Where's the Beef?

If you grew up like I did, meat came from the grocery store - placed neatly on a foam tray, wrapped in sealed plastic, and stamped with the USDA seal of approval. Or, if my mother made a weekend trip to the butcher shop in our town, wrapped in white paper with the price etched on top with a black wax pencil. I grew up in a rural area of Pennsylvania where many of my classmates grew up on farms, participated in 4-H, and butchered their own meat. My family and I did none of these things. I wouldn't have been able to tell you what happened in the interim between cute cow in the pasture and burger on the grill. All of that changed today.



Beginning last school year, our school nutrition program has slowly increased purchases of locally raised and processed ground beef from T & E Meats in Harrisonburg. Our goal for next school year is to source 100% of our bulk ground beef (used for spaghetti sauce, tacos, etc.) from local sources instead of relying on USDA commodity ground beef. Commodity dollars not used on beef will be used to purchase other commodities that are not as readily available from a local supplier. This allows us to offer a fresher product to students, while helping to fuel our local ag economy. Following is a recent article about T & E:

http://www.hpj.com/archives/2009/may09/may4/Virginiaslaughterhouselinks.cfm

February is probably the calmest time of the year in the world of school nutrition, and so I decided that it was about time that I schedule a complete tour of the T & E processing facility. When I say complete, I mean complete. As in - every step in the process from moo to price per pound. So on this snowy day, the school nutrition director from surrounding Rockingham County and I set out to find out what really goes on in a small scale slaughter house and meat processing facilty.



I'll spare you the gory details, even though it was way less gory than I'd expected, but I will tell you that the process is very humane and streamlined, with a great deal of attention spent on insuring that the meat is safe to eat. In contrast to a large scale processing facility where a cow is slaughtered every 30 seconds, only one calm animal is slaughtered (with a single bullet in case you're wondering) every half hour. An inspector from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) is on site and is involved in the inspection throughout the process. From the "kill floor" (I winced just a little as I typed that), the animals are moved into a large cooler where they await further processing by the skilled meat cutters at T & E. In our case, the most expensive cuts of beef are removed and sold in the T & E retail store, while the remainder of the meat is ground and frozen and sealed in 10 pound packages and then delivered by refrigerated truck to our largest school. From there it is transported by our wonderful maintenance staff to all of our other schools, where it quickly becomes lunch for our more than 4,000 students.





And that, my friends, is where the beef is at in Harrisonburg City!