Let me start by making sure you know I'm not a vegetarian. I've tried before, and failed. Sometimes I feel guilty for my omnivorousness, but most of the time I have no moral issue with eating meat. It tends to be more of a food quality issue. That doesn't mean, though, that I don't respect the fact that an animal died so that I can have a meal. I only eat hormone- and antibiotic-free meat, and I try to eat organically, but I'm a near-minimum wage worker who's busy with school as well, so I don't always have the time or money to get that.
I feel like I'm tattling on TruBurger. If you repeat this, you didn't hear it from me.
So Oak Street Po-boy Festival was a couple weeks ago. TruBurger prepared accordingly, purchasing and patty-ing over 500lbs of meat. We were prepared to serve over 2,000 hamburger po-boys topped with fried onions and pimento cheese. The problem is we didn't sell 2,000 hamburger po-boys. We probably didn't sell even 200 hamburger po-boys. So we were left with 450lbs of beef that we couldn't sell as hamburgers on regular business days because 1. we don't sell that much beef in a whole week, and 2. we don't sell hamburgers that are more than two days out of the packaging.
So what do we do with leftover beef? We bag it up in Ziplocs and freeze it to use in our house-made chili at some later date. Well, great, the meat won't go to waste.
I was charged with the task of sealing up the leftover patties in groups of 8 (that's 2 lbs). It took forever.
Little did I know, the cheap-ass off-brand zip bags we used did not close all the way. So, partially thanks to me and my lack of knowledge about deep-freezing meat, and partially thanks to TruBurger's need to buy off-brand storage products to make up for the cheap prices they set for their premium ingredients, 450lbs of premium, USDA certified 100% natural, black Angus beef was frost-bitten overnight and completely ruined.
I was very nearly fired. Of more concern to me, though, was the guilt that came with knowing I was responsible for the waste of that much meat. How many cows is that?!
I looked it up... An angus cow can weigh any where from 1000-1600 lbs while the bulls between 2000- 2500. They are usually butchered at 1000-1300 lbs. Even without the bones and whatnot that's still a lot of cow. If I'm not mistaken ground beef can be made from any part of the cow's meat, so it's possible, but definitely not probable, that this could have been just one cow.
ReplyDeleteYou should work at Cowbell. I went there for the first time over the weekend and now I want to work there. Seems like they know how to purchase quality plastic bags, too.
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