LABELLING meat from eight-tooth cattle as 'low grade' makes no sense and will only cause confusion for consumers.
Victorian beef producer Rod Polkinghorne, hailed as the architect of MSA, has no qualms about making that assessment from years of seeing what works and what doesn't when it comes to marketing table beef for retail sale.
From what he has heard so far, the JR McDonald/Torbay experiment is headed for a spectacular failure.
"There are some aspects of what's being suggested that I fully support," he said.
"The general intent of Torbay's bill is to describe meat better and offer consumers some protection and that's commendable, but the question is to make sure the meat is graded with something that works. You can't make a useful guess on how something is going to eat unless it has been through the MSA process."
As Mr Polkinghorne outlined in a submission to a Senate committee in Canberra last year, "a grading system becomes relevant and valuable when it conveys a clear, simple cooked result to a consumer".
What that means is that consumers do not buy carcasses. They do not care what the animal looked like or how old it was when killed. All they want to know is the eating quality when it ends up on their plate.
This is the point JR McDonald and Richard Torbay miss: age and dentition are no predictors of eating quality. And MSA, regarded as the best meat grading system in the world, has proved it, Mr Polkinghorne says.
"It's quite possible to get a wonderful eight-tooth cow that's come off a pretty good paddock that's been irrigated and she's likely to produce a lot of nice cuts, among others that will be bloody awful," he said.
"Then you have someone tell you this is all crook, you're forced to brand it like that and then the consumer comes along and takes it home to cook it and it could very well be wonderful. The next time though it's just as likely to be terrible and that's where the confusion starts."
Mr Polkinghorne said it would be far better to leave a percentage of meat ungraded, which would require no claims or descriptions at point of sale.
He said if MSA technology was used to its full potential, beef could be marketed in similar ways to other fast moving consumer goods.
"If we can label meat like we label cars, so that they perform the way we expect every time we buy them then we're getting close to the ideal system," he said.
"If meat was marketed like Toyotas we could say here's a Yaris steak and here's a Lexus roast, and charge for it accordingly at the price the consumer will be prepared to pay because they can be virtually guaranteed of the product's performance after every purchase."
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