Tenderness Intrinsic Character

Abstract

For all of recorded history, tenderness has been an important, perhaps the most important, intrinsic character of red meat. This chapter explores the relative importance of tenderness to the array of meat consumers in the world. Although tenderness is considered by many consumers as the most important sensory characteristic of the eating experience, it has not been easily quantified objectively in real time. Thus, this chapter focuses on methods to quantify red meat tenderness. Also, tenderness of red meat is the culmination of an animal’s biological and emotional responses to events experienced by the animal during its lifetime, especially influenced by the stressful experiences. This chapter reviews the scientific literature concerning the nature of these lifetime experiences as to their influence on red meat tenderness. Thus, this text presents a forensic approach to the tenderness of red meat exploring the probable causes of that character and the exploration of production system elements that might alter the outcome in terms of tender red meat.