The Great Kobe Beef Lie
Food's biggest scam from Forbes writer
Think you’ve tasted the famous Japanese Kobe beef?
Think again.
These are cuts of the famous Kobe beef from Hyogo prefecture in Japan. Note the exquisite marbling of fat throughout. To see it in person, you need to go to Japan, because real Kobe beef cannot be found in the U.S. Photo: Wikipedia
Of course, there are a small number of you out there who have tried it – I did, in Tokyo, and it is delicious. If you ever go to Japan I heartily recommend you splurge, because while it is expensive, it is unique, and you cannot get it in the United States. Not as steaks, not as burgers, certainly not as the ubiquitous “Kobe sliders” at your trendy neighborhood “bistro.”
That’s right. You heard me. I did not misspeak. I am not confused like most of the American food media.
I will state this as clearly as possible:
You cannot buy Japanese Kobe beef in this country. Not in stores, not by mail, and certainly not in restaurants. No matter how much you have spent, how fancy a steakhouse you went to, or which of the many celebrity chefs who regularly feature “Kobe beef” on their menus you believed, you were duped. I’m really sorry to have to be the one telling you this, but no matter how much you would like to believe you have tasted it, if it wasn’t in Asia you almost certainly have never had Japan’s famous Kobe beef.
You may have had an imitation from the Midwest, Great Plains, South America or Australia, where they produce a lot of what I call “Faux-be” beef. You may have even had a Kobe imposter from Japan before 2010. It is now illegal to import (or even hand carry for personal consumption) any Japanese beef. Before 2010 you could import only boneless fresh Japanese beef, but none was real Kobe. Under Japanese law, Kobe beef can only came from Hyogo prefecture (of which Kobe is the capital city), where no slaughterhouses were approved for export by the USDA. According to its own trade group, the Kobe Beef Marketing & Distribution Promotion Association in Japan, where Kobe Beef is a registered trademark, Macao is the only place it is exported to – and only since last year. If you had real Kobe beef in this country in recent years, someone probably smuggled it in their luggage.
“How is this possible?” you ask, when you see the virtues of Kobe being touted on television food shows, by famous chefs, and on menus all over the country? A dozen burger joints in Las Vegas alone offer Kobe burgers. Google it and you will find dozens of online vendors happy to take your money and ship you very pricey steaks. Restaurant reviews in the New York Times have repeatedly praised the “Kobe beef” served at high-end Manhattan restaurants. Not an issue of any major food magazine goes by without reinforcing the great fat Kobe beef lie. So how could I possibly be right?
The answer is sadly simplistic: Despite the fact that Kobe Beef, as well as Kobe Meat and Kobe Cattle, are patented terms and/or trademarks in Japan, these are neither recognized nor protected by U.S. law. As far as regulators here are concerned, Kobe beef, unlike say Florida Orange Juice, means almost nothing (the “beef” part should still come from cows). Like the recent surge in the use of the unregulated label term “natural,” it is an adjective used mainly to confuse consumers and profit from that confusion.
This matters because the reason food lovers and expense account diners want Kobe beef, and are willing to pay a huge premium for it, is because of the real Kobe’s longstanding reputation for excellence. The con the US food industry is running is leading you to believe that what you are paying huge dollars for – like the $40 NYC “Kobe” burger – is somehow linked to this heritage of excellence. It’s not.
All the myths about cows getting massages and drinking beer while listening to classical music are just that, myths, but nonetheless real Kobe beef is produced under some of the world’s strictest legal food standards, whereas “domestic Kobe” beef production, along with that in Australia and South America, is as regulated as the Wild West. In Japan, to be Kobe requires a pure lineage of Tajima-gyu breed cattle (not any old Japanese breed crossbred with American cattle as is the norm here). The animal must also have been born in Hyogo prefecture and thus raised on the local grasses and water and terroir its entire life. It must be a bull or virgin cow, and it takes considerably longer to raise a Tajima-gyu for consumption than most other breeds, adding to the cost. It must be processed in a Hyogo slaughterhouse – none of which export to the US – and then pass a strict government grading exam. There are only 3000 head of certified Kobe Beef cattle in the world, and none are outside Japan. The process is so strict that when the beef is sold, either in stores or restaurants, it must carry the 10-digit identification number so customers know what particular Tajima-gyu cow it came from.
In contrast, when you order “Kobe beef” here, you usually can’t even tell what kind of cow it came from – or where. Or what makes it “Kobe.”
The bottom line is that the only reason there is beef called Kobe beef sold in this country is because our government lets vendors call a lot of things Kobe beef. But the reason consumers buy it is because the cattle industry in Kobe spent lifetimes building a reputation for excellence, a reputation that has essentially been stolen.
There are two different parts to the broad misuse of the Kobe name. Historically in the US, restaurants and distributors have generically termed virtually any beef from anywhere in Japan Kobe, and many high-end restaurants did once get beef from Japan, and put it on the menus as Kobe, though it was not true Kobe beef. But in the past two years there has been no Japanese beef here. So the term Kobe today has even less meaning, and the meat can come from many different countries and have nothing in common with actual Kobe beef except that it comes from cows. The argument often broached by the food industry that this non-Japanese Kobe is some sort of recreation of the real thing from the same breed of cows is also largely a myth.
If you still don’t believe me because you have been inundated with so much fake Kobe beef in this country, read about it in the USDA’s own words, about how as of early 2010 all beef from Japan including that “normally referred to as Kobe beef,” will “be refused entry,” “including in passenger luggage.” This is still the case, as you can see in the most recent Animal Product Manual, produced by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), dated March 1, 2012 which specifically states that beef from Japan, fresh or frozen, whole or cut, bone-in or boneless, will be “Refused Entry.”
It is impossible to say exactly what you are getting in your Faux-be slider, or $100 Faux-be strip, but one thing is certain – it is not Japanese Kobe beef. For the past two years, it has not been any kind of Japanese beef at all.
"Domestic" Kobe And Wagyu Beef
More meaningless labels
Yesterday in this column (above) I started to explain the biggest fraud in the American culinary scene: that there is no authentic Japanese Kobe beef sold in this country, anyplace. Not one slice of it. What is heavily marketed as Kobe beef on menus, in stores, and by mail order is at best an imitation of Japanese beef, and at worst has no relationship whatsoever to the genuine article.
Mine is a rather straightforward proposition – U.S. law bans the import of all Japanese beef. It’s hard to argue with that. But imitation Japanese beef is a much murkier issue.
What about “Domestic Kobe” or Wagyu? Savvy eaters may have noticed that in recent years some menus and meat packaging have switched to these terms. I’ve also seen “American-style Kobe” and “American Wagyu” (I’ve even seen Kobe pork, Kobe bacon and Kobe pigs-in-a-blanket!). I’m not sure if these are attempts to be slightly less dishonest, but if so, they fall far short, since none of these terms mean anything to the buyer.
Restaurants in Dubai are full of live Maine lobsters, flown halfway around the world on ice at great expense to offer diners one of the best expressions of the crustacean. Customers happily pay over $100 to try the famous Maine lobster. But what if those lobsters were a different species, from the Persian Gulf, labeled “domestic Maine lobsters?” Or “UAE Maine lobsters?” That would be a total rip-off. Fortunately the restaurateurs in Dubai are not nearly as unscrupulous as those here in the States, where this kind of high-priced bait and switch is pulled off thousands of times each day with domestic Kobe – excuse me – Faux-be beef.
Kobe is the capital of Hyogo prefecture, where all authentic Kobe beef comes from. Hyogo has a climate, tradition and environment suited to raising cows with really delicious beef, thanks to an extraordinary level of fat marbling. However, it is a crappy place to grow oranges. So imagine you are an orange farmer in Kobe and understandably, no one wants to pay a premium for your juice. You can try harder, do your job better, and build a positive name for your product, or you can find a place where they have already spent generations perfecting their craft and building a reputation for their brand and simply steal it. As long as your own country’s laws don’t care, this is a quick and easy path to ripping off consumers. “Domestic Kobe beef” is the U.S. equivalent of the Kobe farmer bottling and selling “domestic Florida Orange juice” to con consumers into paying a premium for a product unrelated to its namesake reputation.
Or, he can do what some U.S. ranchers have done, and take it a step further. He can import seeds from Florida oranges, discover that the fruit does not so well in his climate, and cross it with some local fruit so it survives better in an environment that was never suited for it and still position it as essentially Florida Orange juice. He can then decide that the Japanese palate really doesn’t care for Florida orange juice anyway, because it is too “orangey,” and position his experiment as some sort of improvement on the original.
“Domestic Kobe” beef means just as much as slapping the word “domestic” in front of any other product made better somewhere else: would you drink domestic Scotch whisky? I wouldn’t. Would you spend $50,000 on a domestic Swiss watch? Would you buy domestic Champagne (well, actually Americans do, and in large quantities, often unknowingly, for the very same reason – there is no law here against bogus labeling).
Several readers wrote in yesterday to compare the misuse of Kobe to that of Champagne, but in my opinion, the Kobe issue is worse. Just about every informed consumer knows that Champagne is a place in France famous for producing great sparkling wines, and much of the time when you buy champagne, you are getting something from Champagne. Kobe is exactly the same scenario, a place known for producing excellent beef, except none of the time you buy Kobe beef are you getting something from Kobe. Also, famous chefs and editors at major food magazines don’t routinely try to fleece the American public into buying bogus champagne.
How about the more innocuous term Wagyu (often domestic Wagyu or Australian Wagyu)? It is frequently bandied about as a synonym or “translation” of Kobe. See it on a menu or in a store and ask about it and you will often be told it is the breed of cattle the famous Japanese Kobe beef comes from. Many websites selling “Wagyu” say exactly this.
Another big lie. Actually, several more big lies.
Real Kobe beef is from a very specific breed of cow – and surprise, it is not Wagyu. In fact, Wagyu is not even a breed. Not that it matters much here, but actual Kobe beef comes from the Tajima-gyu breed – and by law, only from that breed. Wagyu, on the other hand, means “Japanese Cattle” and refers to the entirety of the nation’s breeds. Of course, Japan has many Western and European cattle breeds – if I ship a cow that lives down the road from me in Vermont to Tokyo and it spends more than half its life there, it becomes Japanese cattle – but never Kobe. Some claim – I think erroneously – that Wagyu refers only to a narrower subset of historically Japanese breeds. Even if this were true it wouldn’t change the fact that they are breeds not allowed in Kobe beef. So when I see the term Wagyu on a menu here I know exactly what it means: beef of largely unknown origin that is almost certainly overpriced – and certainly not from Japan.
I know the folks at the American Wagyu Association are not going to be happy that you are learning this, but then if they actually think theirs is better than other types of beef, they should have come up with a new name for it, like “Great Great American Beef,” and let it swim or sink in the free market based on its quality. This is how most products are launched. It took Toyota and Honda a long time to build a quality reputation that matched that of American cars – they didn’t get there through the shortcut of calling themselves “Domestic American Automobiles.”
This is far from a crazy concept. Consider Cargill, one of the world’s largest and most successful food producers. Cargill has taken the correct tact and does not have a brand of alleged Wagyu or Kobe beef with a modifier. Instead they have created several of their own registered meat brands at various price points, including Angus Pride and Sterling Silver. The latter is one of their premium products, sourced from the top 12% of USDA graded beef and aged for at least 21 days. It is its own brand name – if you like Sterling Silver beef, you should buy it. If you don’t, never buy it again. That is how capitalism works. I haven’t tried it, so I can’t say, but I already like it simply because it does not pretend to be something it is not.
Here’s another alternative. Call these products what they are: Japanese-style beef. No false claim that it is from Japan, no false claim it is from the same breed as Kobe, no false claim that it is from a breed that doesn’t even exist. The big box store by me sells “Italian-style meatballs,” and I know what I am getting – something you would never get in Italy.
The website of the AWA clearly says the term Wagyu includes everything from Angus to Holstein cows, but proposes that the selective breeding of “American Wagyu” – it pains me just to type those words – began with the importation of Tottori Black and Kumamoto Red bulls. Now these actually happen to be two very high quality breeds that in some cases produce beef that in Japan is considered superior to Kobe. But even if all producers were honest and stuck to these bloodlines, American Kobe would be questionable since the red breed is specifically banned in the production of real Kobe beef. But these bloodlines are not pure, because they have intentionally been crossbred with our cows to produce something that often has only a minority of Japanese breed heredity – yet they still call the result Wagyu.
A quick, boring technical detour (feel free to skip this paragraph): The USDA has a typically bureaucratic definition for the “Wagyu” bloodline criteria: “U.S. Prime steer and heifer beef carcasses which: (a) are derived from cattle that meet the genotypic requirements of the USDA Specification for Characteristics of Cattle Eligible for Approved Beef Programs Claiming Wagyu Influence.” To me the key words are “Wagyu influence,” which reminds me of labels reading “contains __% real fruit juice.” These “genotypic requirements” in turn “must be traceable to one registered parent (Fullblood or Purebred), two registered percentage or recorded parents, two registered grandparents (Fullblood or Purebred), or one registered Terminal Cross sire.” The gist of it seems to be that in order to be labeled Wagyu under USDA rules – rules that apparently apply only to specific brands and not to all domestic or imported “Wagyu,” – the meat in question can come from the breeding of a cow whose grandparents were both 94% “Wagyu,” even though there is no such breed. Giving everyone involved the benefit of the doubt and assuming they were starting with an actual quality Japanese breed, after crossing both grandparents with American cattle, then doing it again with the parents, you are talking about selling Wagyu from a cow that is potentially less than half “Wagyu.” To me, that’s like selling orange juice that is less than 47% oranges. Except you go to jail for the juice scam.
Just to be clear, I am not saying that some of what is labeled Domestic Kobe or Wagyu is not good or even great. In fact, I believe it is entirely possible to breed a better beef than real Kobe. But it is impossible to know this if it is labeled nonsensically and with no consistency. If these mixes are better cattle resulting in better meat, they should simply market them accordingly and charge a premium for “Fred’s Special Angus/Kumamoto Mix,” or give it a catchier name, instead of claiming it is something it is clearly not.
I also visited the website of Kobe Beef America. Click on “Why American Kobe beef?” and you can see for yourself their admittance that what they are marketing is distinctly different from what they themselves call “true Japanese Kobe beef.” Why? Here’s the kicker: the taste of the “American Kobe beef” has been created to appeal to the American palate – because the real thing is too rich for us! Of course, if you pay over $100 for a steak in a fancy restaurant, you might expect it to be rich. By this logic, we should all start eating domestic Swiss chocolate and domestic Russian caviar for our own good, because the real versions are too rich.
The irony in all of this is that we actually produce excellent beef here in the United States, and should be very proud of it. Many consumers, including the most sophisticated palates, prefer its taste to that of Kobe. Go to The Palm or Del Frisco and have a dry-aged, USDA Prime, bone-in ribeye and you may wonder why anyone would bother to make counterfeit foreign beef at all. Need more irony? In Japan, Kobe isn’t even considered the best beef, it just got the best buzz over here. If the Kobe farmers had not done such a good job building their reputation it would not have been stolen. Likewise, if our celebrity chefs knew more about quality meat, they might be foisting “domestic” Matsuzaka Sirloin on their unsuspecting customers instead of Faux-be and charging $200 instead of $100.
I recently ate at a restaurant that featured a chicken I had never heard of on its menu. When I asked, the owner told me, “It’s a very rare breed in France, rarer than the famed Bresse. It’s like the Kobe beef of chicken.” So it’s from France, I inquired? “No, California, near LA.”
This typifies much of what is wrong with our food production and labeling laws. Despite the facts, you will be able to walk into many restaurants tomorrow, question the menu, and be absolutely assured that theirs is real Japanese Kobe beef. It is not.
Source:
Forbes
Think you’ve tasted the famous Japanese Kobe beef?
Think again.
These are cuts of the famous Kobe beef from Hyogo prefecture in Japan. Note the exquisite marbling of fat throughout. To see it in person, you need to go to Japan, because real Kobe beef cannot be found in the U.S. Photo: WikipediaOf course, there are a small number of you out there who have tried it – I did, in Tokyo, and it is delicious. If you ever go to Japan I heartily recommend you splurge, because while it is expensive, it is unique, and you cannot get it in the United States. Not as steaks, not as burgers, certainly not as the ubiquitous “Kobe sliders” at your trendy neighborhood “bistro.”
That’s right. You heard me. I did not misspeak. I am not confused like most of the American food media.
I will state this as clearly as possible:
You cannot buy Japanese Kobe beef in this country. Not in stores, not by mail, and certainly not in restaurants. No matter how much you have spent, how fancy a steakhouse you went to, or which of the many celebrity chefs who regularly feature “Kobe beef” on their menus you believed, you were duped. I’m really sorry to have to be the one telling you this, but no matter how much you would like to believe you have tasted it, if it wasn’t in Asia you almost certainly have never had Japan’s famous Kobe beef.
You may have had an imitation from the Midwest, Great Plains, South America or Australia, where they produce a lot of what I call “Faux-be” beef. You may have even had a Kobe imposter from Japan before 2010. It is now illegal to import (or even hand carry for personal consumption) any Japanese beef. Before 2010 you could import only boneless fresh Japanese beef, but none was real Kobe. Under Japanese law, Kobe beef can only came from Hyogo prefecture (of which Kobe is the capital city), where no slaughterhouses were approved for export by the USDA. According to its own trade group, the Kobe Beef Marketing & Distribution Promotion Association in Japan, where Kobe Beef is a registered trademark, Macao is the only place it is exported to – and only since last year. If you had real Kobe beef in this country in recent years, someone probably smuggled it in their luggage.
“How is this possible?” you ask, when you see the virtues of Kobe being touted on television food shows, by famous chefs, and on menus all over the country? A dozen burger joints in Las Vegas alone offer Kobe burgers. Google it and you will find dozens of online vendors happy to take your money and ship you very pricey steaks. Restaurant reviews in the New York Times have repeatedly praised the “Kobe beef” served at high-end Manhattan restaurants. Not an issue of any major food magazine goes by without reinforcing the great fat Kobe beef lie. So how could I possibly be right?
The answer is sadly simplistic: Despite the fact that Kobe Beef, as well as Kobe Meat and Kobe Cattle, are patented terms and/or trademarks in Japan, these are neither recognized nor protected by U.S. law. As far as regulators here are concerned, Kobe beef, unlike say Florida Orange Juice, means almost nothing (the “beef” part should still come from cows). Like the recent surge in the use of the unregulated label term “natural,” it is an adjective used mainly to confuse consumers and profit from that confusion.
This matters because the reason food lovers and expense account diners want Kobe beef, and are willing to pay a huge premium for it, is because of the real Kobe’s longstanding reputation for excellence. The con the US food industry is running is leading you to believe that what you are paying huge dollars for – like the $40 NYC “Kobe” burger – is somehow linked to this heritage of excellence. It’s not.
All the myths about cows getting massages and drinking beer while listening to classical music are just that, myths, but nonetheless real Kobe beef is produced under some of the world’s strictest legal food standards, whereas “domestic Kobe” beef production, along with that in Australia and South America, is as regulated as the Wild West. In Japan, to be Kobe requires a pure lineage of Tajima-gyu breed cattle (not any old Japanese breed crossbred with American cattle as is the norm here). The animal must also have been born in Hyogo prefecture and thus raised on the local grasses and water and terroir its entire life. It must be a bull or virgin cow, and it takes considerably longer to raise a Tajima-gyu for consumption than most other breeds, adding to the cost. It must be processed in a Hyogo slaughterhouse – none of which export to the US – and then pass a strict government grading exam. There are only 3000 head of certified Kobe Beef cattle in the world, and none are outside Japan. The process is so strict that when the beef is sold, either in stores or restaurants, it must carry the 10-digit identification number so customers know what particular Tajima-gyu cow it came from.In contrast, when you order “Kobe beef” here, you usually can’t even tell what kind of cow it came from – or where. Or what makes it “Kobe.”
The bottom line is that the only reason there is beef called Kobe beef sold in this country is because our government lets vendors call a lot of things Kobe beef. But the reason consumers buy it is because the cattle industry in Kobe spent lifetimes building a reputation for excellence, a reputation that has essentially been stolen.
There are two different parts to the broad misuse of the Kobe name. Historically in the US, restaurants and distributors have generically termed virtually any beef from anywhere in Japan Kobe, and many high-end restaurants did once get beef from Japan, and put it on the menus as Kobe, though it was not true Kobe beef. But in the past two years there has been no Japanese beef here. So the term Kobe today has even less meaning, and the meat can come from many different countries and have nothing in common with actual Kobe beef except that it comes from cows. The argument often broached by the food industry that this non-Japanese Kobe is some sort of recreation of the real thing from the same breed of cows is also largely a myth.If you still don’t believe me because you have been inundated with so much fake Kobe beef in this country, read about it in the USDA’s own words, about how as of early 2010 all beef from Japan including that “normally referred to as Kobe beef,” will “be refused entry,” “including in passenger luggage.” This is still the case, as you can see in the most recent Animal Product Manual, produced by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), dated March 1, 2012 which specifically states that beef from Japan, fresh or frozen, whole or cut, bone-in or boneless, will be “Refused Entry.”
It is impossible to say exactly what you are getting in your Faux-be slider, or $100 Faux-be strip, but one thing is certain – it is not Japanese Kobe beef. For the past two years, it has not been any kind of Japanese beef at all.
"Domestic" Kobe And Wagyu Beef
More meaningless labels
Yesterday in this column (above) I started to explain the biggest fraud in the American culinary scene: that there is no authentic Japanese Kobe beef sold in this country, anyplace. Not one slice of it. What is heavily marketed as Kobe beef on menus, in stores, and by mail order is at best an imitation of Japanese beef, and at worst has no relationship whatsoever to the genuine article.
Mine is a rather straightforward proposition – U.S. law bans the import of all Japanese beef. It’s hard to argue with that. But imitation Japanese beef is a much murkier issue.
What about “Domestic Kobe” or Wagyu? Savvy eaters may have noticed that in recent years some menus and meat packaging have switched to these terms. I’ve also seen “American-style Kobe” and “American Wagyu” (I’ve even seen Kobe pork, Kobe bacon and Kobe pigs-in-a-blanket!). I’m not sure if these are attempts to be slightly less dishonest, but if so, they fall far short, since none of these terms mean anything to the buyer.
Restaurants in Dubai are full of live Maine lobsters, flown halfway around the world on ice at great expense to offer diners one of the best expressions of the crustacean. Customers happily pay over $100 to try the famous Maine lobster. But what if those lobsters were a different species, from the Persian Gulf, labeled “domestic Maine lobsters?” Or “UAE Maine lobsters?” That would be a total rip-off. Fortunately the restaurateurs in Dubai are not nearly as unscrupulous as those here in the States, where this kind of high-priced bait and switch is pulled off thousands of times each day with domestic Kobe – excuse me – Faux-be beef.Kobe is the capital of Hyogo prefecture, where all authentic Kobe beef comes from. Hyogo has a climate, tradition and environment suited to raising cows with really delicious beef, thanks to an extraordinary level of fat marbling. However, it is a crappy place to grow oranges. So imagine you are an orange farmer in Kobe and understandably, no one wants to pay a premium for your juice. You can try harder, do your job better, and build a positive name for your product, or you can find a place where they have already spent generations perfecting their craft and building a reputation for their brand and simply steal it. As long as your own country’s laws don’t care, this is a quick and easy path to ripping off consumers. “Domestic Kobe beef” is the U.S. equivalent of the Kobe farmer bottling and selling “domestic Florida Orange juice” to con consumers into paying a premium for a product unrelated to its namesake reputation.
Or, he can do what some U.S. ranchers have done, and take it a step further. He can import seeds from Florida oranges, discover that the fruit does not so well in his climate, and cross it with some local fruit so it survives better in an environment that was never suited for it and still position it as essentially Florida Orange juice. He can then decide that the Japanese palate really doesn’t care for Florida orange juice anyway, because it is too “orangey,” and position his experiment as some sort of improvement on the original.
“Domestic Kobe” beef means just as much as slapping the word “domestic” in front of any other product made better somewhere else: would you drink domestic Scotch whisky? I wouldn’t. Would you spend $50,000 on a domestic Swiss watch? Would you buy domestic Champagne (well, actually Americans do, and in large quantities, often unknowingly, for the very same reason – there is no law here against bogus labeling).
Several readers wrote in yesterday to compare the misuse of Kobe to that of Champagne, but in my opinion, the Kobe issue is worse. Just about every informed consumer knows that Champagne is a place in France famous for producing great sparkling wines, and much of the time when you buy champagne, you are getting something from Champagne. Kobe is exactly the same scenario, a place known for producing excellent beef, except none of the time you buy Kobe beef are you getting something from Kobe. Also, famous chefs and editors at major food magazines don’t routinely try to fleece the American public into buying bogus champagne.How about the more innocuous term Wagyu (often domestic Wagyu or Australian Wagyu)? It is frequently bandied about as a synonym or “translation” of Kobe. See it on a menu or in a store and ask about it and you will often be told it is the breed of cattle the famous Japanese Kobe beef comes from. Many websites selling “Wagyu” say exactly this.
Another big lie. Actually, several more big lies.
Real Kobe beef is from a very specific breed of cow – and surprise, it is not Wagyu. In fact, Wagyu is not even a breed. Not that it matters much here, but actual Kobe beef comes from the Tajima-gyu breed – and by law, only from that breed. Wagyu, on the other hand, means “Japanese Cattle” and refers to the entirety of the nation’s breeds. Of course, Japan has many Western and European cattle breeds – if I ship a cow that lives down the road from me in Vermont to Tokyo and it spends more than half its life there, it becomes Japanese cattle – but never Kobe. Some claim – I think erroneously – that Wagyu refers only to a narrower subset of historically Japanese breeds. Even if this were true it wouldn’t change the fact that they are breeds not allowed in Kobe beef. So when I see the term Wagyu on a menu here I know exactly what it means: beef of largely unknown origin that is almost certainly overpriced – and certainly not from Japan.
I know the folks at the American Wagyu Association are not going to be happy that you are learning this, but then if they actually think theirs is better than other types of beef, they should have come up with a new name for it, like “Great Great American Beef,” and let it swim or sink in the free market based on its quality. This is how most products are launched. It took Toyota and Honda a long time to build a quality reputation that matched that of American cars – they didn’t get there through the shortcut of calling themselves “Domestic American Automobiles.”
This is far from a crazy concept. Consider Cargill, one of the world’s largest and most successful food producers. Cargill has taken the correct tact and does not have a brand of alleged Wagyu or Kobe beef with a modifier. Instead they have created several of their own registered meat brands at various price points, including Angus Pride and Sterling Silver. The latter is one of their premium products, sourced from the top 12% of USDA graded beef and aged for at least 21 days. It is its own brand name – if you like Sterling Silver beef, you should buy it. If you don’t, never buy it again. That is how capitalism works. I haven’t tried it, so I can’t say, but I already like it simply because it does not pretend to be something it is not.
Here’s another alternative. Call these products what they are: Japanese-style beef. No false claim that it is from Japan, no false claim it is from the same breed as Kobe, no false claim that it is from a breed that doesn’t even exist. The big box store by me sells “Italian-style meatballs,” and I know what I am getting – something you would never get in Italy.
The website of the AWA clearly says the term Wagyu includes everything from Angus to Holstein cows, but proposes that the selective breeding of “American Wagyu” – it pains me just to type those words – began with the importation of Tottori Black and Kumamoto Red bulls. Now these actually happen to be two very high quality breeds that in some cases produce beef that in Japan is considered superior to Kobe. But even if all producers were honest and stuck to these bloodlines, American Kobe would be questionable since the red breed is specifically banned in the production of real Kobe beef. But these bloodlines are not pure, because they have intentionally been crossbred with our cows to produce something that often has only a minority of Japanese breed heredity – yet they still call the result Wagyu.
A quick, boring technical detour (feel free to skip this paragraph): The USDA has a typically bureaucratic definition for the “Wagyu” bloodline criteria: “U.S. Prime steer and heifer beef carcasses which: (a) are derived from cattle that meet the genotypic requirements of the USDA Specification for Characteristics of Cattle Eligible for Approved Beef Programs Claiming Wagyu Influence.” To me the key words are “Wagyu influence,” which reminds me of labels reading “contains __% real fruit juice.” These “genotypic requirements” in turn “must be traceable to one registered parent (Fullblood or Purebred), two registered percentage or recorded parents, two registered grandparents (Fullblood or Purebred), or one registered Terminal Cross sire.” The gist of it seems to be that in order to be labeled Wagyu under USDA rules – rules that apparently apply only to specific brands and not to all domestic or imported “Wagyu,” – the meat in question can come from the breeding of a cow whose grandparents were both 94% “Wagyu,” even though there is no such breed. Giving everyone involved the benefit of the doubt and assuming they were starting with an actual quality Japanese breed, after crossing both grandparents with American cattle, then doing it again with the parents, you are talking about selling Wagyu from a cow that is potentially less than half “Wagyu.” To me, that’s like selling orange juice that is less than 47% oranges. Except you go to jail for the juice scam.Just to be clear, I am not saying that some of what is labeled Domestic Kobe or Wagyu is not good or even great. In fact, I believe it is entirely possible to breed a better beef than real Kobe. But it is impossible to know this if it is labeled nonsensically and with no consistency. If these mixes are better cattle resulting in better meat, they should simply market them accordingly and charge a premium for “Fred’s Special Angus/Kumamoto Mix,” or give it a catchier name, instead of claiming it is something it is clearly not.
I also visited the website of Kobe Beef America. Click on “Why American Kobe beef?” and you can see for yourself their admittance that what they are marketing is distinctly different from what they themselves call “true Japanese Kobe beef.” Why? Here’s the kicker: the taste of the “American Kobe beef” has been created to appeal to the American palate – because the real thing is too rich for us! Of course, if you pay over $100 for a steak in a fancy restaurant, you might expect it to be rich. By this logic, we should all start eating domestic Swiss chocolate and domestic Russian caviar for our own good, because the real versions are too rich.
The irony in all of this is that we actually produce excellent beef here in the United States, and should be very proud of it. Many consumers, including the most sophisticated palates, prefer its taste to that of Kobe. Go to The Palm or Del Frisco and have a dry-aged, USDA Prime, bone-in ribeye and you may wonder why anyone would bother to make counterfeit foreign beef at all. Need more irony? In Japan, Kobe isn’t even considered the best beef, it just got the best buzz over here. If the Kobe farmers had not done such a good job building their reputation it would not have been stolen. Likewise, if our celebrity chefs knew more about quality meat, they might be foisting “domestic” Matsuzaka Sirloin on their unsuspecting customers instead of Faux-be and charging $200 instead of $100.
I recently ate at a restaurant that featured a chicken I had never heard of on its menu. When I asked, the owner told me, “It’s a very rare breed in France, rarer than the famed Bresse. It’s like the Kobe beef of chicken.” So it’s from France, I inquired? “No, California, near LA.”
This typifies much of what is wrong with our food production and labeling laws. Despite the facts, you will be able to walk into many restaurants tomorrow, question the menu, and be absolutely assured that theirs is real Japanese Kobe beef. It is not.
Source:
Forbes
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