Identifying Tumor Material in Beef

In this episode, Lindsey of Blondies Butcher Shop discusses the process of identifying tumor material found within an arm roast. Follow along as she examines the joint, discusses potential stress fractures, and illustrates how tumor material appears.

What You’ll Learn:

• Identification of tumor material within the joint of the arm roast
• Understanding the potential impact of tumor growth on the animal’s health
• Insights into untreated tumors on larger animals and the importance of timely harvesting

Transcript:

Lindsey: Hey everybody, it’s Lindsay with Blondie’s Butcher Shop. I have a really cool kind of anomaly that I find, not often, but often enough, and I’m gonna show you what we as butchers look for, what sometimes we find in meat, things that, what is healthy, what’s not, what we’re going to cut out and what’s okay to enter the food realm.

So we’re going to look at an arm roast on a beef that came in a really beautiful beef that hung at like 870 some pounds. I found a tumor in its front arm joint right above its elbow. It could possibly abscess, doesn’t look like this one has, but I’m going to give you a look at what I caught and how this would affect the animal down the line and how it did not affect the animal prior to harvest. So we’ll take a look.

Alright everybody, this is the arm roast I was cutting on a really beautifully finished black Angus beef, 870-some pound carcass. This is traditionally, excuse my bone dust and fat here, this is traditionally what an arm roast would look like cut out. I would take this back piece off, this rib piece that would go to burger. When I did flip this around, trim it up. Do you see what I see? So here we have the joint. This got cut a little lower than I probably should have for an arm roast. But you can look here in this joint and you can kind of see where this could have been potentially a stress fracture or a fracture at some point in time here, how it’s kind of put together in here as well. But this is what caught my eye right here. So this is the joint around the tendon. And this here is what tumor material looks like in here. It’s not abscessed yet. If it was abscessed, I’d probably be seeing green pus come out of it or something of the sorts. I’m going to take my saw and I’m going to just cut across this bone and we’re just going to discard of this. But this animal walked in sound, not lame, perfectly fine. But I bet if this animal had gotten any bigger into the 900 pound, 2,000 pound carcass range, which would probably put them between that 1,400 and 1,600 pound on the hoof range you would have seen some lateness, especially in the front shoulder with this holding 80% of the animal’s body weight. They tend to deteriorate really fast with front shoulder injuries just because of the weight load they carry. But this one was actually harvested in time and the farmer got super lucky. So that is what a tumor looks like.