At risk of starting a copycat thread -

[MrsMatt]

I've noticed over the past year or so that beef (especially steak) tastes weird. Whenever I eat a steak, I get a strange fatty aftertaste that is becoming increasingly unpleasant.

Steak used to be my favorite food - grew up on a dairy farm, with access to grass-fed beef. I've tried conventional and grass-fed and have the same reaction.

Has this happened to anyone else? It's only beef that I have this problem with.

[hippywife]

1. We switched to

locally raised grass-fed beef, pork and chicken. Meat the way it used to be raised before the industrial agriculture boom. No more meat from the grocery and the taste is so much better.

:hi:

[Kali]

2. any other foods tasting weird to you?

some virus infections can affect you taste perceptions but I think it would affect more than one food. I can see a reaction to one type of beef over another but not really both without something else going on too.

[MrsMatt]

3. It's only beef that I'm having this issue with

it's getting to the point that whenever I see my husband prepare steaks for the grill, I begin to feel a little sick.

Maybe it's just pyscological.

[Chan790]

4. Have you considered the sourcing of your beef?

(And I'm not just saying that to be snarky because I'm a lacto-vegetarian.)

I summered growing-up on a small dairy farm (goats, mostly. Some sheep, 1 cow briefly. We're talking non-commercial small...a neighborhood-barter and subsistence farm. Barely a farm, more like everybody raised livestock in the back 2 acres.) and my mother worked on this farm growing up (it was her parents'.) as well as the hog farm across the road where she, among other things, slaughtered hogs. This prepared her for a first job out of HS working as a butcher's assistant in a local market...she lasted one day. At the end of the first day, she took it upon herself to start tossing the "turned" beef.

"What are you doing!!"
"It's rotten."
"So...throw it in the freezer overnight. If it still looks and smells bad when we defrost it, we'll use it for ground chuck."

I dunno how this story ends...she never went back to that market. My point is that not everybody in the meat industry is ethical. There's a lot of things that could be to the cause here that have nothing to do with you beyond a stronger sense of taste. Cost-cutting measures that would potentially change the taste of your meat include using downer cattle (illegal in most locations as many are sick animals), using older cattle (cheaper), sourcing their meat from a farmer/rancher/commercial-dairy-operation that uses excessive quantities of antibiotics, steroids, hormones or rBGH (all of which can affect meat quality. Cheaper because these farmers typically have to undercut their competition on price in order to sell their inferior meat.) or even (rarely) spiking their stock with less-desirable types of meat (very illegal!! Typically mutton as US farms produce tons of mutton (as a "byproduct" of lamb and wool farming) and there is no domestic market for it whatsoever.) It's a bad economy, people will do just about anything to boost sagging profit margins.

Try a different market perhaps.

Alternately, you might have just lost the taste for it. Even before I became a vegetarian I couldn't eat turkey for years, it disgusted me from my mid-teens even though I was raised on it. My younger brother is revolted by soft cheese, he gags and loses his appetite even in its' presence.

Edit: If you want to know all the ways unethical people can f*ck with your meat, ask Kali. She's a rancher, if you think veg*ns hate unethical meat producers, ranchers hate them just as much...it's the people that actually work within the law and generally-accepted standards that get truly screwed by unethical and illegal cost-cutting tactics.)

[MrsMatt]

8. I'm thinking you are correct about losing taste for it

I'm very careful about where I shop for meat, and have tried all kinds (organic, grass-fed, and conventional), but with the same effect.

I'm pretty up-to-date on ethical and unethical animal production methods as part of my job, and I'm very aware of most the crap that shady producers pull (can't claim to know all, because they are crafty buggers). In addition, my brother is a producer (mostly hogs, but some feeder cattle), and my boss is a beef producer (with such a tender heart for his animals, he can't even bring himself to eat his own beef).

Thanks - I may just have to consider scratching beef off my menu.

[Kali]

5. maybe you have just lost your taste for it

I can't eat goat or lamb - even goat cheese so there you go!

or maybe it's just the big cut of a steak - maybe it is still ok as stew/soup, roast beef sandwiches, or burgers or ethnic food...

[OrwellwasRight]

6. Maybe that is the taste of BSE.

**Joke**

But seriously -- I'm not confident that factoring farming has really changed and that it is feeding our cows meat-free feed. I read an article in Harper's a few years ago about how factory-farmed port tastes different and how factories had to change their methods to get it to taste better (to boil down the argument, there were too many "fear" acids in the meat because of the way the hogs were raised). My Two Cents: Try eating organically grown beef or cutting beef out of your diet.

[Curmudgeoness]

7. I love steak too, and I have found that I have to trim all the fat off

these days before I cook it. It seems to me that when I get fresh meat and eat it that day, it is not as bad. After it is frozen and then I cook it, it has that taste. I have also wondered if I should try some of the organic, free-range beef just to see if it is my taste buds changing or if it really is the meat I am buying. Worth a try (even if it is so much more expensive that I would rarely be able to have steaks).