Something Weird Most Americans Don’t Know About the "Lamb Meat" They Eat
If you're someone that eats lamb often, you're special, and in a good way.
And now, here's some weird facts for you to chew on…
1) If you gathered a group of 100 random Americans together, only 1 of them will likely be a consistent lamb meat eater. Even though lamb is not that popular of a meat in the good ole USA, its market share is slowly growing.
2) On average, roughly 30-40% of the lamb consumed in the US is imported. That means there's a high chance that the lamb you're eating traveled thousands of miles, either from Australia or New Zealand.
3) There are 2 distinctly different types of lambs that farmers raise in America, the European wool sheep and the African hair sheep. By now there are different crosses and breeds being raised from both lineages, with the hair sheep growing in popularity for its regenerative grazing and meat qualities.
For anyone that's really interested in knowing about the lamb meat they eat, this stuff is common knowledge.
But to those who haven't ever looked into it, some of these might come as a shock.
For example, here's the weirdest thing most Americans don't know about the lamb meat they eat:
They might not actually be eating lamb meat.
The reason is, because in America, just because the label reads "Lamb Meat" doesn't always mean that it's technically "Lamb Meat".
For instance, I asked a USDA inspected butcher, and she said that even though there are generally 3 classifications for meat that comes from sheep (lamb [under 14 months old], yearling mutton or hogget [between 14 and 24 months old], and mutton [older than 2 years of age]) they can technically slap the American Lamb label on any package of meat from whatever age of sheep they slaughter.
So, is this a problem?
Well, it depends on how picky the sheep-meat-eater is.
If they are looking for a specific flavor of sheep meat, like the mild flavor a yearling lamb would provide, but then end up with a package of "lamb" that's actually way older (mutton) and has a stronger flavor, then they will probably be disappointed.
Crazy, right?
But here's the solution: