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Remember when buying meat at the market during the Lunar New Year: Hang beef high, place pork on the table, why?

If you go to a large market, you will often see butchers hanging beef up high and placing pork on the counter. This is done for the purpose of ensuring the quality of the meat.

Administrator

11 February, 2024

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Meat is an essential food in special culinary life, especially during Tet. However, as Tet approaches, the problem of unsafe meat becomes more common. Therefore, choosing meat for Tet is very important to ensure safety.

Among the types of commonly used meat, pork and beef are popular but also have many risks of being unsafe. One of the tips to pay attention to when looking for good beef and pork is: Why do they hang beef and place pork on the table?

Hanging beef demonstrates good quality

When buying meat, buyers often worry about beef because they are expensive and purchased in smaller quantities compared to pork. Many sellers sell fake beef (made from pork, buffalo meat…) to make profit. People are also afraid of water injection or seasoning in beef. Therefore, if the beef is injected with water, the sellers will not hang it because water will drip down. On the other hand, it is difficult to detect if the beef is placed on the table. Therefore, many sellers hang beef to show off the quality and attract customers, especially those who come from a distance.

Hanging beef helps preserve it better

When selling at the market, meat is exposed to more air and environment, which can cause it to spoil faster. Therefore, when selling outside the market, sellers often hang beef to avoid contact with the moist surface of the table, so the beef can be preserved longer. When choosing hung beef, you can choose better quality and more delicious meat compared to beef placed on the table and sold in smaller quantities. The selling speed of beef is usually slower than that of pork, so the selling time is longer. Therefore, hanging beef helps maintain its quality for a longer period of time.

Pork sells faster than beef, so hanging it is not convenient

Selling at the market is a way to attract customers. The characteristic of pork is that it contains both fat and lean meat. The characteristic of beef is that it usually contains more lean meat and has a uniform color. Therefore, if they are displayed the same way by hanging, beef will look more attractive than pork. This is because when hung, pork can reveal more fat.

Moreover, the demand for pork is usually higher than beef, and people tend to buy larger quantities, so hanging pork takes a lot of time compared to hanging beef. Additionally, hanging pork is not visually appealing. Sellers usually need to place the entire piece of pork on the table for easy cutting, and hanging it can be cumbersome.

For these reasons, when going to the market, especially at large meat markets, you should pay attention to this to choose better quality beef.

In addition to the above issues when buying beef and pork, to ensure buying fresh and delicious meat, housewives should also pay attention to:

– The color of fresh meat should be pink or natural red, avoiding excessively dark or strange colors.

– Pressing the meat should make it bounce back.