On Food and Cooking

unloaded oxygen into our cells.) And when oxygen manages to rob the iron atom of an el ...

activity of oxygen-consuming enzymes in the muscle tissue, and the activity of enzymes that can resupply brow ...

Muscle Fibers, Tissues, and Meat Flavor The main source of meat’s great appeal is its flavor. Meat flavor has ...

sour, salty, and savory sensations. And when they’re heated, they react with each other to form hundreds ...

Meat pigments. Left: The heme group, a carbon-ring structure at the center of both hemoglobin and my ...

fun of “those gastronomes who pretend to have discovered the special flavor of the leg upon which a sleeping p ...

relative proportions depending on the nature of the fat. Compounds from forage plants contribute ...

convert into chemicals called terpenes, relatives of the aroma compounds in many herbs and spices (p. 273 ...

indigestible plant compounds. Meat color is a good indicator of its iron content; red beef and ...

Rural and Urban Styles of Meat There are two traditional, indeed ancient ways of obtaining meat fr ...

slaughtering them young to obtain tender, mild, fatty flesh. This method also goes back to prehistory, ...

encouraged the rise of large-scale specialized meat production. In 1927 the U.S. Department of Agriculture enshr ...

Rapid, confined growth favors the production of white muscle fibers, so modern meats are relatively pale. They ...

its production efficiency. Consumer and producer preferences for lean beef led the USDA to re ...

well as efficiency. The result was the popular label rouge, or “red label,” which identifies chickens that ...

conceived and pushed during an agricultural recession in the early 1920s by cattlemen in the Midwest ...

visible fat marbling — at all packing houses subject to federal health supervision. U.S. “Prime” ...

Each of the animals that we raise for food has its own biological nature, and its own history of being shaped ...

type; these include the French Charolais and Limousin, and the Italian Chianina, which is probably the largest b ...

brought a new interest in beef from cattle raised exclusively on grass, which is leaner and stronge ...