The Muscle Behind Meat Science (Updated)

Do you like your steak rare, medium or well done? Professor Robyn Warner is a founding member of the Meat Standards Australia (MSA) Scientific Committee and she solves scientific problems from paddock to plate for the meat industry. Professor Warner and her colleagues at CSIRO and Canada wanted to understand the broad variations in meat tenderness. So they cooked a single muscle fibre (cell) under a confocal microscope and it led to a new theory on muscle shrinkage during cooking. It has changed the current meat science dogma that it is driven by connective tissue. Produced by Andi Horvath Filmed by John Carter, with 'meat muscle' video made by CSIRO Edited by Robert Cross With thanks to Prof Robyn Warner Acknowledgement: work presented in this video was conducted by Prof Robyn Warner while working at CSIRO and was conducted by CSIRO scientists Dr Sofia Øiseth and Ms Joanne Hughes, CSIRO Food and Nutrition Flagship. This work was done in collaboration with Prof Peter Purslow, Departamento de Technologia de los Alimentos, Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias, Universidad Nacional Del Centro de La Província de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Full reference: J.M. Hughes, S.K. Oiseth, P.P. Purslow, R.D.Warner (2014) “A structural approach to understanding the interactions between colour, water-holding capacity and tenderness”. Meat Science, 98, 520–532.