Here Photo caption below Chef Hubert Schmieder and Professor William Stadelman presented a proposal for an international ostrich meat identification guide, based on the American Ostrich Association Meat Guide, this spring at a meat congress in Oustdoorn, South Africa. The guide received final approval this month at a meeting in Belgium and is set to change the way ostrich steak, fillets and ground ostrich are bought and sold worldwide. Instead of using scientific descriptions or common names that could be confused between countries, the meat guide uses numbers to differentiate between the different edible parts of an ostrich. The industry needed a system to identify the parts of the bird and the quality of the meat without a lot of confusing words.
Numbers are the same worldwide.
Twenty-three countries agreed that the guide lets buyers order by number and know they will be getting the same piece of meat regardless of where they buy it. Some of the countries that adopted the new identification system are South Africa, Australia, Israel and the Netherlands. The international ostrich meat buyer's catalog makes selecting different cuts from the ostrich as easy as ordering a No. 3 combination plate from your favorite Mexican restaurant. The congress chose numbers instead of the Latin descriptions of each muscle because numbers are universal. A buyer in Israel can order meat from a distributor in the Netherlands despite the language gap.