Recommended Method for Assessment of Tenderness

Abstract

Tenderness in meat is a highly desirable quality and it governs the relative price of different meat cuts throughout the Community. The deployment of new breeds, together with developments of husbandry techniques, factory processing and distribution, should lead to an augmentation, not a diminution of eating quality. Organised consumer influence in the Community will insist on this. It is important that experiments in breeding, production and processing of meat animals are completed by an assessment of eating quality, in particular of tenderness. This should be done as a routine in all experiments funded by the Community. A valuable data bank can be quickly built up, and an important responsibility of Community scientists and officials, namely that of serving consumers as well as producers and processors, will have been met.