Interesting UDSA story
ahviendha
Posts: 1,291 Member
I buy my meat from a local grass fed, family run farm. They send me weekly emails on information about their meat, and their interactions with other big box farmers and the US government. This week's email was eye-opening for how ridiculous our current food standards are. Have fun! (email from David Maren at Tendergrass Farms/grassfedbeef.org)
Joel Salatin has said that Lincoln was the worst president this country has ever had because he started the USDA. This story might help you understand why he might say something like that.
If you’ve ever traveled much in third world countries, you’ve probably gotten sick at least once or twice from the food. And if you’ve gotten sick from the food, chances are it was probably bad meat that you ate – not bad tortillas. For a person like me who has spent years in Latin America where at times I was forced to practically become a vegetarian to avoid Moctezuma’s revenge, it’s not too hard to understand why the USDA has strict procedures and regulations that meat producers like Tendergrass Farms are required to follow. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really like getting sick.
All of that said, the regulations imposed on even the smallest grass fed meats companies are numerous and extensive, to say the least. Besides the sometimes illogical and common-sense-free requirements of the USDA with regard to the pre-butcher health of the animal, the temperature-controlled environment where we dry age our beef, and the “safety” of the final product, there are an enormous number of regulations regarding the labeling of our products. I’ll share the saga of just one Tendergrass Farms product and our quest to label it according to USDA regulations.
Back last fall we realized that there was something critical missing from our pastured pork product line: the good old fashioned all-American hot dog. But we knew that we didn’t want to make anything even remotely similar to the modern frankenfood that is sold in most stores as ‘franks’ today. We wanted to go back, way back, with our recipe to the original Frankfurter that would have been sold on the streets of Germany in the 1600′s.
It doesn’t take much historical research to figure out that the original Wieners were actually real sausages, sausages stuffed inside of real pork intestine casings. We decided to keep it basic and make our pastured frankfurters with pastured pork, salt, mustard, paprika, nutmeg, coriander, and red pepper, in real pork casings. Just like the originals, we thought it would be best to make them from good course-ground pork and sell them in the raw so that they could be cooked up at home on the grill alongside grass fed hamburgers.
As soon as I ran this new recipe by our courteous USDA inspector I knew that we’d be having lots of fun with this product’s label. He informed me that the USDA’s labeling regulations required that our product be “comminuted, semisolid sausages” if it was to have the words Hot Dog, Wiener, or Frankfurter (or any variation thereof) on the label. Comminuted? Yep. I had to look it up in the dictionary too. It turns out that it means “reduced to minute particles or fragments.” Effectively this means that I would have to make my product out of a pasty texture-less meat pulp for it to be called a Wiener, a Frankfurter, or a Hot Dog. To top it off, our product was going to be made from real pork and would therefore be a solid sausage, not a ‘semisolid,’ which further disqualified it from being called any normal hot dog names. Admittedly, the most reasonable part of their requirements was that all Hot Dogs must be sold already cooked. (I’ll agree that the thought of some poor mother giving her baby uncooked pork to gnaw on is pretty scary!)
In desperation, I started scanning the 200+ page USDA Labeling Policy Book and I came upon an entry that looked interesting:
The term “Dinner Dog” is a product of the modern food industry. It exists because companies on the other end of the food spectrum from Tendergrass are also making Hot Dogs that don’t fit the USDA’s Hot Dog definition. At least in the example from the regulation book this is because the product doesn’t actually contain meat. I checked with the inspector and we a got the green light on using this term for our new product’s label! He said we’d be good to go as long as we labeled it “Dinner Dogs – Pork Sausage.”
That all went fine with our first batch of Grass Fed Franks. But then, just a few weeks ago, when we went to make our second batch of sausage there was a different IIC (Inspector In Charge) looking over our labeling. This particular inspector was clearly more read-up on the intricacies of labeling regulations than the former one and she informed us that paprika, an ingredient in our Dinner Dogs, was banned from use in “Pork Sausage.” Paprika? It turns out that paprika is sometimes used, because of its bright red color, to make old meat look fresh. It has also been used to make very fatty sausages look leaner because one can use paprika to turn cheap white lard into something that looks like an appealingly pink sausage. So, long story short, we were informed that we could no longer use the term ‘Sausage’ on our sausages unless we changed our recipe to exclude paprika.
Being a Spanish major in college, I happened to remember that the term “Chorizo” simply meant “Sausage” in Spanish. I looked it up in the USDA labeling book and – lo and behold! – I found that a loophole in the paprika ban had been written so that traditional Spanish and Mexican sausages containing paprika could be labeled legally. After getting it approved in Washington DC, we were good to go. This week we’re cutting up and packaging 21 pastured pigs (18 of which were raised on Joel Salatin’s farm) and much of it will now be labeled just as the USDA requires: “Dinner Dogs – Chorizo”.
At least for now, we think that’s legal. And our inspector has told us that as long as we have it right on the label we can call it whatever we want on our website! I guess we’ll see if that’s true or not in the long run.
I am so glad I stopped eating hot dogs.
Joel Salatin has said that Lincoln was the worst president this country has ever had because he started the USDA. This story might help you understand why he might say something like that.
If you’ve ever traveled much in third world countries, you’ve probably gotten sick at least once or twice from the food. And if you’ve gotten sick from the food, chances are it was probably bad meat that you ate – not bad tortillas. For a person like me who has spent years in Latin America where at times I was forced to practically become a vegetarian to avoid Moctezuma’s revenge, it’s not too hard to understand why the USDA has strict procedures and regulations that meat producers like Tendergrass Farms are required to follow. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really like getting sick.
All of that said, the regulations imposed on even the smallest grass fed meats companies are numerous and extensive, to say the least. Besides the sometimes illogical and common-sense-free requirements of the USDA with regard to the pre-butcher health of the animal, the temperature-controlled environment where we dry age our beef, and the “safety” of the final product, there are an enormous number of regulations regarding the labeling of our products. I’ll share the saga of just one Tendergrass Farms product and our quest to label it according to USDA regulations.
Back last fall we realized that there was something critical missing from our pastured pork product line: the good old fashioned all-American hot dog. But we knew that we didn’t want to make anything even remotely similar to the modern frankenfood that is sold in most stores as ‘franks’ today. We wanted to go back, way back, with our recipe to the original Frankfurter that would have been sold on the streets of Germany in the 1600′s.
It doesn’t take much historical research to figure out that the original Wieners were actually real sausages, sausages stuffed inside of real pork intestine casings. We decided to keep it basic and make our pastured frankfurters with pastured pork, salt, mustard, paprika, nutmeg, coriander, and red pepper, in real pork casings. Just like the originals, we thought it would be best to make them from good course-ground pork and sell them in the raw so that they could be cooked up at home on the grill alongside grass fed hamburgers.
As soon as I ran this new recipe by our courteous USDA inspector I knew that we’d be having lots of fun with this product’s label. He informed me that the USDA’s labeling regulations required that our product be “comminuted, semisolid sausages” if it was to have the words Hot Dog, Wiener, or Frankfurter (or any variation thereof) on the label. Comminuted? Yep. I had to look it up in the dictionary too. It turns out that it means “reduced to minute particles or fragments.” Effectively this means that I would have to make my product out of a pasty texture-less meat pulp for it to be called a Wiener, a Frankfurter, or a Hot Dog. To top it off, our product was going to be made from real pork and would therefore be a solid sausage, not a ‘semisolid,’ which further disqualified it from being called any normal hot dog names. Admittedly, the most reasonable part of their requirements was that all Hot Dogs must be sold already cooked. (I’ll agree that the thought of some poor mother giving her baby uncooked pork to gnaw on is pretty scary!)
In desperation, I started scanning the 200+ page USDA Labeling Policy Book and I came upon an entry that looked interesting:
The term “Dinner Dog” is a product of the modern food industry. It exists because companies on the other end of the food spectrum from Tendergrass are also making Hot Dogs that don’t fit the USDA’s Hot Dog definition. At least in the example from the regulation book this is because the product doesn’t actually contain meat. I checked with the inspector and we a got the green light on using this term for our new product’s label! He said we’d be good to go as long as we labeled it “Dinner Dogs – Pork Sausage.”
That all went fine with our first batch of Grass Fed Franks. But then, just a few weeks ago, when we went to make our second batch of sausage there was a different IIC (Inspector In Charge) looking over our labeling. This particular inspector was clearly more read-up on the intricacies of labeling regulations than the former one and she informed us that paprika, an ingredient in our Dinner Dogs, was banned from use in “Pork Sausage.” Paprika? It turns out that paprika is sometimes used, because of its bright red color, to make old meat look fresh. It has also been used to make very fatty sausages look leaner because one can use paprika to turn cheap white lard into something that looks like an appealingly pink sausage. So, long story short, we were informed that we could no longer use the term ‘Sausage’ on our sausages unless we changed our recipe to exclude paprika.
Being a Spanish major in college, I happened to remember that the term “Chorizo” simply meant “Sausage” in Spanish. I looked it up in the USDA labeling book and – lo and behold! – I found that a loophole in the paprika ban had been written so that traditional Spanish and Mexican sausages containing paprika could be labeled legally. After getting it approved in Washington DC, we were good to go. This week we’re cutting up and packaging 21 pastured pigs (18 of which were raised on Joel Salatin’s farm) and much of it will now be labeled just as the USDA requires: “Dinner Dogs – Chorizo”.
At least for now, we think that’s legal. And our inspector has told us that as long as we have it right on the label we can call it whatever we want on our website! I guess we’ll see if that’s true or not in the long run.
I am so glad I stopped eating hot dogs.
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Replies
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Wow! This is just crazy! I honestly don't care what it's called when I buy it!0
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The USDA is a joke. Indeed, government is one giant, ineffectual, violent, wealth-destroying and - ultimately - unfunny, joke.
I hate the state.0
