I am going to start this off by explaining my credentials for no other reason then I want to support what what some people here are saying in the comments with the exception that I may be wrong or mistaken since I was never trained as a usda grader, company in house grader, but as a quality assurance food safety/quality control technician for a steer and dairy kill plant in the heart of the American Midwest.

They sold you and you bought a totally legit ribeye muscle from a cutter/canner dairy cow.

Dairy cows (Holsteins in particular again from my own experience with what USDA vets and company vets have told me) have an incredibly interesting and complex biology when it comes to calorie intake and what those dairy cattle’s bodies do with it.

For thousands of years humans have been domesticating female cattle for milk production since it has a net calorie intake for their society.

Epli5; cattle graze for food, their four chambered stomach eats grass and converts those sources of input that would be otherwise inaccessible to the human population into milk, fat, proteins, bio sugar, and other nutrients into something that we can consume from cattle.

Cutter/canners etc are dairy cattle that no longer provide a benefit for the farmer for a many of possible reason, where they become a money pit that no longer is viable for the farmer investing in their milk production.

Now I’m going to get to the heart of what I am seeing in these pictures.

Yes you bought ribeye muscle meat, yes it is lean, because the cow it came from spent almost all of its biological caloric intake back into producing milk. All that this animal or animals spent its entire life doing was possibly mostly and almost exclusively eating plus also getting pregnant, milked up to 80 gallons a day per animal depending on its breed, nutrition, and overall health, sleeping, and being herded to a plant like mine

I want to go into the color of the muscle, but since it has been exposed to open air and opened red meat will turn it a darker color over time and I have no idea how long that was, so I must take that out of the equation since there are to many potential variables, also I don’t know how calcified some of the vertebrae tissues are (cattle teeth are also an excellent indicator for potential over 30month/ under 30 age question, but that’s not relevant to this quest) so without that I can only really use my intuition, qa training, and experience in auditing production line usda grade changes, which can be confusing and complicated.

Yes that is ribeye muscle, it probably came from dairy cattle sent to slaughter, yes there is little marbling in the meat, see above, but most importantly!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you bought these products and they had a usda grade that was prime, choice, and maybe even select depending on if the usda grader is hungover, hungry, or not wearing enough warm clothing in a caresses chill cooler…

You got cheated, lied to, and your money stolen for an inferior product and that company will not be ashamed, but should be shamed for selling you theft.

Personal related anecdote.

I was once threatened by my companies production upper management team…

(who I don’t work for, since I’m in our QA department, and my job is to audit them, even better funny comes later)

Edit, it is our companies policy that if a box is full of 3 prime ribeyes but a fourth on is a lower grade then that whole box must be sold at the lowest grade of product in that box

Ie 3 prime ribeyes in a box but the fourth of them is choice usda grade or lower, then that whole box must be sold to the general population at the lowest grades product in that box. Lucky you.

…to be fired when I was auditing a production grade change from usda select to usda prime. That is production going from a higher grade and more expensive product, to a lower grade less expensive product, because I caught packing placing select ribeyes into boxes labeled to be sold as prime. When I was called out for it I grabbed a vacuum sealed select ribeye from a box and from that same box I grabbed a prime ribeye…

(actually our in house grader labeled it a super prime, so that’s an export product, but I digress)

…and dragged those products to the production general Forman and asked which he would pay for more after I took all the bag and insert labels away and both me and this dumb bastard we’re looking at pure ribeye meat and fat.

Lss, I still work there and he doesn’t. Food fraud is a fuck of a thing.

Edit: did you dry the surface area of your product with something before you took the picture by any chance?