Cattle getting so big that steaks cut thinner
If you’ve dined at a steakhouse recently or grilled ribeye for dinner, you may have noticed a curious trend: Steaks are getting thinner.
As U.S. beef cattle have ballooned in size, experts say, restaurants, grocery stores and meat processors have had to get creative in how they slice and dice them up. Increasingly, that means thinner steaks — as well as more scrap meat and “alternative” cuts designed to make the most of a bigger animal.
The cattle industry argues that it provides cheaper and more plentiful beef from fewer cattle. But there’s emerging evidence that Americans dislike the changes to their steaks. And that could hurt the beef sector in the long run.
“If you buy a steak, you have a picture in your mind of what it should look like,” said Josh Maples, an agricultural economist at Mississippi State who has studied the new cuts. “If you make that thinner, or you cut it in half — for many people, that ruins the eating experience.”
It’s no secret that beef cattle are getting bigger — for decades, federal policymakers, academic researchers and industry scientists have strived to beef them up. What may be less obvious to many consumers is how those larger cattle lead to thinner steak cuts.
According to Department of Agriculture data, the weight of the average beef cow hovered around 1,000 pounds until the mid-’70s, when advances in genetics, nutrition and growth-promoting hormones began to produce larger animals. Since 1975, the weight of the average cow at slaughter has increased by roughly 9 pounds each year — from 996 pounds in 1975 to a whopping 1,363 pounds in 2016. (“Cow” technically refers to adult females, only, but is used colloquially for cattle in general.)
As a result, experts say, U.S. ranchers now produce more beef at a lower cost than they did 40 years ago, even though herds have shrunk by 13 million.
But larger cattle also means larger muscles. For restaurants and grocery stores, that has proved a challenge.
“It’s a lot more work for our meat-cutters, I’ll tell you that,” said Travis Doster, the spokesman for Texas Roadhouse, a steakhouse chain with more than 400 locations.
The issue, Doster and others say, lies in the growing diameter of cows’ muscles: things like the longissimus, from which ribeye, top loins, sirloins and chuck eye are cut.
In a forthcoming study in the journal Food Policy, Maples and two co-authors found that as cattle grew, the surface area of the average ribeye grew roughly two square inches — or two postage stamps — between 1991 and 2016. Those larger muscles result in massive, expensive portions if they’re cut to a traditional one— or 1½-inch thickness.
As a result, said Davey Griffin, a professor of animal science at Texas A&M, restaurants and grocery stores have changed how they cut and market steaks. The most common adjustment, especially among mass-market chains, is to simply slice traditional cuts thinner.