I may have to give up eating pork.  It’s not that I have a religious conviction regarding pork, and I certainly am not going vegetarian.  It’s just that it’s getting too complicated.  In an effort to confuse the public, the pork and beef industries are changing the names of 350 of their meat cuts.  That’s right – 350.  I didn’t even know there were 350 different meat cuts.

If this plan is adopted (reportedly before summer arrives), the biggest change will be no more pork chops.  We’ll have to choose between porterhouse chops, rib-eye chops and New York chops (but in reality they are all pork chops, they just won’t call them that).

Also gone will be the pork butt.  I am certain pigs will still have butts, but you will not be able to buy one.  That’s okay, though, because right now if you buy a pork butt you are really buying a pork shoulder.  Putting it more concisely, the pork butt, which really is a pork shoulder, will be called a Boston roast.  Makes sense to me.

In the beef department, names of beef cuts that I never buy because I don’t understand their names, will be changed to other names that I don’t understand, thus forcing me to continue my current buying habits.

In case you are wondering, ground beef still will be called ground beef.  I buy mine at Costco (of course) and it is sold there by leanness.  I assume that will remain the same until they can come up with a new way to complicate things.  When I was a young wife, ground beef was categorized as ground beef, ground chuck, ground round and ground sirloin.  Maybe it still is in the grocery stores.  Do you remember ground chuck?  I think it was upgraded to ground charles and then changed to ground butt, except they really meant ground shoulder.

No seriously, it took me a while to learn this stuff.  Eventually I figured out that the more expensive it was per pound the better the meat was and the leaner it was.  Before that I memorized the cuts of meat kind of like poker hands – one pair, two pairs, three of a kind, straight, flush and so-forth.  Beef was the lowest, chuck beats beef, round beats chuck; and sirloin must beat them all because it sounds like steak.

I hope that clears up any confusion.  I would say that I researched all of these facts, but I won’t lie to you.  I’m simply giving my thoughts on what I read in the Orlando Sentinel last month.  Who knows if these proposed changes will be coming to a grocery store or not.  As for me, if and when the changes are implemented, I’ll just wing it at the meat counter and probably buy more chicken.