When we want to buy red meat, many of us just go to the market or to the butcher and as ask for the prices of pre-cut section of a meat carcass. The butcher or meat seller tells you a very high price and we continue to bargain until we think we have gotten a very good price.
The meat seller usually disagrees with you, lifting the piece of meat several times to show you how big it is. And of course the piece of meat truly appears big. We agree at a price, open our purse or wallet and pay for the meat.
That is basically how many people in Nigeria buy their meat. What is wrong with this? You may be expecting me to talk about the improper way animals are being slaughtered at our abattoirs (which is a very big issues) or the unhygienic was they are being processed and displayed for sale. No, this is not what I am going to discuss. Today, I want to try to be a cost-saver by showing you that we often lose money when we buy meat the way we do.
Have you even noticed that when you buy the white meats – Chicken and Turkey for example, the sizes you get at different times for a particular amount varies. What I mean is that some chicken that you buy one some days for N1000 are smaller that some you buy on other days for the same N1000. This is because we buy by weight. That is how chickens and turkeys are being sold and that is the way red meat should be sold in the market too.
Meat Content of water, protein, fat, ash & calories
I will use the following data to show you how you lose money when you by red meat using size rather than weight.
A typical red meat flesh consists of roughly 75 percent water, 19 percent protein, 2.5 percent intramuscular fat, 1.2 percent carbohydrates and 2.3 percent other soluble non-protein substances as shown in the table below. When we cook meat, most of the water are either lost into the cooking pot or goes out as steam. At the end, our meat shrinks and become smaller.
Product
|
Water
|
Protein
|
Fat
|
Ash
|
Calories / 100g
| |
F
R E S H | Beef (lean) |
75.0
|
22.3
|
1.8
|
1.2
|
116
|
| Beef carcass |
54.7
|
16.5
|
28.0
|
0.8
|
323
| |
| Pork (lean) |
75.1
|
22.8
|
1.2
|
1.0
|
112
| |
| Pork carcass |
41.1
|
11.2
|
47.0
|
0.6
|
472
| |
| Veal (lean) |
76.4
|
21.3
|
0.8
|
1.2
|
98
| |
| Chicken |
75.0
|
22.8
|
0.9
|
1.2
|
105
| |
| Venison (deer) |
75.7
|
21.4
|
1.3
|
1.2
|
103
| |
| Beef fat (subcutaneous) |
4.0
|
1.5
|
94.0
|
0.1
|
854
| |
| Pork fat (back fat) |
7.7
|
2.9
|
88.7
|
0.7
|
812
|
Source: Food and Agricultural Organization
Some meat sellers even try to make meat swell by dipping them in water or blood for a long period so that they can ask us to pay more for it. If we had bought our meat by weight, water would have counted for little in the weight and we would have gotten more kilos of meat added. Therefore, when you get small meat with heavy weight, you know there is not much water in it.
Next time we want to buy meat, we may want to go to where it is being sold by weight so that we can stop paying more for water than meat. Insisting on buying our water by weight will really help everyone. This way, both the buyer and the seller gain; nobody is cheated.
