Search results: USDA meat

No lab-based meat or dairy product is yet on the market, but lots of people are working on such things.  Here are some recent examples, starting with my favorite.

• • Grant offered to lab-grown kangaroo meat start-up: Australian lab-grown meat business has been awarded AUS$25,000 to help with its research into cell-cultured kangaroo meat products… Read
  • Kraft Heinz venture fund invests in startup making real cheese… without cows:   San Francisco startup New Culture – which is making animal-free dairy cheese with casein proteins made from microbial fermentation (instead of cow’s milk) – has closed a $3.5m seed round led by Evolv Ventures, a $100m venture fund backed by Kraft Heinz… Read
  • First products from Motif FoodWorks’ fermentation-based protein platform ready to launch in 2021:  The first three proteins from Motif FoodWorks’ fermentation-based food ingredient platform will be ready for launch in early 2021, says the company, one of a new breed of synthetic biology companies using microbes as microscopic factories capable of producing animal proteins… without animals… Read
  • Sustainable Bioproducts gears up for 2020 launch of consumer brand built around new-to-the-world protein source:  Sustainable Bioproducts – which is developing new-to-the-world protein-packed whole food ingredients from microbes – plans to launch a consumer brand to help familiarize Americans with a new fungal food source that could be used in everything from meat and milk alternatives to snacks… Read
  • Perfect Day gives fans first taste of animal-free dairy with limited edition ice cream release:  Perfect Day, a start-up producing whey and casein via microbial fermentation (minus the cows) is giving fans a first taste of its animal-free proteins via a limited edition release of ice cream sold directly to consumers via its website… Read
  • Clara Foods completes Series B, joins forces with Ingredion to commercialize egg proteins… minus the chicken:  What came first, the chicken or the egg? Clara Foods, a San Francisco-based startup producing egg proteins via microbial fermentation, has ditched the chicken in favor of yeast, and teamed up with ingredients giant Ingredion to develop and commercialize its animal-free wares after completing a Series B funding round… Read
  • ‘Cultivated’ meat could be the most-consumer-friendly term for cell-cultured meat, suggests Mattson/GFI research: The term ‘clean meat’ is confusing (and carries the tacit implication that regular meat is ‘dirty’), while ‘cell-based meat’ – a more neutral term favored by some startups – doesn’t poll well with shoppers. ‘Lab-grown’ is a food marketer’s nightmare. But ‘cultivated meat’ might just tick all the boxes when it comes to describing growing meat from animal cells, without slaughter, suggests new research. Read more  
  • Five startups form alliance to provide clear path to market for cell-based meat:  BlueNalu, Finless Foods, Forke & Goode, JUST Inc., and Memphis Meats have formed a coalition called the Alliance for Meat, Poultry & Seafood (AMPS) Innovation to carve out a clear path to market for cell-cultured meat, poultry, and seafood. Read more  
  • Selling plant-based and cell-cultured meat will be about ‘benefits for me’ says Hartman Group:  While ending factory farming and reducing GHG emissions are top priorities for start-ups such as Impossible Foods, most shoppers are primarily motivated by ‘benefits for me’ – be it taste and discovery, or health and wellness, when it comes to plant-based meat and dairy, according to a new report from The Hartman Group. Read more  
  • FDA and USDA shed more light on how cell-based meat will be regulated, but don’t weigh into naming debate… yet:  The USDA and the FDA have provided more clarity on who will be responsible for what when it comes to regulating cell-cultured meat, but have not – yet – offered their thoughts on appropriate terminology with which to describe it on food labels. Read more
  • Future Meat Technologies raises $14m to commercialize cell cultured meat: ‘We see a path to reality here, it’s not just something on a Power Point presentation,’ says S2G Ventures:  Future Meat Technologies is one of the few players in the nascent space to have shown how cell-cultured (a.k.a. ‘cultivated’) meat could move from the lab to an industrial scale, claims one of the lead investors in a $14m Series A round that will support the construction of a pilot scale production facility south of Tel Aviv, Israel… Read
  • MycoTechnology unveils texturized fermented vegetable protein for plant based meat applications: As the race to expand protein options for plant-based meats heats up, Colorado-based MycoTechnology has thrown its hat into the ring with a texturized version of PureTaste, a vegetable protein produced via the fermentation of pea and rice proteins with Shiitake mushroom mycelium (roots)… Read  
  • Future Meat Technologies raises $14m to commercialize cell cultured meat: ‘We see a path to reality here, it’s not just something on a Power Point presentation,’ says S2G Ventures:  Future Meat Technologies is one of the few players in the nascent space to have shown how cell-cultured (a.k.a. ‘cultivated’) meat could move from the lab to an industrial scale, claims one of the lead investors in a $14m Series A round that will support the construction of a pilot scale production facility south of Tel Aviv, Israel…Read

I’m always interested to see what food safety lawyer Bill Marler has to say about the latest lapses.  He often represents the innocent-but-unlucky victims of food poisonings.  All they were doing was getting something to eat or feed their kids.  They had no idea the food was contaminated with a deadly form of E. coli or Salmonella.

In a recent post, Marler reflected on the enormous progress made by meat producers in reducing pathogens in their products.  Marler explains:

From the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak of 1993 until the 2002 ConAgra E. coli outbreak, at least 95% of Marler Clark revenue was E. coli cases linked to hamburger.  Today, it is nearly zero.  That is success.  To the beef industry – thank you for meeting the challenge…for now, hats off to you.

But, he points out, the meat industry must continue to act with vigilance, as demonstrated by the CDC’s recent safety warning about ground beef contaminated with toxic E. coli O103.

The CDC lists the statistics of this recent outbreak to date.

• Reported Cases: 177
• States: 10
• Hospitalizations: 21
• Deaths: 0

The recalls of ground beef have started.

• Grant Park Packing in Franklin Park, Ill., recalled approximately 53,200 pounds of raw ground beef products on April 24, 2019.
• K2D Foods, doing business as Colorado Premium Foods, in Carrollton, Ga., recalledapproximately 113,424 pounds of raw ground beef products on April 23, 2019.

Others may follow.

Meat producers: eternal vigilance, please.  Lives are at stake.

As for food safety in general: The CDC says foodborne illness cases are increasing.

During 2018, FoodNet identified

• 25,606 infections
• 5,893 hospitalizations
• 120 deaths

Note: these are fully preventable.

And food producers must make sure that they are fully prevented.

The Washington Post reports that the USDA has committed about $5 million of bailout funds to buy 1.8 million pounds of pork products from the Brazilian meatpacker, JBS.

The bailout funds were supposed to help U.S. commodity producers who lost sales because of the tariff disputes with China.

JBS is the biggest meat seller in the U.S. It employs 73,000 people here.

Maybe the USDA thought it was an American company?

Globalization in action…

This is a collection of articles on the Chinese market for meat from the daily industry newsletter, Global Meat News.

Special Edition: Focus on China
China has been the highlight of the international meat market this year in terms of re-igniting unexpected relationships for trade access and its continuous clashes with the US market. With the Asian sector ramping up its global position, will we see China dominate the meat market in years to come?

• China lift on British beef ban to ‘unlock UK agriculture’s full potential’: China has today (27 June) made a landmark decision to lift the ban on UK beef exports for the first time in 20 years… Read
• NAMI welcomes additional China beef export facilities: The US meat industry has welcomed US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) efforts to secure approval for 20 additional facilities that are now eligible to export beef to China… Read
• US pork could lose $2.2 billion a year due to China trade war: The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) has called for a swift resolution of the United States-China trade dispute, in the hopes of paving the way for increased US pork exports… Read
• China and France reach beef agreement: China has signed an agreement to import beef from France… Read
• USDA reassures farmers that Trump will resolve China trade war: The US Department of Agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue believes Donald Trump will defend national interests for farmers following the country’s ongoing trade war with China… Read
• Irish beef given China approval: Irish companies have been given approval to export beef to China… Read
• China poultry equipment sector to be hit by new Trump USA tariffs: America’s pork exporters will be counting the cost of new 25% tariffs announced on Saturday (16 June) by the Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council of China, on US-made meat and poultry exports… Read
• Ukraine and China take steps towards trade deal for poultry meat: Representatives from the Ukraine and China have signed a document to promote mutual trade in poultry meat… Read
• China set to visit Brazil to inspect 84 slaughterhouse refrigerators: Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply has revealed that Asian veterinarians from China will visit the South American country at the end of May to review 84 slaughterhouse refrigerators… Read
• US beef sector unsettled by threat of Chinese duties: US beef industry representatives are voicing consternation over the Chinese Government’s announcement that the country is preparing retaliatory sanctions against beef exports as part of its escalating trade war with the USA… Read

One of the industry newsletters I read regularly is GlobalMeatNews.com, which occasionally collects articles on specific topics into “special editions.”  This one is about pork.

Still the most-consumed meat in the world, the pork sector is shifting quickly with global markets opening for processors on a weekly basis. In this special newsletter, we look at the lucrative Chinese market that everyone is looking to break into, as well as work being done to tackle diseases in the pork sector.

• Canada heads to China to expand pork and beef exports: Canada is aiming to boost its position in the global meat market by initiating discussions with China in order to strengthen trading relationships and to pursue other opportunities across the agricultural sector… Read
• Chinese pig meat imports slow during first quarter: Chinese pig meat imports declined 10% compared with 2017 levels during the first quarter of this year… Read
• HKScan launches pork exports to China: Finnish processor HKScan has launched pork exports to China from its Forssa production unit… Read
• Access for US pork in Argentina takes a step closer: The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Argentina’s Ministry of Agro-Industry have finalised technical details for US pork to be imported into the South American country… Read
• University study finds growth link between pork and formula-fed infants: The University of Colorado has published a report that supports pork as an important source of protein in an infant’s diet when transitioning to solid foods… Read and see note below.
• Poland’s wall to tackle ASF should have been built four years ago, say meat experts: The Polish Government’s decision to build a 1,200-kilometre-long fence along the country’s eastern border, as a tool to fight African Swine Fever (ASF) by blocking the migration of infected wild boars, has been condemned as too little, too late by Poland’s meat sector… Read
• Supermarkets urged to end poor pig welfare in WAP campaign: World Animal Protection (WAP) has launched a global campaign calling on supermarket chains to source their pork from high-welfare farms… Read

A note on the pork study: it elicited a tirade in the New Food Economy about how so much of nutrition research is correlational and says little about causation.  The writer singles out the pork study as one of three examples of possible misuse of statistics.

Feeding infants puréed pork and increased body length? Trick question. P = 0.001—so something really seems to be happening. But does greater body length in infants actually matter? We’ll let the scientists pursue this one on their own until they come up with something that’s not just statistically significant but meaningful…The point isn’t to prevent you from snacking on prunes and chocolate while you shovel puréed pork into the baby. Do it if you want to, and given the marvelous powers of the placebo effect, you’ll probably be happy you did. But stop treating studies like these as if they contain the truth.

The study, no surprise, was sponsored by NIH but also by the National Pork Board, among other industry groups.  The Pork Board issued a press release: “New Study Finds Pureed Pork Supports Infant Growth.”

The USDA has just issued a report on trends in per capita food availability from 1970 to 2014.

Here’s my favorite figure:

The inner ring represents calories from those food groups in 1970. The outer ring includes data from 2014.

The bottom line: calories from all food groups increased, fats and oils and the meat group most of all, dairy and fruits and vegetables the least.

The sugar data are also interesting:

Total sugars (blue) peaked at about 1999 in parallel with high fructose corn syrup (orange).  Table sugar, sucrose, has been flat since the 1980s (green).

Eat your veggies!

USDA has just released three sets of GIPSA rules governing poultry grower ranking (“tournament”) systems (GIPSA stands for Grain Inspection, Packers & Stockyards Administration).

These are draconian systems in which poultry growers working for giant, vertically integrated poultry companies compete with each other for payments.

The system works like this:

The vertically integrated live poultry dealer provides the chicks, feed, and medication to poultry growers who house and feed the birds under a contract. The poultry grower grows the birds to market size (preferred weight for slaughter) and then, after slaughter, receives a settlement check for that flock. The payment received depends on how efficiently the poultry grower converted feed to meat as compared to the other poultry growers in the settlement group.

It’s hard to begin to imagine how unfair this system can be.

The poultry companies control the following inputs and production variables: chick health, number of chicks placed, feed quality, medications, growout time, breed and type of bird, weighing of the birds, and weighing of the feed.

And on top of this, “company employees who are also poultry growers get preferential treatment and may get better birds or get to keep flocks longer.”

Or, as GIPSA’s Q and A puts it:

For example, if a chicken grower attempts to organize other chicken growers to bargain for better pay or publicly expresses unhappiness with the way they are being treated by a processor, they can suffer retaliation. Processors can require growers to make investments that are not economically justifiable for the grower, or can terminate contracts with little notice. And because in contract growing the processors own the birds and provide inputs like feed, they can choose to provide poultry growers with bad feed or sickly birds that have a higher mortality rate, which cuts deeply into a grower’s opportunity to earn income on those birds.

The USDA press release pointed out that

the four largest poultry processors control 51 percent of the broiler market and 57 percent of the turkey market.  In part due to this concentration, poultry growers often have limited options for processors available in their local communities: 52 percent of growers have only one or two processors in their state or region to whom they can sell.  That means processors can often wield market power over the growers, treating them unfairly, suppressing how much they are paid, or pitting them against each other.

GIPSA initially proposed rules in 2010 that would protect growers from some of these abuses by paying them more fairly, but the industry objected.  It doesn’t like the revised rules either.  As the National Chicken Council puts it, “Obama Administration Strangles Poultry and Livestock Producers with New, Controversial Regulations.”  And the pork producers say they will work with president Trump to get rid of the rule.

The current proposals are a compromise, but a reasonably good one.  The proposal establishes criteria that the USDA Secretary may use to determine:

whether a live poultry dealer has used a poultry grower ranking system to compensate poultry growers in an unfair, unjustly discriminatory, or deceptive manner, or in a way that gives an undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any poultry grower or subjects any poultry grower to an undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition says the rules

finally give the largely toothless act some bite. The “Farmer Fair Practices Rules” published today…will provide much-needed protections to contract farmers in the poultry and livestock industry.

Food and Water Watch says (via email)

These proposed and interim rules provide important, though modest, protections for farmers, but fall far short of the safeguards mandated by the 2008 Farm Bill. Hopefully, these rules can provide a foundation for strengthening farmer protections in the face of an increasingly consolidated poultry, hog and cattle slaughter and processing industry.

But I particularly love the tell-it-like-it-is statement from the Government Accountability Project’s Amanda Hitt (also via email):

It’s been a long time since we have been in a position to praise the Department of Agriculture, but today, Secretary Vilsack got it right…The GIPSA rules that came out today are not only a welcome attempt to right a series of wrongs that heretofore have gone unchecked, but are also simple common sense.

These farmers…were lied to and manipulated by a corporate machine that has been using its political influence to profit at the peril of the American farmer. This is not a partisan issue; this is about putting limits on corporate greed. I hope that all can agree that something needs to be done and that these rules are an important first step.

Here are the relevant documents:

• Poultry Grower Ranking Systems – Proposed Rule
• Scope of sections 202(a) and (b) PSA – Interim final rule
• Unfair Practices and Undue Preferences Violation PSA – Proposed Rule
• FAQs

Yesterday, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) issued a warning about the carcinogenic potential of processed and red meat.  This, as you might expect, caused a media flurry.  CNN News asked me for a written comment.  They titled it “The other benefit to eating less red meat.”  Here’s what I wrote:

Meat producers do not like the “eat less meat” message. Consumers do not want to give up their bacon and hamburgers — delicious and also icons of the American way of life.

But these judgments should come as no surprise to anyone. Eating less processed and red meat has been accepted dietary advice since Ancel and Margaret Keys wrote their diet book for heart disease prevention, “Eat Well and Stay Well,” in 1959. Their advice: “restrict saturated fats, the fats in beef, pork, lamb, sausages …” They aimed this advice at reducing saturated fat to prevent heart disease. Federal committees and agencies have continued issuing such heart-disease advice to the present day.

Cancer entered the picture in the 1970s, when scientists began to link red meat — beef, pork, lamb — to the risk of cancers of the colon and rectum. Even after several decades of research, they had a hard time deciding whether the culprit in meat was fat, saturated fat, protein, carcinogens induced when meat is cooked to high temperatures or some other component.

In the mid-1990s, dietary guidelines committees advised eating lean meats and limiting intake of processed meats, still because of their high fat content. By the late 1990s, cancer experts said that red meat “probably” increases the risk of colorectal cancers, and “possibly” increases the risk of cancers of the pancreas, breast, prostate and kidney. The IARC report, based on more recent evidence, makes even stronger recommendations and favors carcinogens as the causative factors.

To put this in context: For decades, the meat industry’s big public relations problem has been that vegetarians are demonstrably healthier than meat eaters. People who do not eat red meat havemuch less of a chance of developing heart disease and bowel cancers than the average American.

More recently, the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) found diets “higher in red/processed meats…” to be associated with a greater risk of colorectal cancer, and it recommended dietary patterns and low in red and/or processed meats, but higher in vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, lean meats/seafood and low-fat dairy — largely, but not necessarily exclusively, plant-based.

This is good advice for anyone.

Eating less red and processed meats has two benefits: a reduced risk for certain forms of cancer,and a reduced effect on climate change.

The DGAC deemed eating less red meat to be exceptionally beneficial to the environment as well as to human health. The IARC report strengthens the health component of the recommendation. The secretaries of USDA and Health and Human Services, however, have refused to allow environmental concerns to be considered in the 2015 dietary guidelines.

I mention the dispute over environmental “sustainability” in the dietary guidelines because largely plant-based diets are appropriate for all kinds of health concerns — obesity, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and now, especially, colorectal cancer — as well as environmental concerns.

By eating less red and processed meats, you promote both your own health and that of the planet.

At issue then is how much red and processed meat is compatible with good health. The IARC commission ducked that question, although it cites evidence that as little as 100 grams (a quarter pound) of red meat a day, and half that much of processed meats, increases cancer risk by 15% to 20%.

Will an occasional hamburger or piece of bacon raise your risk that much? I don’t think so. But the evidence reviewed by IARC strongly suggests that if you do eat meat, eat less when you do, don’t eat meat every day, save processed meats for rare treats and be sure to eat plenty of vegetables.

Fortunately, this advice leaves plenty of room for delicious meals — just with meat taking up much less room on the plate.

Other comments

• The Washington Post–an excellent summary (I’m quoted)
• The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association
• The  North American Meat Institute
• USA Today on the World Series (I’m quoted)
• Wall Street Journal on the IARC report (I’m quoted)
• The Atlantic on meat industry lobbying (I’m quoted)
• Fortune magazine on the decline in meat consumption (I’m quoted)
• The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics responds
• Dr. David Katz’s excellent commentary