Some in C.O. would chop new names for meat

With grilling season right around the corner, what better way to fire up new interest in meat, then renaming some of America’s favorite cuts?

“I think it’s silly,” a Bend woman said Tuesday.

“I think it would raise my curiosity,” said a Bend man purchasing meat at Bend’s Primal Cuts Meat Market.

Recently, the National Pork Board and Beef Checkoff Program got approval to create new names for more than 350 cuts of beef and pork.

It’s a strategy to make shopping for meat easier — and to entice consumers to buy it more often.

So what sounds better, the porterhouse chops or just plain old pork chops?

“Porterhouse chops sound very good,” said a Bend man.

Several others said the plain old pork chop sounded best.

Porterhouse chops are just one of the new names for a very specific type of pork chop. Other pork chops include “ribeye chops” and “New York chops.”

Most of the people NewsChannel 21 spoke with say adding new names to meat would not making selecting cuts easier, but more confusing.

“It’s pork, I don’t really need it to sound fancy to like it or to buy it,” said another Bend woman.

But Primal Cuts owner Bryan Tremayne said the new names are about making it easier for customers to narrow down meat selections.

“They ae getting more specific on the pork chop, so they’re giving you a porterhouse chop, or a rib chop. It’s going to be more like beef,” he said.

Experts in the meat industry said it will help consumers understand why some items now simply labeled “pork chops” have different prices.

And it’s not just pork — soon a beef-under-blade-boneless steak will be a Denver steak.

It’s a marketing tactic to simplify and entice.

But don’t expect to find any fancy new names at Primal Cuts anytime soon.

“I’m still going to call them pork chops,” Tremayne said. “Nobody gets that specific, and I get pork chops that are all the way from the front shoulder all the way to the back back leg.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the new names for cuts of meat. But that doesn’t mean the meat industry has to use them — retailers can still choose to use traditional names, like “pork chop.”