CHAPTER XII 

 MEAT PRODUCTION 1 

 i. NATURE OF MEAT PRODUCTION 



500. Definitions. By " meat " is understood in a general 

 way the flesh of an animal as distinguished from the skeleton 

 on the one hand and the internal organs, hide and other offal 

 on the other. Meat in this general sense is separable mechani- 

 cally into adipose tissue (" fat ") and lean meat, both of which, 

 but especially the latter, are of somewhat complex composition. 



The adipose tissue (94) consists of connective tissue in which 

 a greater or less accumulation of fat has taken place and is 

 essentially a reserve of non-nitrogenous, energy-yielding ma- 

 terial. The lean meat, or meat in the narrower sense (86), 

 consists primarily of muscular tissue along with more or less 

 fat, and its characteristic ingredients are the proteins. 



501. Proportion of fat and lean in carcass. The proportion 

 of lean meat to fat tissue in the carcass is naturally quite vari- 

 able, depending somewhat upon the age but chiefly on the feed- 

 ing of the animal, insufficient nutrition reducing the store of fat 

 in the body to a minimum while heavy feeding may cause the 

 production of large amounts of it. Thus Lawes and Gilbert 

 found the proportion of fat in the carcasses of the ten animals 

 analyzed by them (97) to vary from 15.3 to 48.3 per cent. 

 Jordan observed a range of 18.80 to 24.62 per cent in steers 2-2 J 

 years old. Tschirwinsky reports the extremes of 10.39 an ^ 

 40.92 per cent in pigs, while Wilson found a minimum of 1.31 

 per cent in new-born pigs. Atwater 2 gives the following as 

 the average composition of a side of beef of medium fatness : 



1 The discussions in this chapter follow, to a considerable extent, those presented 

 by the writer in U. S. Dept. Agr., Bur. Anim. Indus., Bui. 108 (1908). 



2 U. S. Dept. Agr., Office Expt. Stas., Bui. 21 (1895), p. 35- 



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