7mo ago

I rarely buy meat. But spending $200 on just meat is crazy?

Is this normal? My wife is a vegetarian, and I just realized I haven't bought beef in a decade. Mostly just chicken (rotisserie and wings/nuggets) and cheap pork cuts for stews.

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/steak/comments/1jxsnpr/did_i_get_a_good_deal_or_did_i_get_scammed/

9 comments

Reading the comments- he did indeed get scammed.
Key signs:
Meat was pumped with brine
Meat wasn't vacuumed sealed well
No marbling
I don't fully understand the differences. Again, I don't buy beef.
It depends on where you are but no. I have family members that will get a quarter or half a cow after it's slaughtered and that'll easily run you $750, and likely higher depending on the quality. For $200 I'd expect them to have gotten a handful of steaks, some roasts, and probably some ground beef. Hell, I've eaten a $200 single kobe steak before so it could be as little as a single piece but I highly doubt you're buying kobe from the back of a truck
Really really good ribeye can be anywhere from ~$20 to $40 per pound from a locally-sourced butcher, anything above $30/lb is probably a special breed or farm. None of these will be injected with a brine. So this guy basically paid just below high-end prices for bottom of the barrel meat.
I love buying my raw meat products that require constant temperature control from the back of a van. Hey, the USDA checked it out at some point and said ”yep that sure is edible meat probably” so what could go wrong.
- Dont worry, there's a 2kwatt harbor freight generator on the ground there. Surely that is being used to keep that whole ass truck cooled.
I mean, the prices are why people don't eat steak for every meal, if they eat meat to begin with.
But, you can drop some serious bank on fairly meh steaks. I'm lucky I'm that when I can afford something like that, I have family that runs a dairy farm and keep a small number for meat as well. Big pastures, great feed quality, plenty of grass, so the meat is amazing, and I tend to pay less than what a decent steak would be at a store. But even then, I'm looking at about a hundred bucks for my household to have a ribeye each, and there's only four of us. And that's family pricing. He sells way higher than that on the rare occasions when he sells beef to anyone else. Right around 40 USD a pound for the "nicer" cuts.
You already got the answer you were looking for, but I figure the information might be interesting or useful to someone.
- It was interesting, thanks
- I did not know that! The prices put it in retrospective. Thank you.
  I never bought a steak before. And I know it'll be wasted on me. Had a $300 steak at a fancy dinner with tech startups and went "ah neat" then went to go get a lamb kabob.
  So I don't fully understand the costs.
Buying ANYTHING out of the back of a re-painted UHaul is an indication you've been scammed.

9 comments