Talk:ground beef

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

ground beef

SoP.—msh210℠ 21:40, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

An important food item, keep. Not so SoP as earth poultry or air pork. —Stephen 22:22, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Delete. Here it's called minced beef. In either case, it's clearly beef that has been ground (minced); ground chicken for example is easily attestable but equally unnecessary. The "air pork" argument, although it sounds delicious, relies on the reader not having the common sense to work out which sense of "ground" could apply to beef; see WT:CFI section that reads "With such clearly wrong interpretations weeded out..." Equinox ◑ 22:31, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Delete, as above. Mglovesfun 22:06, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Delete Important items have articles in Wikipedia. Attested terms have entries here. —Michael Z. 2009-06-03 23:33 z

Not without lexicographic support: Collins and WordNet. Meat is not actually ground by almost any definition of ground. Grinding is usually performed on frangible materials and yields a powder or small particles, as the primary sense of grind in most dictionaries suggests. (Try putting meat on a grindstone or a bench grinder.) The applicable sense seems to have something to do with the crank-like handle (organ-grinder, meat-grinder, grinding of hips). Nowadays meat-grinders cannot be assumed to be part of most Wiktionary users' experience. By the hereby created "misnomer principle", then, this might warrant an entry. I could be persuaded by a sense at grind that applied to "meat" and also something not called "meat". DCDuring TALK 00:05, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Misnomer or not, if this is true of all meats, then ground certainly does have a definition as it applies to beef. DAVilla 16:09, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Weak keep. Equinox makes a good point about ground chicken, but (deprecated template usage) ground beef has common grammatical uses that are hard to find for other ground meat products. For example, in the phrase ground beef patty (which has over 400 b.g.c hits), the term (deprecated template usage) ground beef is a modifier of patty. This is not a patty that has been ground, so we don't have a double adjective. Rather, the combination ground beef is a single modifier, and as such I lean towards keeping this term. --EncycloPetey 02:18, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

That logic applies also to #chocolate_chunk cookie. (You may want to weigh in there, EP: I see you haven't.) I think it also applies to any other common, two-word collocation where the second word is a noun and the first is a modifying noun or an adjective. We don't allow all common collocations, of course. Or we don't, though maybe not "of course". Or we don't AFAIK, anyway. Examples: pizza party reveler, grape martini drinking, blighted house resident, non-electric typewriter user.—msh210℠ 17:56, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

FWIW, the French word is viande hachée (=ground meat), which is SoP (very clearly: it's almost always beef, but not always), but should be includable nonetheless, in my opinion, because it's felt as a set phrase (as a kind of meat). Lmaltier 20:20, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

It would depend on one's definition of "set phrase", I think. The one I like, because it seems to be amenable to falsification, is a phrase that passes the "in between" test (See WT:IDIOM. Can one insert adjectives or other words in between the components? In this case one could (raw, buffalo, kangaroo, squirrel, etc). By which alternative criteria would this be a set phrase? DCDuring TALK 23:36, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

My criterion (for viande hachée) was subjective. I probably consider that something is a set phrase when you don't combine terms in your mind when you use it: it's stored in the brain as a whole, just like a single word. Words can be inserted between the components, but this does not change my feeling. For ground beef, I don't know. Lmaltier 20:30, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Definitely it's a set phrase in my mind. I try not to rely on that because the feeling isn't attestable, but I absolutely could not see going against this one. Maybe the fancy dress test is a good enough rationale to keep? DAVilla 16:09, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Weak keep Ground beef doesn't actually look like it's been ground. If you say "ground rock" or "ground vegetable", the image IS NOT the same as that of "minced beef", which is 100% synonymous with "ground beef". Circeus 01:21, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Keep per EP and Circeus. Incidentally (or maybe even of direct importance), the U.S. Food & Drug Administration has some fairly tight regulations as to what may be sold under the name "ground beef": "(a) "Chopped Beef" or "Ground Beef" shall consist of chopped fresh and/or frozen beef with or without seasoning and without the addition of beef fat as such, shall not contain more than 30 percent fat, and shall not contain added water, phosphates, binders, or extenders. When beef cheek meat (trimmed beef cheeks) is used in the preparation of chopped or ground beef, the amount of such cheek meat shall be limited to 25 percent; and if in excess of natural proportions, its presence shall be declared on the label, in the ingredient statement required by Sec. 317.2 of this subchapter, if any, and otherwise contiguous to the name of the product." This definition is somewhat different from the FDA definition of "hamburger". bd2412 T 21:50, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Keep At the very least it is like semisweet chocolate with a strong regulatory definition per BD2412. It also seems to use an idiosyncratic sense of "grind"/"ground".

I am troubled by the implication of the regulatory-definition argument that we should possibly have multiple definitions for "ground beef", one for every (English-speaking ?) regulatory authority. Is there a way we could genericize the process of linking users to the appropriate jurisdictional definitions or sources for them without risking cluttering our entries with 10 or more external links. DCDuring TALK 23:18, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's definitely troubling. Think of the number of legal texts where "an X is defined as <some hyper-specific description>". Equinox ◑ 23:21, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

The handling of legal definitions should be a Beer Parlor topic. bd2412 T 23:35, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

And now it is; on that discussion's basis, I hereby change "SoP" to "keep".—msh210℠ 00:29, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Kept.​—msh210℠ 20:30, 8 July 2009 (UTC)