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Man Can Tell a Cow's Age, Gender and Breed From Taste
Laurent Vernet has a taste for beef, such a good taste for it that he can tell gender, maturation, breed, feed, time of year the cow died and whether it was under stress prior to slaughter with one bite of steak. "There's almost no science involved. I've met farmers and butchers who can immediately identify the same things I can, but they do it informally," he says. The real question is, can he tell where a can of Beefaroni was packaged by taste?
" ... Man Can Tell a Cow's Age, Gender and Breed From Taste. ..."
The gender of a cow is easy to tell ... it's female. I don't need to taste anything to figure that one out.
The gender of cattle, or beef, however is slightly more difficult: it might be male or female, but if it's sold by retailers as a cut of beef, it's always male.
All beef comes from steers ... male cattle that are castrated so they don't get all muscle-bound and instead generate tasty fat marbled in the meat (which is muscle).
Cows were never commercially sold for food; the grading system stubbornly insists any grade of beef suitable to be sold in supermarkets as cuts, is always from steers.
Cows normally did not enter the human food chain, but in the modern world, typically older dairy cows that no longer produce milk as they should, are used in commercial processed food and fast-food patties, which is why, by itself, the meat is usually essentially tasteless.
That's also why there is no risk of BSE from supermarket or butcher cuts of meat; the steer is too young for the disease to develop.
Cows, on the other hand, are usually older and can present a risk.
Some might think that cows are used in pet food production, but that's not necessarily true, or at least not the whole truth.
Pet food is made from meat that is not suitable for human consumption; so-called "4-D" animals: diseased, disabled, downers and dying. Chemicals and dye is added to insure it does not enter the human food chain.