Food for Thought: When did we decide food should all look the same?

Last week, the Farmhands and I attended the final piece of their 4-H livestock season: the carcass contest awards.

At the fair, the 4-H members are judged on their showmanship and their animals in the live market classes. The carcass contest follows those animals through processing, giving the members a chance to learn about the meat they raised.

The woman who evaluated the carcasses walked us through the measurements and scoring for meat judging. We learned about beef, goats, sheep, and pigs, but since the Farmhands raised pigs, that’s where my attention settled.

I found the presentation fascinating. 

I also left with a question that has been rattling around in my head:

How much of our food system have we built around the expectation that everything should look the same?

For pork, a major focus of the evaluation is estimating how much ‘Fat Free Lean’ meat a carcass will yield. Measurements include the fat depth over the loin at the tenth rib, the area of that loin muscle, and the hot carcass weight—the weight after slaughter and dressing, before chilling.

Those measurements tell us something useful about meat yield. But they don’t tell us everything we might want to know about a pork chop, including how it tastes or how the animal lived.

In the scoring presented to us, the target hot carcass weight was 191–200 pounds. Points were deducted above or below that window.

That is a remarkably narrow target when you’re raising a living animal.

One explanation from the presentation really stuck with me: consistency matters because pork chops need to fit neatly onto trays in the grocery store meat case. Similar dimensions. Similar portions. All into the same size packages.

I understand the practical appeal. Consistency makes it easier to process, package, sell, and cook food. In a very controlled environment, it’s easier to match these goals.  

But I wonder what happens when fitting the system becomes such a large part of how we define a desirable animal.

The pork industry even has a model called Symbol III, representing its ideal market hog. It reflects breeding and management goals for production performance and carcass characteristics.

As farmers, we make breeding and management choices, too.  While raising quality pork is the end goal, we mostly select for health in our hard climate.  The size of the pork chop only matters if the pig lives healthy enough to reach the processor.  Selecting for desirable traits is part of agriculture. What interests me is which traits we reward—and what those choices mean for the food that reaches our plates.

Here on our farm, we finish about 75–100 pigs a year. We have processing appointments booked for groups of 15 or 20 every two months. When those dates arrive, we select the pigs closest to an ideal weight.

They don’t all grow at the same rate, and a processing appointment doesn’t move just because a few pigs need another week or two.

Sometimes our pork chops are bigger. Sometimes they’re smaller. Some have a little more fat around the edge. Others are leaner.That variation is part of raising animals. Yet somewhere along the way, we’ve become accustomed to seeing very little of it at the grocery store.  In many ways, Asa and I feel that when it looks so matched at the store, it’s easy to forget it’s a gift from a life that feeds you.  It allows us to disconnect from the source of our meat.

And I’m part of that expectation.

When I’m choosing fruits and vegetables, I catch myself reaching for the ones with familiar shapes and similar sizes. When something we raise falls outside the appearance or weight range we think customers expect, it often ends up in our own freezer.

We happily eat it. But we hesitate to sell it.

What does that say about the standards we’ve absorbed—and help reinforce?

It also makes me think about the word “natural.”On a meat label, “natural” refers to minimal processing and the absence of artificial ingredients. It doesn’t describe whether an animal was raised outdoors or whether its pork chops vary in size.

Still, the word brings to mind something much broader for many of us: food connected to the rhythms and variation of the living world.

I find myself wondering how far that picture is from our expectation of near-perfect uniformity.

Then, this week, an egg customer gave me a different perspective.

After a summer of mixed sizes and colors, he noticed that the eggs in his two dozen looked unusually similar. He stopped to ask about it.He preferred the variation.

I loved that. He enjoys the differences when buying eggs from our farm.

Many of you have made room for those differences, too. You understand that buying from a farm may mean adjusting dinner to the size of the roast, choosing between a larger and smaller chicken, or opening a carton of eggs that don’t all match.That willingness matters. It gives us room to work with the animals we’re raising and the conditions they’re raised in.

I’m grateful the carcass contest gave the Farmhands—and me—a chance to learn more about meat judging and how it’s done on an industrial scale. Understanding how meat is evaluated is valuable. So is asking what those measurements capture, what they leave out, and how much influence they should have over the food we raise.

I don’t have a tidy answer. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

When you shop for food, how much does uniformity matter to you? And has buying directly from a farm changed what you expect food to look like?

Comment and tell me. 

I’m curious.

Aila