meat

Flesh of animals that man eats and including the muscles, fats, blood and offal. Butchery meats comprise animals slaughtered and bled in slaughterhouses (cattle, sheep and goats, pigs, horses and poultry). Meat from game is not considered butchery meat and is counted separately. Meat is classified as: • Red meat: adult bovines, older lambs and horses, • White meat: veal, milk-fed lamb, pork and poultry in France. For Anglo-Saxons, who have imposed their viewpoint throughout the world, pork is considered a red meat. • The meat of ground game or game birds is often called “black meat” but also and depending on the species concerned, venison, hunting meat, bush meat. Meat is also the object of many different regulatory definitions according to the following themes: • Health: according to EC regulation no; 853/2004, meat is the edible part, including the blood, of domestic ungulates, birds, lagomorpha (for example, rabbits), all types of wild and farmed game; • Consumer information: according to EC regulation no. 1169/2011. Meat from different animal species, with different genetics, different production systems, different diets and according to the species of different breeds and butchery categories present different characteristics: • structure of their tissues; • quantity and types of muscular fibers; • composition of their muscles according to their location in the carcass and even within the same muscle; • evolution after the animal’s death: final pH, total pigments and glycolytic potential (GP=2* (glycol-gene+glucose+glucose-6-P) = lactate in ?mole lactate g fresh tissue. All these factors explain the variability of the aptitude of meats for conversion (from muscle) and their nutritional and sensorial quality in terms of tenderness, juiciness and flavor, on which the consumer’s acceptance depends. To go a little further: The French word for meat, viande, comes from the Latin vivenda, which means “that which is necessary to human life.” The exact sense of the French word for flesh, chair, is contained in the Latin carnis (meat). “Lenten meat” designated fish eaten during the Christian period of fasting before Easter, Lent.