The basic texture of meat, dense and firm, comes from the mass of muscle fibers, which cooking makes denser, dryer, and tougher. And their elongated arrangement accounts for the “grain” of meat. Cut parallel to the bundles and you see them from the side, lined up like the logs of a cabin wall; cut across the bundles and you see just their ends. It’s easier to push fiber bundles apart from each other than to break the bundles themselves, so it’s easier to chew along the direction of the fibers than across them. We usually carve meat across the grain, so that we can chew with the grain.
Muscle fibers are small in diameter when the animal is young and its muscles little used. As it grows and exercises, its muscles get stronger by enlarging—not by increasing the number of fibers, but by increasing the number of contractile protein fibrils within the individual fibers. That is, the number of muscle cells stays the same, but they get thicker. The more protein fibrils there are packed together in the cells, the harder it is to cut across them. So the meat of older, well exercised animals is tougher than the meat of young animals.