Not trying to dox myself so I'm not gonna say where exactly I work but yeah it's at a grocery store. Wondering about quality of meat at places and stuff? I'm your guy.

  • deadtoddler420 [any]
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    4 years ago

    dumbest way youve heard of using expensive steak?

    i just remember being at my s/o's dad's house and the slow disappointment after being offered steak as i realized he didn't ask how i like it done and that meaning it was gonna be overcooked steak slathered in barbeque sauce

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Idk if this counts but everyone and their mother wants sirloin tips until they see the price. There's so many better cuts of steak (my go-to is either short rib or chuck eye) than steak tips. There are other kinds of steak and steak tips, while good are not worth the money in the winter. Don't use them as general purpose. And yeah "well done" kills any cut unless it's a ribeye or something but it still makes it taste worse.

  • CrimsonSage [any]
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    4 years ago

    Is it true that hamburgers are made out of germans from Hamburg?

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      We're normally supposed to throw them in a bin that gets turned into dogfood (or composted I really have no idea) but sometimes, depending on what it is (how busy it is) I'll throw it in the normal trash.

      • Multihedra [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        When I worked at a bread factory, all the floor bread/dough went into a compactor and was eventually sold as hog food.

        On the one hand it’s good that the stuff doesn’t go to waste, on the other it’s wild that there are specific market niches for floor food

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Short ribs are cheap and good. Buy them folks. My favorite favorite are ribeyes (I'll take them over the tenderloin any day) but I only get them when they're on their last day and we discount them because they're too expensive.

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      It's been kinda shit since we lost our hero pay and dealing with raw meat premium, now it's min wage city lol (I try to get some overtime in so I can increase my average pay rate is a given week)

  • emizeko [they/them]
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    4 years ago

    had some great double-cut pork chops tonight. thank you for you service o7

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Glad you enjoyed it lol. Idk where you are but unfortunately most places don't cut their pork in house anymore. My place does (it's a normie grocery store).

      • emizeko [they/them]
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        4 years ago

        we have one real butcher left locally, I try to go there instead of Whole Paycheck

        • VivaZapata [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          There's a few grocery stores that still have the real deal in them. I'd support the local stuff before a place like mine any day but you can tell how upset the old timers are at their job being ruined. My boss is a cool stoner guy and he's pissed at the company for getting rid of most of the skilled labor from his job.

      • emizeko [they/them]
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        edit-2
        4 years ago

        cool so I can stop buying pork and absolutely nothing happens except someone else buys pork marginally cheaper

        DotP or fucking bust

        • emizeko [they/them]
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          4 years ago

          https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-trouble-with-ethical-consumption/

          • emizeko [they/them]
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            edit-2
            4 years ago

            In a speciesist world, a practicing ethical vegan highlights and disrupts normalised violence every time they refuse to eat animal products, or refuse to sit at a table where animal products are being consumed.

            oh, so it's boycotting plus never getting invited to dinner again.

            Veganism is a deep and multi-faceted form of resistance, and it is only one aspect of the wider animal liberation movement, which engages many different forms of activism including direct action, consciousness raising and strategic litigation.

            raising awareness and lawsuits. this is liberalism; adding a single throwaway reference to "direct action" doesn't help when there is no theory of change behind it.

                  • emizeko [they/them]
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                    edit-2
                    4 years ago

                    let's compare this to climate change: do you think more people need to be "aware" that burning fossil fuels is fucked, or do you think someone has to make them stop?

                    everyone knows fossil fuels are bad, even the people profiting off them

                      • emizeko [they/them]
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                        4 years ago

                        how do you expect to be able to make people stop burning fossil fuels if we don’t even know there’s a problem

                        how do you expect to be able to make people stop burning fossil fuels when the vast majority already know there's a problem? individual consumer choices and shaming? or seizing the means of production?

                                  • emizeko [they/them]
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                                    edit-2
                                    4 years ago

                                    as if "building solidarity" with a cow is meaningful in any actual sense. what have you built? what does that do besides make you feel morally superior? are you going to go out in a field and get its opinion on the mass line?

                                      • emizeko [they/them]
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                                        4 years ago

                                        your point is we should recruit cows into the socialist party

                                          • emizeko [they/them]
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                                            4 years ago

                                            Are you helping to seize the means

                                            we were talking about seizing the means, and you brought up building solidarity with a cow to do that

                                                  • emizeko [they/them]
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                                                    edit-2
                                                    4 years ago

                                                    a dictatorship of the proletariat is a prerequisite to achieving real change, I will continue criticizing moral scolds whose theory of change is guilt-tripping and consumer choices instead of building a vanguard party

                                                      • emizeko [they/them]
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                                                        edit-2
                                                        4 years ago

                                                        the fundamental error you are making is thinking that ethical concerns will ever dominate material and cultural factors (which "ethics" are a subset of). the base (material conditions) and superstructure are the real forces reinforcing meat consumption.

                                                        the only advantage the working class has is numbers, yet your priority is to immediately subdivide them into "good" and "bad" categories— instead of using those numbers to seize the power that could then reduce those material and cultural factors that reinforce meat consumption. that's why I keep mentioning a dictatorship of the proletariat, the only way to actually achieve communism against the forces of capital reaction. less sorting the working class on moral grounds, more historical materialism.

              • emizeko [they/them]
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                edit-2
                4 years ago

                This is like saying reading/watching theory is liberalism.

                theory connects conditions to your material class interests. "raising awareness" is a moral appeal (idealism)

                  • emizeko [they/them]
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                    edit-2
                    4 years ago

                    Non-human animals have material interests.

                    theory connects conditions to your material class SELF-interest.

                    "raising awareness" is a moral appeal to a person on behalf of a third-party

                    it's my belief that in a DotP once there is enough class consciousness to come into a species-being, we will be able to extend that to all animals. I would hope that one of the first things a DotP would do is get rid of food deserts to make sure good produce and non-animal options were easily available to everyone.

                    think of it in terms of base and superstructure; even if you make a bold stroke to eliminate all the stuff in the base that pushes meat, the elements of the superstructure that recreate that will still be there, creating (albeit smaller) cultural ripples that will recreate (lesser) material inequalities that then have to be addressed again. it's like reducing the amplitude on a big pendulum as you approach a classless society

      • VivaZapata [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        Sounds like a good idea. I'd rather there not be a meat industry and for us all to have cloned meat or something.

  • Des [she/her, they/them]
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    4 years ago

    wish i could hire you my market is down a person and i'm tired of doing 7 day weeks (got my first 2 days off in 20 days wooo)

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      I'm not at all surprised you have to do so many days in a row. My boss works 13 days in a row pretty frequently. He's not your traditional evil boss and would pay me more if he could.

      • Des [she/her, they/them]
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        4 years ago

        yea i do long stretches when vacations happen since i work at such a small understaffed store. when covid hit and i took over i did 60 days which was insane. we are all fucked on pay since every tiny raise has to go through the district manager. i run a market and make $16.50. when i started cutting i made $9.50

        • VivaZapata [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          Cool stuff I feel like sharing my pay could dox me a bit so I'm not gonna do that but it's not nearly enough. I'm a student though so this isn't gonna be my life forever hopefully. There's such an insane labor shortage right now right? If the invisible hand of the free market was real I'd be being paid like $20 an hour lol.

          • Des [she/her, they/them]
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            4 years ago

            absolutely insane labor shortage. and yea we should be starting at $20. keep that mentality since the industry can really hollow you out. i stopped going to college (was close to finishing) to take the FT market work cause i needed $ more than education at the time. keep grinding through school comrade! o7 it's not worth the wear it puts on your body

            • VivaZapata [he/him]
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              4 years ago

              My assistant manager's (who is a libertarian chud btw) back is so fucked up from the job. Trust me I know he always says he has more metal in his back than bone. Lifting all that meat off of the hooks isn't great for your body.

              • Des [she/her, they/them]
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                4 years ago

                that's why i'm glad we transitioned away from hardcore cutting. prepack except for boneless loins now baby! sucks though since my skills are limited to just giving advice to customers now but it saved my back except my hands are falling apart from stocking and wrapping with the insane volume we have now.

                • VivaZapata [he/him]
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                  4 years ago

                  I think my boss feels very similar to you. We do more than just boneless loins for pork in my store but this era will be over soon. It's sad to see a profession die but yeah with the volume we put out it would never work.

  • DickFuckarelli [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    I have my opinions, but many people will say there isn't that big of a difference between Choice and Prime. What's your take?

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      I'd say there's a noticeable difference but I'd mostly stick to choice. I'd rather get a nice cut of choice meet than a shitty cut of prime. (Lol I wonder what a wagyu eye round would be like).

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      For a lot of places its honestly really rare for them to even cut their own pork an all. It's really dirty on the band saw so generally it's done in a factory meat packing plant somewhere else. That being said I'm sure some places get in the entire pig but I really doubt it. At my place we'd get it already sectioned off (into ribs and loins or whatever). When my boss was young he'd get pretty much the entire animal but for the most part those days are long gone. No idea about the head.

        • VivaZapata [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          I honestly have no idea what I'd do with a pig head other than do lord of the flies IRL. I think they get ground up to dogfood though so I'm not sure anyone will have one.

  • flooze [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    How come the price differential between more expensive cuts and less expensive cuts is so much smaller for the cheaper brands and grocery stores? It seems like eye round, brisket, or tritip will be like $5 and a ribeye or strip steak only slightly more at $7 or $8. At fancier stores that sell better stuff, the cheaper cuts will only be slightly higher in the $5-7 range, but the steaks are all $14+.

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      I can't exactly speak for the nicer stores because I don't work at one. I work at a normie grocery store that's a little stuck in the past so is still doing the actual butchering (taking various parts of the cow and turning them into whatever cuts you end up buying). That being said if you have a rib section of your cow, the part anyone actually wants are what are called ribeyes (or delmonico's depending on where you are). The less fancy cuts like short ribs and back ribs are cheaper because no one comes in asking for them really but they're basically the same meat in a different shape. Buy short ribs for a good deal and use the bones to make some soup. They're the meat of the proletariat.

  • krothotkin [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Ever work with quail? Any gross meat trash stories? (I've worked at a grocery store and taking out the meat trash during the summer was the fucking worst.)

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Luckily I don't take the meat trash outside but I know the smell that it has when it's been out there. For some fucking reason my co-workers were too lazy to leave the meat trash barrels in the cooler so they got maggots. Not so great. We leave them where they belong now.

      I've never worked with quail only chicken, beef, pork, lamb and veal. Occasionally duck rabbit and bison depending on the time but those last 3 we get in from a factory and don't cut at all ourselves.

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      I've never seen it. Tell me a bit about it sounds cool. I have never tried horse meat so I have no idea. In theory it's probably just as humane as other mean which is to say not at all.

  • Inshallah [they/them]
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    4 years ago

    Where can I source unrendered tallow? Or even rendered tallow for that matter.

    • VivaZapata [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      We sell suet for a really cheap price so that could work out probably. I'm sure anywhere could have it. If someone was trimming a rib or something and had a bunch of fat leftover they'd probably be able to sell it to you at least in my store.