How Did 150 Live Cattle Get From Australia to Chinese Dinner Tables?

This is the first time China has imported live cattle, and it did so for one reason: to eat them.

Two months ago, a Boeing 747 that had taken off from Melbourne landed at Chongqing Jiangbei Airport. Nothing about it looked special until the cargo door opened. Inside were 150 Angus, Angus-cross and Bos taurus cattle, alive.

The cattle spent more than 10 hours in the air between Australia and China. Their next stop was a quarantine facility in Chongqing. If all goes well, they will go to the slaughterhouse in batches within 14 days, and soon after that you will be able to find them, cut and packaged, in the most prominent spots in Chongqing's malls and supermarkets.

This is the first time China has imported live cattle for slaughter and sale. Until now, only breeding cattle could enter the country alive. Any imported Australian steak you ate in a restaurant was cooked from frozen or chilled beef.

This unprecedented journey served one simple demand: eating.

The demand may be simple, but moving the cattle from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern was not. Imported frozen and chilled beef has usually reached China by sea. Shipping costs less than flying, carries far more per trip (sea cargo is counted in millions of kilograms; this flight's limit was 90,000 kilograms), and its procedures are well established. This time, though, the importers chose air freight so the cattle bound for slaughter would be better cared for. Throughout the journey the animals stood in high-fenced crates lined with pads that absorbed their waste. The pads were supplied specially from Australia, and the cattle reportedly find them quite comfortable to stand on.

The plane carrying 150 live Australian cattle arrives in Chongqing. Images above from the Hengdu Agriculture Group website

Because live animals are hard to transport, the cattle were put on a strict feeding regime before leaving Australia to keep their waste to a minimum. On arrival, Chinese quarantine officials first checked the Animal Health Certificate issued by the Australian authorities, and only after approving documents including the Entry and Exit Animal and Plant Quarantine Permit did they let the cattle off the plane. The 150 animals were then taken straight to a quarantine facility in Gaojia Town, Fengdu County, Chongqing, where they will be kept and fed in isolation. During this period, China's quality inspection authorities ran further inspection and quarantine checks to make sure the cattle met the relevant standards.

In fact, the cattle's quarantine began well before they set off.

"Before being shipped to China, the cattle were held in a quarantine area in Australia and examined by Chinese entry-exit inspection and quarantine officials and Australian vets. The isolation period lasted 7 days, and the cattle were inspected every day," Craig Aldous, CEO of Elders China, told QDaily. Elders, which exported the cattle, is headquartered in Australia, and its buyers hand-picked every one of the 150 animals.

The Chinese importer is Chongqing Hengdu Agriculture Group. According to Hengdu's official materials, the cattle will be cut and processed at the company's standard slaughterhouse and made into steaks, beef snacks and ready-made dishes for ordinary consumers. Chongqing diners are the luckiest: they can buy fresh products from these cattle in the city's major malls and supermarkets. Consumers elsewhere can, for now, only buy frozen products shipped by cold chain through Hengdu's official Tmall store.

Chilled beef from the imported Australian cattle, on sale in Chongqing malls and supermarkets. Image from the Hengdu Agriculture Group website

The cattle have now been in Chongqing for nearly 2 months. Yet Johnny Wang, head chef of the Italian restaurant GAIA 2 in Shanghai, still could not believe it had happened.

"150 cattle brought in? This is the first I've heard of it. That can't be right. Customs would never let them through." Wang learned of the deal during his interview with QDaily. "My Australian friends never mentioned it."

Wang has been cooking for 17 years and moved into high-end Western dining in 2005. The restaurant where he now works is a long-standing partner of Elders, which supplies it with imported Australian beef.

Two things about the deal puzzled him.

The first is that imported beef in China is tightly rationed: "You can't just import it whenever you want." Until now, beef imported into China through legitimate channels, frozen or chilled, has come mainly from Australia, Uruguay, New Zealand and a few other countries. How much beef China buys from each country is set by strict annual quotas. The same goes for importers: each year's quota is divided according to the volume agreed between China and Australia, and each company's share depends on its size and track record.

Seen this way, Wang's doubt is reasonable. But things changed after China and Australia signed a free trade agreement in June this year, which finally let a live-cattle trade that had been years in the making go ahead. This deal for slaughter cattle is also the first Australian cattle trade since the agreement was signed.

Wang's other doubt concerned inspection and quarantine. Imported beef has always reached China frozen or chilled, under its own set of inspection and quarantine standards. Importing live cattle means following a new set. That is where it gets hard: live imports raise a string of questions, such as which country's officials carry out the checks, where they do it, and how the animals' offal and waste are disposed of.

Frozen beef. Image from Outoftownblog.com

Elders China told QDaily it could not disclose the detailed inspection and quarantine rules for this shipment. But it said the results met the standards China and Australia had agreed in advance, and that the cattle were in "perfect condition" when they reached the quarantine facility in Chongqing.

Mike Shook, head chef of Kee Club, a high-end private club in Shanghai, had not heard of the deal either. Kee Club is also an Elders China client.

Still, the live-cattle import does not surprise Shook much. He thinks it perfectly natural that Chinese consumers love imported beef, even though "if I put two portions of beef in front of you, one Chinese and one Australian, most people couldn't tell which is which."

"But Chinese consumers will still pick Australian beef without thinking," he added.

That is easy to understand. Ordinary consumers don't need to know the whys and wherefores of the beef they eat, and people's knowledge of ingredients always takes time to deepen. One thing is certain, though: Chinese consumers' knowledge of beef will grow far more slowly than their appetite for imported beef.

Before 2011, China imported between 10,000 and 20,000 tonnes of frozen beef a year. In the first three quarters of this year, China imported 320,000 tonnes of beef, up 34.4% year on year. Of that, frozen beef accounted for 316,000 tonnes and chilled beef for 0.4 tonnes.

Neither GAIA 2 nor Kee Club has had a chance to use the imported cattle yet, but both head chefs said beef from cattle slaughtered locally "is certainly something frozen beef can't match."

That comes down mostly to how the beef is handled.

Take GAIA 2. The cuts it uses most are rib eye and sirloin, which end up as Italian-style steaks. The most important step before cooking is choosing good raw meat.

Image from libaclub

Wang told us every restaurant has its own standards for choosing ingredients, but broadly speaking, a stable supply chain matters most. Australia has the largest quota of all the beef China imports each year, and many companies trade in Australian beef, which is why it is the best known to Chinese consumers.

Once a restaurant confirms that a supplier's samples meet its standards, it places an order.

Most Western restaurants receive their imported beef frozen, so it has to be thawed before it can be cooked. And here lies the key problem: no thawing method, however skilled or careful, can stop the beef from losing its juices.

If you have ever bought frozen beef at a supermarket, you will know this: take it out of the freezer, thaw it at room temperature or in the fridge, and it always ends up leaking a bloody liquid. That liquid is the juice the beef loses as it thaws. The more juice it loses, the drier and tougher it tastes. The higher the grade of the beef, the better it holds on to its juices.

"In high-grade beef, the juices are locked inside the meat," Shook said.

What counts as "high-grade" depends on how beef is graded, and the standards vary from country to country. Japan grades beef on an A scale topping out at A5; the Japanese A5 wagyu people talk about is arguably the best beef there is. (China has not yet opened its market to Japanese beef, though, so few restaurants openly claim to serve Japanese A5 wagyu; any that really do are using smuggled meat.) Australia grades on an M scale: the higher the number, the better the beef, with M12 at the top.

According to Wang, ordinary restaurants usually use Australian beef graded M2 or M3. Most mid- to high-end restaurants prefer M3 to M5, at under 400 or 500 yuan a plate (for a 250 to 350 g steak). High-end restaurants and hotels usually choose M8, M9 or higher, at more than 200 yuan per 100 g.

A 300 g M4 rib eye, priced at 398 yuan. Image courtesy of GAIA 2

One measure used to grade Australian beef is how much fat marbling it has. Marbling is the marble-like pattern of fat running through the meat; the more of it there is and the more evenly it is spread, the better the beef and the higher its grade. How much marbling a cow develops depends on what it eats. Grain feed (made of five main grains: barley, wheat, oats, sorghum and corn) is nutritionally balanced, so grain-fed cattle develop more marbling than grass-fed ones.

Australian beef is graded by the amount of marbling. Image from the Australian Wagyu Association

Choosing good beef is, of course, only the first step. Between entering the restaurant's door and reaching your table, imported beef goes through at least the following stages.

First comes portioning and bagging. To take GAIA 2 again: when the kitchen receives a slab of frozen raw beef, the cooks thaw it, cut it into single-steak portions sized for the plate, seal each in a vacuum bag and store them in a cold room at 0 to 4 degrees Celsius.

Before cooking, the cooks take the bagged beef out of the cold room and soak it in water held at 65 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 to 24 hours, to lock in as much juice as possible. Beef pan-fried straight from the cold room would lose much of its juice, which hurts both its taste and its nutrients.

After the water bath, the beef comes out of its bag, is seasoned with basics such as pepper and salt, and goes onto the heat to be seared and roasted.

Wang, who has worked in both French and Italian restaurants, believes Western cooking is less complicated than Chinese cooking. There are French and Italian styles, but both handle beef in basically the same way.

There are differences, of course. French steak is more refined, with an emphasis on plating and showy presentation, and French cooks make good use of sauces to bring out rich flavors. Italian steak is the opposite. It makes few demands of the sauce, uses molecular gastronomy less often than French cooking does (using chemical reactions to change the molecular structure of ingredients, giving them new looks, tastes and textures), and keeps the plating fairly simple; the guiding principle is to bring out the ingredient's "natural flavor."

The "pearls" on this steak are made from mushrooms using molecular gastronomy techniques. Image from Telegraph.co.uk

In more than 10 years of working with Western food, Wang has noticed something: Chinese demand for imported beef has grown, but Western restaurants serving imported steak have not found business any easier. He believes a Western restaurant's fortunes depend heavily on its location and the market it aims at. High-end restaurants have relatively steady customers and suffer less when the market turns.

"Take the high-end restaurants in Xintiandi or on the Bund: over the past two years, (beef) prices there have gone up 30%. But in places like ours (a Western restaurant in a shopping mall; GAIA 2 is in iAPM, a high-end mall in Shanghai), prices have fallen a lot over the past year or so."

The reason is not hard to find. Most people who go to Shanghai's Xintiandi go there to eat and drink well, but malls are full of passing shoppers, and those shoppers are not ready to try a dish that costs a bit more.

Still, Wang remains fairly upbeat. He believes China's beef market will keep growing fast and people will slowly learn what good beef is. Even so, he still finds it a little hard to believe that China has imported 150 live cattle, and says he will "have to go ask my Australian friends."

Chinese diners have far less to worry about. And there is good news: imported beef is getting cheaper. The beef from these Australian cattle sells at Hengdu Foods' flagship store on Tmall for between 79 and 239 yuan per 1,000 g, depending on the cut. It is easy to imagine imported steak soon becoming a regular on Chinese family dinner tables.

Cover image from Hellorf