Assessment of Meat Quality

Abstract Meat Quality is a special item of product quality and must be strictly differentiated from production quality. The carcass composition e.g. is a factor of production quality which may be a good or a bad factor for meat quality. Ecological aspects and animal welfare are parts of production quality but not of meat quality. Ecology and animal welfare may be, however, a part of the appreciation of meat which expresses a subjective evaluation of this food by the consumer and trading people. Appreciation is often mixed with product quality; this leads to confusion. These statements imply that meat quality can be defined as the comprehensive description of objective characteristics or factors of which it is composed. Four groups of factors may be discerned: I. Nutritional factors, II. Sensorical factors, III. Hygienic parameters, IV. Technological characteristics. Nutritional factors, the part of the unwanted substances within the hygienic factors, and a number of technological factors like pH or myofibrillar protein content can be measured by chemical analysis. The microbiological aspect of hygiene can be evaluated by many means like ATP- and pyruvate detection (biological analysis) or cell differentiation and cells counting. Many technological aspects can be measured with physical methods like water holding capacity and shear force. The sensorical analysis is the most difficult part in measuring meat quality. The reason is the problem of calibration of human feelings. It must become the task of this decade to develop calibrateable devices for panelists. For the appearance i.e. colour and marbling cards may be the solution. For tenderness evaluation I propose artificial, fibrous, unhazardous structures of defined firmness which can be chewed, and for flavour aspects I can imagine composed mixtures of standardized flavours maybe within the structures developed for tenderness. So far the panelists are trained by their memory. But this is superimposed by mood and feelings. Computer programmes developing at the moment to compensate human feelings must remain unsuccessful. This paper will highlight furthermore the difficulties of some aspects of measurement of meat quality like the attempt to detect very early post mortem the final meat quality on the consumer's plate, about the difficulties in measuring water holding capacity and the never ending story of unwanted substances in meat.