I wasn’t merely the daughter of a meat cutter, I was involved. My dad would take one or more of his three young daughters to work with him to help out as junior meat cutters. I guess child labor laws weren’t such a big deal back then. Or else no one knew because he often went in hours before the store opened, to line up the meat counter.

Starting when we turned about 7 years old, we girls would wrap and weigh meat, cube the steak and eventually graduate to actually using a knife to trim fat from cuts. I also liked picking which orange sticker with promotional messages to put on a package of wrapped meat and gave it considerable thought. “Great for grilling” or “Extra lean” were some of the options.

You couldn’t put a sticker on every pack of meat, just some of them, so they’d stand out. Dad, is this pack of chicken great for grilling? I’d ask. He’d come over to my side of the meat room and study the pack I was working on. It’s OK, but I’d say it’s more “Tasty buy.”

My favorite task was dropping chunks of meat into the grinder to make ground beef, then putting mounds of it on trays. Sometimes I made designs in the burger meat. Like smiley faces or sand castles. I shaped letters on the counter, using the meat and would spell words. Eighty or a 100 pounds of ground beef can make a lot of meat art.

My least favorite part of going to work with dad was being in the room when he was operating the saw, which we weren’t allowed to use. It was shrill and hurt my ears when he cut through bones with it. I also didn’t like waiting by myself outside of the room when he was hosing it down with scalding water after the work was done.

Last thing we did before we went home was take off our aprons and become regular shoppers in the store, rounding up the groceries from mom’s shopping list as we headed home. If she’d asked for a roast or steaks, during our work, he would have watched for and set aside the best. We didn’t have much money, but Dad got a discount on meat, so we ate like rich carnivores.

All this to say, I know a little bit about meat.

Last week I went to a popular steakhouse and ordered ground steak. Call it what you want, it’s still a big burger without the bun. The server asked how I wanted it cooked. Medium. Servers clarify these days, that’s pink in the center. I nodded.

When the burger arrived, it was red as a stoplight inside. The server swung back by the table and asked how everything was. I don’t think this is cooked medium, I said.

She blankly looked at me. So I put it in the form of a question. Do you think this is medium? Yes, she said. I cut in to the burger further and dug out some of the inside redness. It’s not just the color, it’s the texture. Look … this is rare, really rare. She sent her supervisor over to have a look. This isn’t medium, I said politely.

“It’s how we do medium here,” the supervisor said. As if medium is a matter of opinion, each establishment choosing the shade of red they feel is medium. Medium isn’t a feeling. It’s a degree of doneness.

I was outnumbered, but didn’t give up. It’s bleeding on my fries, I said quietly. Yes, we have juicy ground steaks, the supervisor said. It’s not just the color, it’s the gooey texture, I pointed out again. (I refrained from telling her ground beef was my Play-Doh when I was young. “In fact, I could scrape out the inside of this burger and sculpt you a little house right now because this is nearly raw like the meat I used to play with.”)

Having waited tables through college years, I’m kind to servers who are a little at the mercy of whatever the cooks send out. But here was becoming a wee bit annoyed at their determination to defend their opinion of medium. Lots of servers know to agree with the customer when possible. You want pickles in your water? Yes, of course.

And yet, this server and the supervisor held the fort: It is medium, but we’ll cook it some more for you. How, I wondered, I’ve mangled it. And besides, I’m always a little iffy on sending food back to the kitchen for more cooking. What if I’ve licked it? Would it go on the grill beside other as-yet-unlicked food? I don’t think food that’s been served should be comingled with unserved food.

Plus when meat leaves to be cooked some more, it usually returns alone because the sides didn’t need more cooking. A single piece of bitten meat on a big plate is lonely and unappetizing.

I declined a redo and just moped. Righteously. I didn’t want another burger, I wanted them to understand medium for ground beef isn’t a belief. It’s actually a legal food handling definition. Based on time cooked at a certain temperature to kill bacteria which can get mixed in ground meat. They probably know that.

So there should be a color chart, like in paint stores so we could all be on the same page when we discuss the color of the center. Instead of generic “pink” which we obviously have differing definitions of, we could use more specific names. Nail polishes also have lots of shades of red. Helpful in explaining a problem, “My burger is Glamour Pink on one half and on the thicker half, it’s Ravishing Red. I requested Sensual Coral.”

As I discussed this matter with friends, I found most actually prefer rare meat. One was excited because getting a burger cooked less-than-medium is difficult, because you know, the law. There’s actually a network of people who tell others which restaurants are willing to fudge on the ground beef rules and give you a rare burger. Someone said another good reason to be vegetarian — you don’t have to deal with all this. The vegetarian present said, You can overcook and undercook veggies, too.

Yeah, but an undercooked carrot doesn’t bleed when you poke it with a fork.

This is the opinion of Nancy Williams, the coordinator of professional education at UNC Asheville. Contact her at nwilliam@unca.edu.