Earlier this year I wrote at length about a very pricey food scam, the widespread sale of fake Kobe beef in this country. In my multi-part series I explained that for the past few years the USDA has completely banned the import of all Japanese beef, Kobe or otherwise, fresh or frozen, bone or boneless. If a restaurant was advertising the sale of Kobe beef steaks, burgers, sliders, or any form of Kobe beef whatsoever, it was what I deemed “Faux-be beef” - certainly not the real thing from Japan no matter how much you paid for it.
Or as London’s Daily Mail eloquently put it, “While restaurants across America have claimed to sell Kobe beef on their upscale menus for years, charging customers hundreds of dollars for the delicacy, these steaks have previously been fakes.”
2014 UPDATE: Changes have occurred regarding the status of Kobe beef in the United States. For the most current information, please read the 2014 piece, The New Truth About Kobe Beef, which has details that supersede information contain herein.
2016 UPDATE: Several of the food frauds examined here at Forbes.com, including Kobe Beef, Seafood and Parmesan Cheese as well as dozens of others, from wine to honey, are covered in detail in my new book, Real Food, Fake Food.
The new book Real Food, Fake Food (Algonquin, July 2016), covers the gamut of food frauds and scams... [+]
This situation changed drastically last month when the USDA relaxed its rules and allowed the limited importation of some Japanese beef. The ban came about in the first place because of an outbreak of foot and mouth disease among Japanese cattle, but after ample investigation, the USDA has deemed the current risk for Japan to be low, and since late August, whole cuts of boneless beef can be imported. For steak lovers this is a pretty big shift since high-quality Japanese beef is rarely served on the bone anyway: you don’t traditionally get a Kobe T-bone or porterhouse or bone-in rib eye, so the real Kobe beef people crave will be allowed.
And it is not just Kobe. As I explained in my earlier series, other geographically designated (Kobe is a place, like Champagne or Burgundy) Wagyu beef (Wagyu refers to several Japanese breeds, whereas Kobe beef can only come from one particular breed) from Japan is often considered as good or even better than that from Kobe, and in theory all these will now be allowed. In fact, some of the steakhouses now selling "real" Kobe are actually selling other similar varieties of high-quality Japanese beef.
In practice, we are still talking about a very small quantity of very expensive beef. Kobe and its brethren throughout Japan are produced in very small quantities to begin with, and even though the USDA has relaxed the foot and mouth ban, its many other rules still apply, including approved slaughterhouses and inspections, so don’t expect to see Japanese beef in your supermarket anytime soon. In 2009, the last year Japanese beef was legally, we bought 72 tons of it. That may sound like a lot but in that same year we ate about 13.5 million tons of beef, according to the USDA. The imports from Japan did not even represent a significant fraction of one percent of our beef.
The small amount that is being imported today is going almost exclusively to high-end steakhouses who will charge dearly for it - the Old Homestead in New York was one of the first to jump on the legal Kobe bandwagon, and numerous news outlets have reported their price of $350 for a steak. My favorite among the places I have seen as early Japanese Wagyu adopters is Red The Steakhouse in Miami, which was an excellent steakhouse to begin with and is where I would go to try the steaks if I could afford them. Japanese beef has also predictably made a fast comeback appearance on the Las Vegas Strip, where I expect it will soon be as widely available as something so scarce can be.
While this is a victory for beef connoisseurs tired of being duped, it does not really change the fake Kobe situation and in a way makes it even worse. A few months ago discerning fake Kobe beef on restaurant menus was easy - it was all fake. Nonetheless many restaurants claimed to serve real Japanese Kobe beef. As I explained in my earlier series, this is possible because the US does not recognize Japan’s trademarks and thus the term Kobe beef has almost no legal significance here, so retailers and restaurants can use it as they see fit. Now that it is theoretically possible to buy the genuine article it will be much harder for consumers to know if what they are paying hundreds of dollars for is the real thing or not. It is a classic case of buyer beware and if in doubt before plunking down more than you have ever paid for a steak, ask to see documentation such as the example pictured from Red in Miami.
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