Someone repeated this urban legend to me a few weeks ago, and it just took me a long time to get around to looking it up.

A few problems with this story: First of all, meat is not sold with grade letters. Second, all meat sold for human consumption in the US is edible. There are mandatory inspections of meat plants to ensure this.

There is also a voluntary additional inspection that can be performed to label beef as Prime, Choice, or Select. This process mainly exists so the meat providers can have independent verification of the meat quality for the customers who demand the highest quality cuts (like high end restaurants). But when I talk about quality, I mean things like age and marbling. Things that make a big difference between a $20 steak and a $50 steak, but nothing that will matter in your soft taco.

Bottom line, the quality difference is mostly about taste. And if your burrito beef didn’t taste so good, you wouldn’t go to Taco Bell so much.

Eggs, on the other hand, are sold with grade letters (AA, A or B). Those letters again correspond to the overall quality of the egg, but all are edible. The less perfect eggs are usually just shipped off for industrial baking use.

Source: Snopes. For more reference, go to this site here, and/or this one here, but warning- both get into more detail than you probably ever wanted about your steak, and use the word carcass even more than I’m comfortable with. For eggs, go here.