A customer at my shop in Dayton asked why the pork looks paler than it used to in 2010
Last Thursday a regular named Marge came in and said the chops looked a little lighter pink than she remembered from 10 or 15 years back. I hadn't really thought about it, so I pulled out my old cut book from when I started in 2006 and compared it to how I break down a loin now. Turns out we're trimming more of the fat cap and the hogs themselves are leaner than they were, plus a lot of the big processors changed feed and breed programs somewhere around 2012. She just shrugged and bought her usual two pounds, but it got me wondering how many other little things in this trade have quietly shifted and I never noticed because I'm in it every day. Any of you notice the same thing with your beef or chicken over the past decade or so?
Isn't the leanness thing mostly from the 90s though, not 2012? The big push to cut back fat in hogs started way earlier, and by the time you hit 2010 the breeding was already pretty far along. Feed changes in the early 2010s mostly tweaked things like color and marbling, not how much fat cap you're trimming.