This question occurred to me as I was cooking lunch.
A while back, I read Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin. In it, she described how she designed animal-handling facilities according to how the animals perceived their environment and what their reactions were likely to be. The goal was to calm the animals, to prevent them from panicking.
I also recently saw Food, Inc with its criticism of factory farming: the animals are crowded and stressed, and many die prematurely.
My question is, does the emotional state of a food animal in the time before it is killed affect the quality or taste of the meat?
Obviously the act of killing them is traumatic, but that applies to every animal. And the killing can be done quickly. The food they eat will affect the final taste too, or so I’ve heard. And diseased animals probably aren’t that great–but then we’re not supposed to be getting those.
I’m wondering more about their lives before the kill. Does stress affect the meat?
I read in “On Food and Cooking” that adrenalin makes meat tougher, so slaughterhouses have an interest in making the experience less stressful. I hope it is true.
Yes, pre-slaughter stress can affect the quality and taste of the meat.
You might expect that free range, organic, less stressful husbandry produces happier animals who also taste better. In my personal experience, this is definitely the case with pork, locally reared pork from smallholdings is so different from intensively reared supermarket pork that you would be hard pushed to identify it as the same species. The same may not be true for chicken.
Do you know if those farms are using the same breeds of pig? I ask because I kind of remember on GoodEats Alton mentioning the “standard” pig for the American market was bred to be fairly lean which makes it pretty dry.(Also for good meat to feed ratio.) I’m wondering if the real difference is those farms you go to use a different breed which tastes better.
Absolutely, the breeds used in intensive farming are usually lean and fast growing, and the lack of fat marbling makes a big difference to the meat. Our local small scale producers have a variety of breeds and crosses, some plain Landrace and Great white, others go for the older breeds. But no matter what breeds they choose, the meat is always good. UK supermarket pork, on the other hand, is consistently awful, no matter how farm-assured or organic or outdoor reared they proclaim it to be.
I grew up in Norway, where lean Landrace pork dominates the pig industry, and their pork is pretty decent. I don’t know how the same breed can taste so different in different countries, I would think they’re fed much the same diet.
Cows are dead before they know it, so the death is usually not traumatic - they have the front of their brains blown out with a bolt gun, which leaves the affective parts of the brain obliterated. But if cows are happy eating grass instead of corn and being able to walk around instead of wading in their own shit, I would say very probably yes. That is why such beef has a premium price on it.