Inglewood: Where Steaks Come From

Two hundred sides of beef hang stolidly from hooks, like giant subway straphangers in suet overcoats. You’ve seen this sort of room before--a refrigerated meat locker is a favorite movie scene. In fact, a couple of movies have been shot here at Holiday Meats & Provisions in Inglewood.

But it’s a scene you can’t see anywhere else in the Southland. The meat business has changed a lot since the ‘70s, and meat companies now get their meat from the big Midwestern slaughterhouses already divided into cryopacked “primal cuts” such as sirloin, round and chuck. Holiday, which specializes in premium meats for the restaurant trade, is the last operation in Southern California that still “breaks” its own beef.

The company’s president and founder, Nat Rocker, is a Holocaust survivor whose family was in the beef business in Poland until World War II. Growing up in Ithaca, N.Y., in the ‘50s, he expected to be an accountant, but when his family moved to Los Angeles in 1960, he ended up back in the meat business. After a couple of years, he started Holiday, delivering to restaurants in his wife’s station wagon. His current operation--40,000 square feet, all refrigerated, 20 bobtail trucks and two semi trucks--is a good deal grander.

The sides of beef arrive from Kansas or Iowa in refrigerated trucks, but they no longer hang from hooks during their journey. It’s more space-efficient to use a super-strong plastic tape that can hold 1,200 pounds of cow.

This plant was designed to have no outdoor loading docks, so the trucks back up to a gigantic sliding door and unload the sides directly into the refrigerated storage room, where they will spend two or three days. Here a Department of Agriculture inspector checks them out, and they’re transferred to hooks hanging from an overhead track. To reduce dripping, it’s extra-cold in this room; you can see your breath.

When a side of beef is due for breaking, a white-clad worker slides it out of storage, still hanging from an overhead track, and cuts through the backbone with a hand-held electrical butcher’s saw, nearly dividing the hindquarter from the forequarter, which continues to hang there by a strip of muscle. He also loosens the inner round from the rib cage with a knife.

Then one very strong guy slides it over to the boning table, separates the 300-pound forequarter and throws it on the table, where 11 workers will bone out the various cuts. Another worker first runs it through a butcher’s saw twice, once to separate the short loin, with all the most tender steaks, from the sirloin, and once to trim off the flank from the upper ends of the ribs. At the boning table, everybody’s cutting the rib portion into neat short loins, sirloins, ribs and boneless loins, and the rest into chuck, brisket, foreshank and plate.

The hindquarter is sidetracked to butcher later. At Holiday, everybody in a cutting operation works on the same part at a given time. In a while, all the cutters will shift over to hindquarters. “This is for consistency and pace,” Rocker says,”and to prevent boredom.”

There are four conveyor belts at the boning table, for bone, fat, trimmings and finished cuts. The bones go directly into a truck parked outside, which will take them away to be made into fertilizer. The fat will also wind up elsewhere, but meanwhile it’s treated with the same sanitary safeguards as meat. The trimmings will be ground into hamburger.

The finished cuts go to a sorting table, where they’re mostly wrapped in cryovac packages for delivery to customers. Some cuts, such as rib eyes, are first wrapped in stockinette so they’ll keep their shape.

But part of the meat goes instead to the portion control room, as Holiday calls its custom cutting room. Here, for instance, the loins are cut into individual steaks to the customer’s order.

“This package had to be redone,” Rocker says, pointing to a plastic container with dozens of compartments. “These are filet steaks for an airline. They’ve got to be absolutely uniform, or one passenger’s going to look over and see somebody else eating what looks like a bigger steak and get upset.”

The ground-meat section is in the same room, but it’s a separate operation. The meat is inspected anew as it comes into the ground-meat section as if it had come from outside the building. “We have a USDA inspector on the premises 60% to 70% of the time,” Rocker says.

Holiday follows its own Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points procedures, which are more rigorous than those required by current USDA inspection standards. “HACCP was developed during the ‘60s for the food that was to be sent into space with the astronauts,” says Rocker. “It obviously had to be absolutely safe--you couldn’t afford any risk at all of food poisoning in outer space.

“The sinks in our bathrooms are like the ones in a hospital operating room,” Rocker says. “The taps operated by foot or knee, so you never touch them with your hands, which is how you might pass infection.

“There’s no paint in this building. Paint is awful--paint flakes and sheds and everything. Everything here is plastic, stainless steel or epoxy. Not even the walls in the front office are painted.

“We close down work every day at 1 a.m. and then we clean the place until 9. Floors, ceiling, everything, it’s all washed with edible soap and then steamed. And every two hours during the day, the floors are scraped to prevent buildup of fat and protein.”

HACCP is the way of the future in meat processing. It’s now mandatory for larger butchering operations like this one, and in a couple of years the USDA will require it for smaller meat plants and butcher shops.

But HACCP doesn’t cover everything. For instance, it probably doesn’t mandate sterile white uniforms on the bad guys who are stalking the hero because he knows the terrible secret of the world-threatening laser microchip, or whatever it is, through a meat locker full of swaying sides of beef.