Recently I read an article which said that an independent blind taste test of pork from around the world conducted recently by a leading South Korean magazine delivered some surprising results – at least for the Korean participants and the competition sponsors.
The team consisted of two five-person Korean panels consisting of food bloggers and meat industry professionals gave U.S. pork very high marks. In addition, several of the respondents were surprised when they learned that the pork samples they favored came from the United States rather than domestic sources.
I was surprised to know that U.S. pork was rated highly in both the frozen and chilled categories, after the meat industry professionals revealed their choices. For the competition they selected collar butt and single-ribbed belly, which are the most popular pork cuts among Korean consumers, both at home and when dining out. Frozen meat samples came from several countries. Chilled meat samples consisted of two domestic brands and U.S. product.
To ensure a fair comparison, they took steps to minimise differences in freshness among the samples due to time in distribution, using only samples that were less than 20 days after they were being imported.
The panel of meat industry professionals gave high marks to both frozen and fresh U.S. pork, but the hosts of the competition mentioned a conflict between the professionals’ taste buds and their national pride. The interesting part was that the evaluation on personal liking, which was different before and after disclosing the countries of origin. In the case of chilled pork, U.S. pork scored high before disclosing the countries of origin. However, after the countries of origin and prices were revealed, domestic branded pork scored higher. These findings show that the professionals have some amount of emotional preference for domestic brands.
In conclusion I would like to end by saying that maybe the reason why majority of the people prefer imported pork is not just because of the price, but it also has something to do with the quality of the meat.
(Thank you for reading =D , please leave a comment)
