Variability in Tenderness Due to Struggling

IN MANY experiments conducted on tenderness of poultry meat it has been noticed that this factor varies from bird to bird during post-mortem aging, even after seemingly identical slaughter treatments. Marion and Stadelman (1958) showed this effect with turkeys, and Dodge and Stadelman (1959), Klose et al. (1959), and Pool et al. (1959) observed the effect with both turkeys and chickens of different ages. Koonz and Robinson (1946) and Koonz, Darrow and Essary (1954) showed also that considerable variation exists between the tenderness of the principal muscles of the poultry carcass as well as between individual birds. Since in most cases the groups of birds tested were raised under identical management conditions and treated the same during slaughter, it would seem that some presently uncontrolled factor—possibly physiological—causes the variation. Assuming that glycolysis play an important part in post-mortem tenderization of beef (Bate-Smith, 1948, Bendall, 1951) the activity of …