, continuous electrical field. What you really want is alternating current. So the muscle contracts, relaxes, contracts relaxes. As you do that, you're using up glycogen, you're producing acid. You are hastening the rate at which rigor mortis occurs. That makes me more tender. And so from the from the mechanism standpoint, it works. Can we create something like that that could be used in the field. Again, as long as you have pulses of electricity rather than a continuous contraction, then you're gonna have, uh, some improvement is possible under that scenario. The other thing I would point out is, um, when when when we when we shoot a deer, the heart stops right and that's how blood is pumped through the body. So when the heart is no longer beating, we can't pump blood out. So um, some electrical impulse will help get a little bit of that blood out of the system. And so that's the other side benefit. So what is the ideal shot placement for a hunter in the head, in the neck, in the heart, in the lungs, in the spine, Like what would be your top choice? Yeah, so just in terms of meat, just limit this to like, in terms of meat quality, and get out of the and not bog it down with room for air, right, margin for air and all that. I appreciate that because that is a bit of the question. At the end of the day, you want the animal to go from being alive to no longer being alive, and heart shot ahead shot, any of those will will affect that same consequence. And so from a meat quality standpoint, um, other than damage to tissue and those kind of things, there's probably not real a real big difference among those locations. Do you have you ever seen? Um? I can't really it's hard to even explained this. Sometimes when you're when you're skinning a deer, you'll find that there's like a you know that foam, there's like a foam between the like like a bubbly foam that forms between the hide and the meat. Right, What is that stuff? Well, that's part of that connective tissue that I talked about again, That is a protein based structure that goes between the muscles and also between the muscle and the hide. Uh, no no damage, no risk, no concern on that standpoint. I might mention though that um, we we think about, well, if you've got that silver tissue on the outside of the muscle, you can always trend that off. But if you get a microscope and look at that muscle, that tissue actually goes throughout the muscle. And and that's why muscle from the leg, for example, is inherently less tender than a muscle that's from the loin or the backstrap, because those are muscles of support versus the legs, big muscles of locomotion. They need more of that connective tissue. So, by and large, if you've gotta you've got a piece of meat with a lot of connective tissue in it, you know, uh, slow roasting, uh, putting in a pot and stewart that kind of a thing is how we tend to cook that. Whereas you get the muscles that don't have very much connective tissue that tenderlins, the backstraps, all of that. We can make sticks out of those, throw them in a skellet throw them on the grill, and have a very nice eating experience. What a what happens when well, first let me ask you this. Have you have you had exposure to to your your possiverous uh counterparts like fish, fish meat? Is that a thing I'm not much on fish meat. I can't tell you too much about that. Are there people that specialize Are there people in the meat science word to specialize in fish? Yes, there are people specialize in fish. People specialize in pork or beef or poultry. Uh, yeah, we're we can be a pretty specialized group. So because this one, this question about bleeding, let's just let's just if you know about the process of bleeding fish, you can speak to that. But what are you trying to achieve when what are you trying to achieve when you bleed something? When people talk about like needing to bleed it out, like, what, what are you really getting? That's that's a that's an awesome question because a lot of people run around saying, there's all this blood in the meat um muscle, which is true. Muscle is sent water, right, So all you have to think about what's the function of blood. And one of the main things is we carry oxygen through blood right on hemoglobin molecules inside the meat is a molecule that also binds oxygen, bind better than hemoglobin actually, so it draws the oxygen out of the blood into the meat and it binds to mild globin. And so when you look at meat, and that meat is red in color. That's myad globe. There's very very little hemo globe and very little blood in the meat itself. But because meat water, everybody goes, oh my gosh, look at all the blood that's in that meat. But most of that is myo globin and water that's inside the muscle. So when you bleed, you're just trying to get rid of the bloods that's there. And probably the biggest real reason for that is um It's a great nutrient for bacterial growth and spoilage, and so we try and remove that so that we don't have to deal with it. You're saying that blood in the meat is lends itself to quicker spoilage. Not necessarily a meatles meats are pretty good bacterial medium for growth anyway, but typically in in uh, in commercial animals, we we remove the blood just so that we don't have to deal with that as we go down the line. Otherwise it tends to drip and get all over everything. Oh my god. You so once it's out it becomes problematic. Yeah, like you don't you don't want it around? Yeah? Yes, I want to back up to dark cutters. Real quick um red cutters. Yeah, yeah, Steve's red cutters. Like the obvious stressors are like taking a long time to die, uh, and like not eating. But what are some of the not so obvious stressors that hunters wouldn't think of? Like is weather something that would stress out an animal and make their meat worse, or like interacting with foreign animals things like that. Yes, Uh, it's a really good question, Spencer, And you're absolutely right. Just think about you or write. Anything that causes us stress causes that animal stress as well. And and and so part of that has to do with physical stress if it's cold and you're trying to stay warm, for example, Um, if you're we also have social stress, right you mix mix people up in an elevator and everybody gets kind of quiet and awkward and and and that kind of stress also creates circumstances or situations that can impact the animal. In the case of females, if they're cycling, then that hormonal cycle can create stress as well. That draws glycogen out of the muscles. Uh. It's that's a really tough question to it's. Uh, it's it just creates enough different uh, physiological responses to those hormones that that animal is going to need more energy and it's going to draw against that glycogen's oars to be able to supply that sort of like nervous energy if you think of it. So you never hear like hunters and fishermen complain about a spawning fish tasting bad though, or strutting turkey or anything like that. Is it just because like we're really ignorant, or is it less likely to happen in poultry and fish? Uh? I don't know about fish and poultry. It can still happen in poultry, but chances are that we're that's kind of what we expect. It's what we're used to seeing. And the best example I can give you is UH, in poultry, commercial poultry, once they're harvested and you're removed all the all the viscera, then you want to chill that carcass down quickly. And the way that happens in the industry is you take the poultry carcass and put it in an ice water bath. Now that cold shock, but or the muscle is in rigor causes immediate contraction. In comparison, you could also chill that carcass by putting it in a refrigerated cooler. And so you can go to the grocery store now and there are there is air chilled poultry and there's regular commercial poultry. And I'll tell you there's a profound difference in tenderness between those two, which the air chilled is not as contracted and is far more tender than what we traditionally do with poultry. Are these labeled like things that we can identify in the grocery store? Uh? Typically the air chilled poultry is labeled that way. The others are not their traditional normal commodity product. If you had to look at what you know is done with well, I'm gonna ask you an equivalent question to this around around red meat, but knowing what's done in uh poultry slaughter facility. Okay, what would be the closest approximation that a person could achieve if they're hunting pheasants or hunting turkeys and they have a pickup truck with them, Like, what would what would you do upon what? Like? What would you do in terms of a timeline and tools in order to replicate best practices? Yeah? So, Uh, there's there's two big things. I think one is you want to get rid of the guts UH as soon as possible. That's a that's a food safety issue. UM. If we have uh feces or fecal material spreading around the inside of that body cavity. The sooner you get all that out, the better off you are. That's number one. Number two is and we've kind of touched on this earlier, but you just give it time to go into a rigor mortis. But or you do much more with it and so you don't have to plunge it in ice water. You can allow it to go to rigger um for an hour or so once you've removed the viscera, and and you'll have a fine eating experience. It's when we go, I think too fast. It's when we try and and and you know, get the animal and stuff it with snow, or we get the animal and and and and throw it in the skillet too quickly. That's where we get quality problems being created. And you're saying it's bad to stuff with snow. Most of the time you don't need to do that. And if you're if you if you got to say a deer for example, and let's assume it's a heart shot as opposed to a head shot. So you've disrupted the internal organs, right and um, and so the best thing you can do from a food safety standpoint is to remove all those organs from the inside of the animal. Now, once you've done that, there's a chance there's some fecal material in there. And so what happens when you stuff it with snow You've just smeared all that around, and as the snow melts, you've smeared that bacteria around on the inside. The fact is the animals going to chill out at a reasonable rate anyhow. Um. I'm now, Now, if you're dealing with a very large animal and it's warm outside, um, you know it'd be nicer if you could cool that off a little quicker. But you're not going to have snow around to do that under that circumstance anyway. So I don't think it's necessary to try and accelerate the chilling rate of animals as long as you deal with the meat in a timely matter after it's hand rigor mortis. So are you saying there's such things freezing something too soon? Like if you shut a duck at nine am and you had it breast and gutted by ten am and going to freeze. Is that too quick? Completely? In fact, we actually had a had a former student in our department who went to work in Alaska and they're harvesting reindeer when it was twenty below outside. And the problem they had is they they harvest the deer, lay it on the ground, and in twenty minutes it would be frozen. Now what happens is when that when the meat thaws, then you get massive muscle contraction, way more than normal. So absolutely too fast to the freezer is not a good thing. The other dimension of that spencer that you ask about, which is interesting, I think, is that, uh, it's better if you can go into rigor with the muscles attached to the bones, because that, to some extent that limits contraction. If you remove all those connections of the muscle to the bone, that muscle is free to shorten up as much as it wants to. That's really interesting because there's a there's a real debate in the hunting world around um things like things like called the you know, the the gutless method, or you know, various ideas around deboning things right away in order to reduce weight when you have to carry it a long way, and um, a lot of people will and I've certainly done it myself, shoot an animal and then immediately debone at all and put into bags. And I always view the con of it. The con to doing this would be that it just seems to create a harder time to sort it out when you get home. It makes more surface area for there to be hair and for it to get dirty. But I never heard anybody talk about that it could even have a negative impact on the end quality in terms of toughness tenderness. Well, and that is in fact the case that if you if you bone it out while it's hot, you can compromise the contraction and therefore the tenderness. But you know, you've got to be practical. You can quarter the animal, for example, and most of the muscle bone attachments are still retained under that scenario. But if you're gonna take your knife and separate every muscle and and open it up so there are no connections at all, uh that I would say the longer you can wait to do that, the better off you're gonna be, because you'll be closer to rigor mortis when you get to that point, Spencer, was that you talking all about everybody hangs ther deer up wrong? Yes, tell him about that. So I've I've heard that like a good steakhouse or a good butcher will do the tender stretch method where they hang a car like a typical deer hunter go kill a deer, they skin it out, and then they hang it by the achilles. So it's like as long as it possibly can be. But I've heard that the tender stretch method is preferred by the beef industry where you basically put these hooks in their pelvis and then you allow their back hands to relax and hang it more of a ninety degree angle. Is that something that you hear that you promote it. It will definitely give a measurable improvement in tenderness if you use that method. It is not used in the US meat industry at all, but there are other countries that do. Is it an efficiency thing? Now, Well, it's what we're used to write. We know what the cuts look like, we know what to expect all the rest of that, and and so if you're going to go to a tender stretch strategy, it's a it's a whole different way of uh separating that carcass and of pieces, and it's just not something the U s ander Steer showing any interest in doing by and large certainly on the beat side. Um, the beef in the United States pretty tender compared to around the world. But I have been to places around the world where the entire cooler is hung through tender stretch. Interesting. Sorry, go ahead, I'm sorry. I've always heard that it's an issue of being efficient. When you hang something by the achilles, you can fit a lot more of these things in the cooler than if you hang them by the pelvis, and then they're they're taking up a lot more room. Side by side it would be about the same. But as that hind leg falls forward, then you're the distance between the animals would have to be have to be a little bit greater in order to have room for that. It might be interesting part of that, part of that whole tender stretched method was devised because uh, in New Zealand they were shipped this is years ago. They were they were freeze lambs. Uh. They would slaughter lambs, freeze the carcasses and ship them overseas. And they discovered that that freezing before rigor mortis made really really tough meat, and so one way to counteract that was to use that tender stretched method or a similar kind of hanging where the legs fall forward. That if you think about that, that causes the muscles of the leg on the back side to stretch more. And so because they're stretched more, they're less contracted. But on the inside of the leg, those muscles are actually more contracted, right, And so it's beneficial for some muscles and not so beneficial for other muscles. I want to tell you a story of guy told me and and I want you to tell me he's dead, So I want to tell me if I'm getting his story right. Yea. I used to live next story to a guy in Miles City, Montana. Who he was. He was in his nineties when I knew him, and he was telling me that his family in Montana, they used to raise turkeys, and they would raise turkeys around they would time it out in order to be selling Thanksgiving turkeys. They were shipping these turkeys by rail from Montana to Minneapolis. And he told me that they would raise the turkey up and then cut off its food supply so that it's digestive track emptied completely and they would only give it water. Then they would kill the turkeys, pluck them and not got them because that led to spoilage quicker, and that they would pack these turkeys into barrels, guts in them but no food in their system, and ship them by rail to Minneapolis for people to eat on Thanksgiving. This is an I was gonna say, this was a while ago. Does that make any sense? Well, part of it does. Um. Actually, if you think about ruminants right, uh, they have a lot of gut fill and so it takes a long time for that to get gone. So you could cut off feed source to an animal for a while, um, you know, twelve twenty four hours or whatever, and biologically that animal doesn't know it. It maybe starts to get at hungry, but but biologically it's got all the energy and everything else that needs water. Access to water is huge with If you do not have access to water, that whole dark cutting condition becomes evident more quickly. Access to water is pretty important. And so I could fathom a place where you don't feed the turkeys and you have less gut fill. Um that probably um minimizes a little bit the risk. But to be honest with you, UM, I would highly recommend that they be they have the guts removed, as opposed to its zing them down and leaving the guts in there. Thereafter, after the animal dies, there is migration. I've gut bacteria that comes through the comes through the walls of the intestines into the rest of the body cavity, And of course I sing that would slow it down and all the rest of that, But why run the risk right, Just remove it and and let that natural process of cooling and aging take place after that. That's one other thing I want to mention Steve is that, UM, we've talked a lot about what happens up until rigor mortis, but I would sure want your listeners to understand that after grigor mortis, then as we store that meat in a refrigerator, that meat is going to gradually get more and more tender because of those insigns that are naturally in the meat. So I'm thinking back on your turkey question about the guy with the pickup who shoots the turkey, is what should he do? Uh? Waiting to freeze that meat, even if it's a day or two, is going to make that meat more tender and beef we've see that that muscle improves in tenderness for about seven to ten days. After that it still improves, but at a much lower rate. And so it would be you would get far better product if you age that beef two weeks before you may cut it into steaks in the case of deer or whatever, even if it's there or four days, that's gonna be better than cutting it and putting it in the fraser immediately. Similar to see turkey question talking about how those turkeys were cut off from food. Um, the guys in my hometown of South Dakota that teach me how to clean snapping turtle, they all did the same thing where they catch a snapping turtle and then they put it in a tank with water and they leave it in there for a week, and they say that it's cleansing its system. You don't want to eat them right away, the meat won't be any good, and so all they have for that week is this few inches of water that they're in. Is that a really bad practice? I gotta tell you, I don't know anything about Uh. You know what it would do, is it would it would it would remove food from the g I tractor. Of course, Uh is that good or bad? I don't know. I my instinct is it seems a little excessive, but um, possibly, Kart, I want you to find us a snapping turtle meat. Christ do you have any colleagues of yours? Are you've been? No one did a dissertation on snappers, not that I'm aware of. But that's that's out of practice you would ever do with a cow or a turkey, That's correct. I would not do that for any of those other animals. But again it raises another point. You've got to understand a little bit about the digestion system of these animals, right, And so a ruminant has bacteria in that large stomach that breaks down the food into very small components that are then absorbed in the bloodstream and converted to proteins and fats and carbohydrates. In the case of a pig or us humans, we don't have a big ruman and so that food gets absorbed through the small intestine. As a result, it doesn't have to be broken down into quite such small components. So if we feed, for example, if we have a if we have a pig that's eating acorns or peanuts, then the fats will be quite oily, the meat will be oily, and and you'll actually get some flavor from the diet. But in the case of a ruminant because all the food parts get broken down so small, the type of diet is not so critical. Now, the energy and the diet is. Because remember when we talked about three things that influenced tenderness, one of those was fat. So if you get a deer that's grazing on corn fields, for example, that's high energy. They're storing that extra energy in their body in in a form of fat, and that will we particularly in America, we love the taste of of fat in our in our meat products, and so a high energy diet helps. But whether that high energy comes from corn or we eat is probably not as critical, particularly in wild game. How quickly does that diet need to change for you to notice a change in the meat quality. I always hear people refer to wood ducks as the best tasting ducks because they eat a lot of acorns. But it's hard for me to fathom that throughout their entire migration they're finding acorns. So how how quickly would something need to start eating acorns? Or corn or something like that for you to notice the improved meat. Yeah, So the way to think about that is, first of all, you've got a deposit fat from the diet, but you also got to replace fat that's already there, right, And so, uh, you have to think about how quickly do you get rid of the old facts that are there and how quickly do you add new facts that are there? Um, I don't I don't know specifically for for ducks, for example, but in the case of cattle, I'm going to bigger animals, That's what I know. In the case of cattle, they'll be in a feed lot a hundred, a hundred and fifty days in order to get the high marbling, the high fat inside the muscle that really gives us. Now is fifty days enough? Well, it's certainly better than zero, right, So it's a continuum. The longer you do it, the better you're going to be. Can you explain marbling and then, uh, like what factors lead an animal to to have marbling? Because you'll often hear I don't know if you know about this or not, but you'll hear people say that, um, for instance, like that venison isn't marbled. But this is probably way outside of your expertise. But mountain goat has some marbling. Um, what is it? And is it really not universal? Ye? Well again, think how that body stores energy. When we get access energy, our nature is to store it as fat. Right are glycogen supplies are good? So we start storing energy as fat. Now that fact can be in side the muscle that's marbling, or it can be outside the muscle, either under the skin we call that subcutaneous fat, or between the muscles, which would be intertermuscular fat instead of intramuscular fat. And so depending on genetics and the type of animal, they will store energy either inside the muscle or outside the muscle, and that's probably species specific. Within a species, there are genetic differences. For example, why gub for example, has a lot more marbling than does Angus or or Herford or or another us breed of cattle. So there are some genetic differences within a within a species that also regulate how much marbling is deposited. We know this for sure that you only get marbling when you have a high energy diet, and if you don't, and marbling is least likely to be deposited. So a lot of wild game, you know, they're foraging, but they're not on they're not in the cornfield, they're not getting a high energy diet, so they're probably not gonna have as much marbling, even if they have the genetic potential to deposit it in the first place. You know, I want to back up a little bit, and this kind of goes back to gutting things and and the sort of timeline around rigor. But you hear people describe aging, which we want to get into later. But you'll hear people describe aging as like a controlled decomposition. Right, I don't know, I don't know if that's a fair statement or not. But what happens when um, well, I'll put it another way. Sometimes someone will complain about, oh I got a deer and antelope or whatever and it didn't taste you know, it was no good, it was too gamey, whatever, And people will say, oh, yeah, but he shot the deer and in rolled around with it in the back of his truck for three days. Okay. Um, where, if if aging is is decomposition, where does rotting Like where does aging end and rotting begin? Like? What is the difference there? That's it. That's an awesome question. Um, think about dry aged beef for a moment, right, it could be aged forty fifty, sixty seventy days, and yet normally we would think if you had a steak in your refrigerator for that long, it's long gone, right, you're gonna throw it away. And so you have to differentiate between when we when we talk about aging, we're talking about the breakdown of the tissues, mostly the protein inside the meat. Whereas when I think about spoil age or rotting, I'm really thinking about back to real growth on the outside of that tissue. So if you have a way to age but to reduce bacterial growth, you can still get improvement in tenderness. Certainly, you get changes in flavor um from oxidation that normally occurs, but you could you could age for longer if you could get rid of bacterial growth. Right. And so that's why you've got to be real sanitary when you're out there working, Like you say, avoid the grass and the extra blood and everything else getting all over the meat, because all that does is help inoculate the outside surface of that meat with bacteria, and that's not a good thing when it comes to eating quality. So if you could, if you could have a hypothetical situation where you could like eliminate all life inside of a walking cooler, right, meaning there's no like, there's no bacteria, there's no fungus, like, all life is gone inside some space. You would put a deer in there, and that deer would still age, but it wouldn't rot right now, it would It would dehydrate, right, it would dry out re member meat water. And so the typical dry aging over that day period might lose ten or fifteen percent of the way, right, So there's still a lot more water that can come out, but at some point you're practically making jerky. It's just so dry that there's nothing else to do, So you couldn't do it indefinitely. The idea would be that you could safely age longer if you could get rid of the bacteria. And by the way, the bacteria wouldn't necessarily already be in the cooler. We bring it in when we bring in the carcass of animal. So so that guy who's driving around with a uh antelope on the back of his truck for a couple of days, you know he's inoculating that product is what he's doing by the time to get down on it. I recently read a book called Extra Virginity, and it was about the scandalous world of olive oil and how it's like rampant to take a ten dollar bottle of olive oil and put a five price tag on and five label. Is the world of meat exempt from that or does it happen there? What areks some examples of meat fraud in the commercial industry. All animal harvest and cutting is um overseen by employees of the federal government, and so meat fraud is very very very low. Uh that there are inspectors there to ensure safety and wholesomeness. There are agents that deal with accuracy and labeling and the rest of that kind of thing, and so um, there's a there's a lot of reasons why meat fraud would be at a minimum. Now, if I were going to cheat, I might I might cut one part of a carcass and tell you it's a different part, right, and and so I might try and take something out of the shoulder and make you think it's part of the rib, for example, because there's a dollar value there. It doesn't happen very often, but that would be one place. The other place where you simply need to be careful is some of the claims that are made about how the animal is raised and handled and so forth. And again, most of the time there are systems in place, their audits in place, their government employees in place to ensure that that's uh, that that that's accurate, and if there is deception and labeling, the consequences of that are pretty serious. So, um, I don't think there's a lot of fraud in meat quite honestly, have you? Uh you know, it's funny Spencer brings up the olevel thing because I know that there's a ton of fraud uh in the fish world. And I remember reading about this thing where you know, there's many varieties of snapper, but they don't have name brand recognition. I remember reading that these guys that just saying, we're seventies some percent of the fish being sold as red snapper. It's not red snapper. But when you people look at the men you are going to a fish market, they don't want to see mangrove snapper, red line or blue line or whatever to all these different kinds of snappers, so they just throw up like red snapper because people will think like, oh, but the difference there is it's uh, it's not nearly as a controlled system from a supply standpoint, that's correct. You know some of the guys buying filet's like, it's already out of the question. But it's hard to uh, it's probably hard to pass off one kind of carcass as another kind of carcass. Imagine the grade the grading system could be screwed up. Oh, now that that too is done by federal employees, and that right, So you don't make your own call. You don't make your own call on grading. No, if you you can self grade and establish your own grading requirements. But if you're going to call it prime choice select, then those grades are are through federal employees, federal graders, And that's a that's been a tightly controlled system for a long time. I was in a I was in a meat plant this week actually where I watched graders work. So it's still happening. Were you were you second guessing him? No? No, I you agreed with the calls they were making. Yes, I was. Actually I was actually in their buying meat for a research project. Actually, So what goes into the different grades, like what makes a prime a prime, or a choice of choice or a select a select. So there's there's two primary elements used for grade. One is how old the animal is, and the other one has to do with how much marveling, how much fat inside the muscle. It turns out in the US, we sent all the young animals to one plant and all of the old animals to a different plant, and so, uh, they're mostly Age is not a question, and it's just how much marbling is present to get prime or choice or select. One time I was, I was working on a magazine story years ago about livestock theft, like like contemporary cattle rustling, and I went, I was at a sale yard in Twin Falls, Idaho, and I was with some guys that run a cow calfe operation and they were watching what they called milked out dairy cows climbing off a truck and they expressed like a high level of disapproval about the condition of the animals and made a comment about what the beef would be like off those What were they getting at, Well, it's that it's nutrition again, right, So if you have enough energy then you can support yourself. You have enough muscle and you have enough fat to sustain body condition. In the case of dairy cows in particular, they're being milked every day. They're putting a lot of their energy into providing that milk. So you have to provide a really high plane of nutrition. If you're milking and used in the plane of nutrition lowers, then that animal is going to get a lot leaner and it might even lose a little bit of muscle mass. And so that's the body condition that they're looking at. So now so it won't be like potentially won't be as good and could be tougher. Well. Yeah, So the other issue there is those dairy cows are much older. They could be three or four or five years old, whereas young cattle to the marketplace are typically two years or less. And the older and animals sort of like us us, right, the older we get, the tougher we get, right, And that's what happens for muscle as well. Mature animals more connective, tissue, less tender than younger animals, so that when you're out hunting you see that three or four year old stag, right, it's it's not gonna be as tender as an animal that's much younger. Are there any exceptions to the rule, like does it go as far as that a fawn dear would be way more tender than an old buck? Yes, what you just said is correct. A faun would be more tender than a buck with with one caveat that fawn is so small that it would be very easy for it that muscle to get cold and contract before it goes into rigor mortis. So if you could control temperature correctly, then that faun would be way more tender than the older animal. It's the same thing with veal, right, veal is much younger than the than the twenty four month old uh steers and efforts that we buy in the grocery store every day, and veal as much more tender as well? Is veal synonymous with crate raised veal? Do you remember all the blow up years to go about create raise veal? Is there a difference? There's create raise veal a qualifier of veal. Uh No, deal is based on animal age. So most of the veal these days is raised in pens and group pins where there are a number of them together. So um that there is a welfare question that was raised, And I think the industry has responded well to it in that regard, So so that is like that is a classification. There was a classification of veal rather than just meaning the veal is create race. I think people thought it was synonymous, like if it's veal, you know, it was raised in a specific way, but it could skydive and still be vealed. Yeah, that the government would say that um veal is based on animal age period, that's it. And so if someone's you know, if someone says free range veal or pin raised veal or group race veal, those descriptors are being used by the people who are marketing the product. Federal government focuses on the fact that it in fact is veal. Why is it bad to eat raw red meat? And are there less threats with something like deer meat versus cal meat. The risk of eating raw meat is primarily one of microbial issues spoilage and and pathogens that could make you sick um. In addition, if there are parasites and the meat, then if you haven't cooked it, then that's a risk as well. So I would think game meat would be perhaps more likely to have parasites. Uh in the in commercial production of animals, they're gonna do everything they can to minimize that because that reduces the growth efficiency and it's all about efficiency and commercial production. So again and lifeless uh, and that hypothetical lifeless space. You could eat the raw meat all the time. It's just like you're there's no damage from the actual meat. It's just stuff that you're ingesting that accompanies it. Yeah, I think that's a fair way to say that. I haven't. I have a question that kind of relates back also to you know, idea of great raised veal. But okay, so let's look at human beings. So somebody who doesn't do any exercise whatsoever and just kind of sits around, and then someone who lifts weights all the time and has stronger, bigger muscle. So if we look at the this is a cannibalism question their PhD next week after the turtle guy, I wanna human meat guy. I'm glad you're asking a question because I was wondering the same thing, like which people tastes better? Yeah, totally, if you haven't died of fruit loops, if you have salad um. So if we look at the equivalent of that in in animals, uh, an animal that maybe doesn't move around a lot compared to same same animal, same species, but that moves around a lot more or um or I don't know, cats climbing trees. Yeah, we hear about people talk about why is the chicken in like in rural Mexico, the chicken is so good? Be like, well, it's well exercised, right like like if it if an animal has I don't know, is stronger, has more muscle, is potentially more contracted muscle, Like how does that all or is well exercised or not? How does that have an effect if any on toughness or you can you can still manipulate the meat afterwards and the muscle fiber afterwards to to get it to be tender good. I'll answer that, but I just want to tease you, guys. I always have a conversation with my students, and that is that sooner or later when you're talking to the public, they become closet scientists, and I think they don'ts and but the basis of your question is is actually is twofold number one? Does exercise make me less tender? And then the other dimension of that is the inactivity means that they're burning up less energy and if they're consuming the same they're creating more fat. And so that latter part is true. The less exercise, the less movement, the more fat is going to be produced on the same diet. Right. In terms of exercise creating tougher connective tissue and the rest of that, those differences, if they exist, are very subtle and not meaningful. You would have, uh, are greater difference in um tenderness from one muscle to another than you would from one animal to another because of exercise. Okay, so pretty much, you know, given given more or less exercise among people in the office, we may all taste about the same. Yeah, presuming you're the same age, right, Yeah, yeah, in a real quick, simple way, what's the difference between the dark meat? You know, with poultry, what's the difference between the dark meat and the white meat? Uh, it's it's that amount of myoglobin that's present. So, um, not all muscle cells are the same. Some have more myoglobin than the other. So the dark meat just has more of that myoglobin and biologically typically has a little bit more lipid, a little bit more fat in there as well. Neither one is very fat, but there might be another percentage or to a fat in there. Mostly the color difference is just because there's more of that oxygen binding pigment in the meat. Can you explain the function of glands that you find when you're butchering something and our glands as prominent in domestic animals as they are wild ones? Well, yes, Spencer's not like you produce more glands from being domestic. Well, I don't know. I'm thinking about like with a white tailed deer, like they use their glands to mark territory and things like that. The more active gland. Yeah, well I'll buy that, because you smell a fox and you smell your dog named close to the same thing. There. He's right. So in this case, you're talking about scent glands, and we really don't have scent glands and domestic animals to deal with too much where Yes, But if you're talking about lymph glands, those lymph nodes, lamp glands, they exist in all of the animals. They're probably a little bit more visible, easy to see in a leaner animal, and so you probably see those more often in game. And what is the function of those, Well, that's a that's an immune function. That's how the animal sustains hell when you get when you get a cold, you have an immune response that helps you fight against it. So there's a whole system in the body called the lymph system that moves that fluid around to help fight UH disease and injury and the rest of that kind of thing. So when you sprain your ankle, it swells up. That's that's lymph fluid pooling in your ankle. As a result, you know, there's a little gland. It's always hiding out in the back leg of a deer, and you actually gotta take it apart to get that thing out. Let's say you do you forget or don't or you never knew about it, and just you must have been eating him your whole life. Um, is that necessarily bad for you? I don't. I wouldn't be too concerned about a health concern. I suspect it probably has a quality effect on taste and play r and that kind of thing. That same guy that told me the great Turkey story about shipping into Minneapolis and barrels, he had a little custom slaughter plant and I was down there with him one time and we were picking out uh sweetbreads. The Thamus gland. Correct, right, we're picking out sweetbreads and he was. We were. He was slaughtered a bunch of young cattle and the guy that he was slaughtering for didn't want them. So he had me down because he said, you can get all you want if you want to come down. And so he was showing me how to separate the skin and prepare them, and he was saying that that. I said, well, why are they not good on the older animals? And he said that it turns waxy. Is this something you had any exposure to? Well, I have had uh sweetbreads, and I can tell you that on the grill in particular, they can be quite delicious. They're there, it's They're incredible. Yeah, it's uh. And it makes sense to me that as the animal gets older that possibly the saturation of the lipids might change. I don't really know, but I think it's probably less waxy and more um dance, harder fat that's present within that area. But that's a little bit of guess on my part. Yeah, I've never met I've always thought to experiment with this, but never have. As if on a yearling deer um to find that sweetbread and prepare it and see if it's any good. And I'm sure someone listening has done this, but I've never heard of people doing sweetbreads on anything but cattle. Well, lamb, I think people do lamb sweetbreads. Now, they're they're a little bit hard to find. You gotta know what you're looking for. They're not very big, particularly in game animals, so I think that would be a bigger challenge. Why is beef tallow good and venison tale bad. Well, I've never had venison talos so, but it has to do with I would expect it's a difference in what fatty acids are made up of the tissue, right and so um, If you think about something like a chicken or pork fat, it's pretty soft. When you go to the beef carcass, it's a lot more firm, and so it's more saturated in the beef animal. Incidentally, it depends on where on the carcass you get. The fat in the brisket area is softer than fat that's over the loin and the fact that's around the kidney is harder than everything. And so there are differences within the animal as well. But if you have a if you have an unsaturated fat, a soft fat like pork, like poultry. I would expect, like game um, that fat will oxidize more quickly. It's biologically disposed to do so it interacts with sygen from the air. Oxidized lipids are described by US as rancid, and so there could very well be a flavor difference there as well. Oh no, I think you're getting I think you're you're onto it. I'll tell you some of the weird act when we talk about dear tallow like, I'll tell you some of the attributes that we find that differ from the attributes of bee fat. It is the most fat you find is over the realmp, so kind of like alongside like on on top of the romp, alongside either side of the spine, you'll find these big flat cakes of fat. It's it's firm right like you could you could cut into squares. It's kind of flaky, like when when it flakes, you can sort of when it when it's cold or whatever, you can kind of flake it away and hold it in your fingers and it doesn't melt between your fingers at all when you eat it. It's like if you take a sip, like if you were eating then some rib and then you had a sip of ice water. That fat will set up and solidify all over on the inside of your mouth, um, and to the point where you have to almost manually scrape it off the inside of your mouth. And finally it is good. It's okay fresh, but it rots in your freezer. Yeah, and you pull it out later and it's changed man like like six venice deer fat in your freezer for six months comes out way different than when it went in, but the meat is not changed. Yeah, it's that. I'm sure that's that concentration of fats and oxidation that takes place. Oxidation happens in your freezer as well. So that's entirely consistent with what I would expect. You know what's weird. You know what really goes bad in the freezer is bear fat. I don't know why. You can render it into like really nice lard, but it goes bad unrendered. Just the straight fat will rot in your freezer. I don't know if pork fat does, but I uh, pork fat well, probably at a little bit of a slower rate. Um. But you know, this is one of those things where we could talk just briefly about packaging, right, A lot of times we we wrap it up in and that's sort of that waxy coated or plastic coated butcher paper which doesn't get it doesn't get the air out right, whereas um, if you seal it inside a vacuum bag, a plastic bag and vacuum seal that, which is how things are done commercially, you've gotten rid of almost all the air that's there, and that will extend the either the shelf life when it's fresh or the shelf life in the freezer as well, because it minimizes that oxidation process. Go ahead, Spencer, So are you replicating that when you freeze something in water? It's very common among fishermen to take a bag of filets and fill it with water and then throw that in your freezer because it doesn't allow any air to come in contact with the meat. Is that doing the same thing, That's the same principle. I would argue you probably still get some air through there, but it would certainly reduce the problem. You know, we used to in the old days, we would just wrap red meat in wax freezer paper, which created all kinds of problem, Like you just get freezer burned corners, you know right now, I'll do one or two things where I typically will wrap it in plastic wrap like saran wrap in order to get all as much of the air out as I can, and then put it in the wax freezer paper, which I think is protective, like protects it the integrity of the plastic wrap underneath when people are like jam you know, shuffling around in the freezer. And also it decreases light or eliminates light from penetrating in um. Do you feel that that system is like a good system for home use. Sure, it's not quite as effective as the vacuum packaging we're talking about, But the secret is, uh, you use the magic words surand. Like everything else, not all plastic wrap is created equal Suran. Suran is an oxygen barrier. And in fact, those those vacuum package bags I'm talking about their layered and the center layer is a surand type product to prevent oxygen from penetrating. Oh, I don't know that there are some plastic wrap that will let air through and we'll let oxygen through and water through, and so it depends on which which plastic wrap you're using. How do you know that you're getting the right kind um. You know, the the easiest way is to uh if it's if it's not necessarily a brand endorsement, but Saran is a brand name for the oxygen barrier film. UM. Oh, I see the other thing you can do UM. For example, if you make like if you take avocados and chop them up and you cover them with plastic wrap. Some of that plastic wrap it will turn brown very very quickly, and others it will not. And so that's an indication of oxygen permeability as well. Kind of an in home science test, if you will. When you saw out a piece of frozen meat like a backstrap and there's all that liquid in the plate, what is that just water? That's water and myl globe. There are a few other proteins that are in their water soluble enzymes. That kind of thing. It doesn't comprom eyes the nutritional quality of the product at all, but there's no reason to hold onto it. You know. The big thing I remind people is um, the rami might be on that plate once you get it cook, make sure you use a clean plate. So would it be a bad practice then to freeze something thought out refreeze it again, and then thought out again, are you creating a worse product? Yes, what happens there? Okay, go on. You're driving moisture from the product. And usually when you thought out, you're exposing it to oxygen, so you're getting more oxidation as well. So both of those things would be uh negative in terms of eating experience, but not a huge negative. Yeah, I mean you can refreez me. Yeah, I do. I like I've long been. I always have people tell me you can't do that. You can't do that, Well, then I should be dead or dead because we did all the time, like well thaw big bags. So if we but let's say you bone a deer like a deer shoulder out. Um, we bone the deer shoulder out, and you don't have time for whatever reason, just because of life, and you put all the meat into a gallon size zip blog bag, squeeze the air out, put in your freezer for whatever a month and then you finally get time. You're gonna make some sausage, pull it back out, thought, make sausage or burger whatever, repackage it, and then it goes back into the freezer. Now I like sure, like something must be lost. But I would if I PEPSI challenged you on it, I don't think you'd be able to pick it out for the most part, those little differences, particularly if you're going from a whole product to a to a ground product. Uh, I think you're safe by doing that. You know, you want to think a little bit about thawing if you're if you're one of those guys who throws it on the kitchen counter and lets it thaw for the rest of the day, if there's any bacteria in there that's not particularly food safety practices we'd want to encourage. I'd say, put it in the fridge, let it get partially thought, cut off what you need, and then refreeze the rest so that you know that you haven't gotten in a temperature zone where lots of extra spoilage bacteria take place. But the practice that you've talked about people take, People do that all the time. You're absolutely right, And I think I was trying to point out that it's a matter of degrees of of of differences, and it's not a binary yes no, do don't live by kind of decision on that thing. Chris, what is the science say about marinating me? Can you get a liquid to penetrate like a roast and change the flavor of it. Yeah, So there's two reasons to marinate. One is to change flavor and one is to tenderize the meat. And so if you're going to change flavor, then pretty much whatever flavor you like, you can marinate the meat for an hour or two. You'll get a nice surface coating and uh, and it will alter the taste of the product and you're cooking, and that's that's easy. You can do that with We do similar things with dry rubs, right where you just rub the spices on the outside and so forth. Um. But most of the time when we think and meat science about marinating, we're thinking about how are you making that meat more tender. The secret goes back to that connective tissue, that silvery tissue on the outside that goes throughout the whole muscle. You can think of that connective tissue like a fish net or like a harness, so that when the individual cell contracts, that connective tissue moves with it, and that's how we get movement of the whole body or the whole arm as a result of contraction in the live animal. So when you marinate, you want to tenderize that connective tissue. That works best if you have an acid based marinate, so a wine or a vinegar, or a citric kind of a base, even a soy sauce. Those kinds of marinades will enhance the tenderness of the product. The secret, as you just pointed out, is how deep and how far does that really penetrate into the muscle. And I tell you it doesn't go that far. Right, you can you can marinate for eight hours and only be an eighth or a quarter of an inch into the tissue. So it's best if you marinate thinner, smaller pieces. Uh, if you want to get real sophisticated, you can. You can get a syringe and you can actually inject some of that marinate into a larger a larger piece of meat, and that will work as well. Um. The last thing on marinades I would mention is that there are some um, some fruits that have enzymes in them that tender eyed meat. And so for example, kiwi fruit or raw pineapple, even papaya and figs, all of those have enzymes that will attack the meat. Now if it's canned pineapple, well by canning, you've inactivated the enzyme. It doesn't work anymore as a fresh product. If you add that to the to the to the dish, you can tenderize meat in that way. You know, you might give me an answer here that I don't believe, and Noah's wrong. But can you increase moisture by marinating or brining? This is a hot debate in the culinary world. I'm not sure whether you would increase for marinating. You might be able to get a little bit more moisture in there, but you know you're trying to get water to move from to a place that's already moisture. So I wouldn't think you get very much of an effect just by marinating to enhance moisture. If you're brining, look, salt drives out meat, right, That's how we used to preserve meat years and years ago. It's packet and salt, and so salt tends to draw moisture out of the product. Now, if you mix up a salt solution and you injected in the meat, okay, you've added more moisture there. But if you're just putting a piece of meat into a brine, the the you're getting a reverse effect. You're getting moisture pulled out. But don't they like don't they sell you know how? Sometimes Uh, you can get a turkey and it actually has an ingredients list because they've they've they injected with us A brine, yes, and and that's like specifically to make it moist right, But that's just you're just like physically sticking water there. Yes, but you're you're also adding salt, which is a great flavor potentiator, right. It enhances flavor. And so if you give somebody a piece of meat with salt and without salt most of the time, and they'll tell you the one with salt taste better, is more tender, more juicy, more flavorful. Plus there are other ingredients that go into that that turkey that would help the moistures stay in the meat instead of just run out. So it's a it's I think we're dealing with the difference in terminology here and what you're really doing and how it's getting done. What if you like pulverize kiwi and pineapple and you put some meat in a bowl of that, so there's no sodium, so you're not having water come out of it, but you're having it in an enzyme bath of liquid. You I tell you that I have cooked meat with on a skillet with kiwi. Before that I could eat with a spoon. Maybe that's it wasn't very good because because it was much, it was much by aging. Um it must be real like dry aging is beneficial. It us with some dues and don't well so. Um, when you are aging, you are allowing the enzymes that are naturally present within the meat to break down the protein that enhances tenderness. So if you you could age in one of those vacuum bags where almost no moisture comes out, or you can age in air. If you're aging in air, we call it dry aging. If you're aging in one of those vacuum packages, we call it wet aging. And in both cases the tenderization process is the same. And as I said earlier, you'll get the great benefit and the first week or so or two, and then after that the benefits of aging are reduced. You don't see, you've already tender eye it to a large extent, to the to the most that it will occur. It will continue to improve, but not very much. Um so from an aging standpoint. For tenderness. It's enzymes do the work. When we dry age, We're putting meat, typically on a rack, and we leave it set for a period of time. And what happens is the moisture on the surface of that evaporates fairly quickly. In fact, over three or four days, Uh, you will you can get a very nice dry crust on the outside of that meat. The longer you store after that, you will still lose moisture. And um. Two things happened during that aging period from a taste standpoint, One is you're concentrating the flavors because you're removing water and everything else stays behind. But the other thing is is you're actually creating flavors. Proteins get broken down into amino acids, and some amino acids are like the ingredients in MSG. There there their flavor potentiators as well enhancers. Uh. You get some oxidation flavors that go on as you dry age as well. So the taste of a dry age piece of meat is profoundly different than the taste of a wet aged piece of meat. So I think, uh, like a lot of other things, if someone says I'm going to dry age, they need to understand why they're dry aging, what they're going to accomplish when they do that. Now, when you dry age, you lose the weight I mentioned before cent or more. But then you've also got this hard crust on the outside that you've got to trim off and throw away. Do you guys ever call that the rind? Yeah? That it's so you're talking about maybe another fiftent. So you're probably gonna lose of the weight of that muscle when you dry age. You know. A guy once served me a piece of ad dad. It was like he had an odd dad shoulder that he had aged for eighteen months, And once you got through all the dried out stuff, there was a strip of meat inside there. There was about the size of a cigar and it tastes like blue cheese. I mean, it was the cheesiest, strongest, most potent thing. Um. He was just kind of experiment with how long can you how long can you go? But that felt like a real Petrie dish, you know, but no ill effect. We ate it raw. My goodness, your ban is mold always a bad sign when you're dry aging something. No, um, but it makes me nervous. Some mold can be toxic, particularly the black molds. There is a gray mold that tends to come on, and some dry aging experts will say that that enhances or alters the flavor. Incidentally, they've done some testing on some molds and one of them is associated with blue cheese. It's the same kind of mold that can take place. But I would emphasize you don't have to have mold to have a very good dry age product. In fact, I sort of feel like if you've got mold, to me, that's an indication that maybe you don't have the most sanitary cleaning system set up before you started to dry edge in the first place. I'm not a big fan of mold, but I'll tell you there are some scientists who say it does accentuate and add a little bit to the flavor as well. A friend of mine who is a chef, he always advised me that the only mold that there's him is the black fuzzy kind, So that that's that's true, not the only one with that black fuzzy is bad. That's correct. What about aging temperature, I always hear uh Butcher stress that you shouldn't let the ambient temperature get below freezing because it slows down the aging process, so you're not accomplishing what you're trying to do. What is like the ideal temperature for aging meat. Yeah, that's exactly right. If it's frozen water, it's not gonna move right very easily, and so you want to be above freezing. I would say thirty four or thirty five degrees or somewhere in that ballpark would be about right. If you get much higher than that, then you start to get bacterial growth and the rest of that. What's it what's the real danger zone? Well, anything over forty for certain would be too high. Um, but but if you're gonna aren't for a week or two, I would I would shoot for the mid thirties frankly, for that very reason. If you have here's the secret. If it starts to get slimy, that's bacterial growth. And if it's dry then um, and it's not slimy, then you have less bacterial growth. It's not zero, but you have much less spoilage bacteria growing. If it's not slimy, then if it is, you know, there are certain little tricks that people try where um, they'll say, like out in the field, you can rub black pepper all over a quarter to help preserve it. Or do people make these little packages. It's some kind of I don't know what. It's, some kind of acid or something. It looks like a little drink package and you mix that in the water bottle and shake it up. I've messed and stuff and isn't happy with the results because it kind of look like if you put lime juice all over meat. But anyways, they shake it up and you bathe a quarter meat and that stuff and it's supposed to inhibit inhibit bacterial growth or any do you think do you would you have faith in any of these methods as actually accomplishing anything. I'm not too enthusiastic about pepper from a preservative standpoint, but I will tell you that in fact, light organic acid will reduce bacteria on the surface. In fact that that's commercially done as well. A light mist usually a lactic acid or a citric acid for example, could work as well. Tends to reduce spoilia bacteria and um. I know that sometimes the surface of the meat will get that lime juice appearance you're talking about, where it kind of looks washed out and the most of that, but that's only surface. By the time you hook it, you won't even know that that acid was there. You know, I realized I misspoke and I didn't, and I caught it when you mentioned it is when we did this, you were right. It was in the spray bottle. Yeah, it was. It was a product that you mix in a spray bottle. And and it's funny because what turned me off was that lime juicy look. But I didn't think about the fact that that was very surface level. Yeah that's pretty it's pretty thin layer. But that's really all you need. The bigger challenge for me is you could do that, but now you've got a carcass that's low in bacteria load, what do you do with it? Right If you're gonna go lay it in the bed of a pickup and drive it home, you sort of kind of worked against yourself right now. Maybe a better way would be take it home and hang it and then spray right once you're done transporting it. Once you're done with transport, i'llternatively, alternatively go ahead and get the animal, but leave the hide on and don't take the hide off till you get home. Then when you take the hide off, you can spray it and be ready to go. I realized that, uh, an animal that's gone into rigor mortis is harder to skin, of course, so there's the downside of that. Oh yeah, man is getting nice when they're brand new. Yeah, you bet um, Chris, what do you mind talking a bit about some of the research that you've been doing and some of the work you've been doing recently in any new discoveries there. So yeah, there's two, probably three or four things I can talk about here. I'll do this briefly, and if you have questions, we can go deeper. We have built in our laboratory twelve dry aging chambers that are um the most tightly controlled dry aging chambers in the world. We can control relative humidity, we can control airspeed, we can control level of oxygen. We can measure the weight of the meat once a second for six weeks if we want to do that, and of course it's in a cooler where we can control temperature. There's a lot of lore about dry age, a lot of art, if you will, but we're trying to push science forward, and so we've learned a lot about how moisture moves out of that meat, a lot of people think, for example, that rind or that crust prevents moisture loss. It does not. We're learning a lot of different things about dry agent that has not been seen before, and we continue to do that kind of work. We also have some work we just finished up, uh that if you if you think about these meal kit services, um, you get a you get a package of meeting there and must time that package meat is brown. It's not very attractive in color. And so we did a whole project on how do you maintain bright red color in frozen meat? And so there's some tricks you can do if you understand the biology to do that. We have uh, A lot of people feed different kinds of feed to animals, and we are where this is really deep biochemistry. But we're looking at the chemistry now of what happens during that rigor mortis process and right after that that tenderizes meat. So we're looking at the enzymes and how that whole process gets controlled. And then lastly, UM, we did a project here um it's been a number of years now where we went through and characterized with a group of scientists, not just me. We characterize a lot of different muscles in the beef carcass. Out of that, the flat iron steak was identified. There were a number of other cuts as well, but that's probably the one that's most well known. And so when when we do research in my laboratory, I'm I'm a quality oriented scientists in meats, and so I'm looking at meat quality from the standpoint of of what makes that product taste better, what, what gives it better flavor, what makes it more tender, what makes it longer shelf life, what gives us the right color, what gives us the optimal use of that animal? And we talked before about respecting the products that we get, and um, I get frustrated when we use the wrong muscle for the wrong recipe because you are either undervaluing one or overvaluing the other one. And so trying to make sure that we use the right part in the right place, in the right way. And and to me, that is a win win win. It's a win for the people who produce the animals, it's a it's a win for the people that are marketing those products, and best of all, it's a win for those people who are consuming those products. I think the same thing about your listeners quite Honestly, they've They've gone to expense, they've gone to energy, they've gone to effort to go out and get them an animal. And part of it is the experience which we all enjoy, hiking and being outside and all the rest of that. But I would love for them to end up with the highest quality product they can so that the ultimate end of the experience is a very satisfying one as well. You know, Chris, you I don't think we talked about this. What school are you at? University? I'm at the University of Nebraska in the Animal science department. Okay, so I know you guys got snapper turtles there. Now, when you steer you talk about different muscle groups, right, like different the qualities of different muscles. When you dear one of your graduate students you have graduate students, yes, okay, when you steer one of them into snapping turtle work, I want you to remind them that it is lower amongst snapping turtle people that there are is it five or seven? There are there are seven distinct meats inside of a snapping turtle. So since it's low all low hanging fruit and snapping turtle meat research, that might be a good dissertation would be like you'll have to think of how to how you have to think of a good title for the dissertation, but it would be something like, um uh, testing the qualitative. Yeah, they're out of the seven kinds of snapping turtle meat. Well, I first of all, I have to locate the Snapping Turtle Meat Foundation. They have deep pockets, Chris, don't worry, Spencer and I will start that organization now and do some fundraising so we can fund the research. I've never known what they mean by the seven times. I don't like pork, chicken, beef, things like that. But there's there's well to their credit, to their credit, to the to the to the it looks like I'm talking just looking at it, like you know the backstraps that run down the inside of a turtle, inside that little honeycomb bone, very very white, very string. You can tear it apart by hand. Then like their legs have some intensely dark meat. The neck is visually very different. There's something there. Chris, as student will find it and you'll report back to us, and then Chris probably do some dry aging on turtle studies. You know, I'm also tell you this story that I was contacted a number of years ago by scientists who is working in Latin America, and he was looking at, uh, what was the motivation for hunters. They would go out hunt saying bush meat, and they would go out hunting monkeys, and they would walk by holler monkeys and they would hike for a week in order to get spider monkeys, and and he was trying to figure out how much energy it took them to go harvest one type over another, and he couldn't figure out what was the difference in these two animals. Well, it turns out spider monkeys eat fruit and holler monkeys eat a lot of tree bark rich in tannins. And we actually came very close to having a research project on monkey meat taste because I'm convinced those holler monkeys had very bitter flavored meat and the spider monkeys was going to be, you know, much more desirable meat products. However, like everything else, the funding fell through for that project and we didn't get to do it. But that's too bad. I was with I was with the Chimana and we went monkey hunting. They their favorite is the spider monkey. Second favorite was red howler. We got a red howler and ate it. But then the way they cook things that really everything winds up being very similar because they'll dry it, you know that they like smoke it, then boil it, and they do a lot of processes to it that really change it. There were other monkeys that I thought when we encountered them, I thought, man, his monkeys in trouble, but they're very dismissive of it. And then we encountered a possum after they got a red Howler, and I thought, man, this like, no one wants to see monkeys. There are people that at least like possums. This possum is doomed. And they were very dismissive of anyone that would ever go near a possum and stroll down past it. It would be a real rich area of inquiry for someone to look into the qualitative nature of how it's viewed, uh, what tastes good, and how culturally subjective that is well. I one time I spent some time with the chupic Askimos. They like tougher meat when butchering an animal, like this part is good, it's very chewy. This part is not good. It's very tender. They especially like the tendon that supports the head that comes off the spine. That's good because that's nice and chewy and um. They'd be fascinated to understand, like how much of this stuff is culturally overlaid and if there really is any sort of human you know, any sort of objective reality about what tastes good. That's a great questions that there are cultures in the world that that favor the less tender product, there are also cultures in the world that favor the stronger, more intense flavors that come from pasture raised beef or wild game for example. Uh. And interesting on our monkey meat conversation, you touched on I think a really critical point, and that was not only would they kind of dismiss the monkeys, but if some hunter actually shot one, then that person was widely disparaged as well. Yeah, so there was a definitely a social aspect to it to go on top of everything else. As you mentioned, Krin, let's close out with the future. Okay, this is Chris Crins. This this is Cris been Diana talk about this well. Okay, so we've done some blind taste testing around here with fake meat and I think overwhelmingly as soon as you have a bite of the impostor meat. I mean, it's just so obvious taste, texture, smell, everything that would go into you know, one's experience of eating something, it's just so clearly not any kind of meat. So how much meat science goes into the development of these products? And from your perspective, how possible is it on a cellular level to really create uh, animal flesh out of nothing that is animal material? How much time do we have? Well, uh, first of all, most there have been food scientists who have contributed to those products. Not too many meat scientists, but there are too bad. But you know, within that if you we started our conversation talking about Warner Bratchler shear an objective measure of tenderness. If you look at the muscles and a beef carcass, there is more than a twofold difference in sure force from one muscle to the other. So even within an animal, there's a wide range of tenderness and texture. I tend to agree with you every one of those non meat products that we've talked about, UM, has not met my standard for what I care to eat. I like to say sort of tongue in cheek. Um. Everybody is entitled to their own stupid opinion, right, And as a as a food industry, I don't object to offering a variety of products, even if I myself don't care for this. But mostly the comments I've just made are relevant regarding plant based substitutes for meat. There is some effort going on to use cells and grow cells to create a meat product like you're talking about. But just as we have a twofold difference in tenderness within the body itself, uh in tenderness um, the structures and cellular architecture it takes to build those muscles, they are very very far away from being able to mimic a meat like structure in in my judgment, and so certainly as a meat scientist, I don't feel threatened by those products. Mostly I am. I guess I'm a little disappointed and frustrated by the marketing claims that are made regarding those kinds of products. Time and again people talk about, oh, these products are They're healthier for the environment, they're greener. But the reality is when you do a full life cycle analysis, uh, live animal production is a very efficient way to convert plants to meet and uh. In Nebraska, we've been a state for over one hundred and fifty years, we have we have farms in the state that have been in families for more than seven generations. You can't possibly produce animals for seven generations if it's not done in a sustainable way. And so I my frustration with the product line is more along the disparagement of what takes place with agricultural production and frame clee. I think it's a little bit deceiving in a lot of ways compared to what we have, whether it's game animals or whether it's commercially raised animals. Those animals are out there grazing pasture, they're they're eating grain, and they have the opportunity to give us this wonderful, desirable eating experience if we all respect and take care and manage those animals appropriately. That's, frankly, that's what my whole career has been about, is managing the product. Chris, thanks for coming on. It's it's truly been a pleasure. I honestly appreciate so much the chance to talk about this. As you mentioned earlier, we have a lot of misconceptions going on out there and Uh, it's uh, it's enjoyable for me to to kind of explain and educate a little bit. So well, I'm gonna warn you that I'm probably gonna steal traffic and misconceptions because it's such a it's such a big out of our lives to speculate about why things taste good and bad. But we'll build up, we'll build up another list of things we've heard from people, and we'll come back and check with you. That'd be great. I'd be happy to do it. Thank you, Thank you very much.