Intern fact sheets to help buyers of U.S. meat

By Michael Chao, USMEF intern

I can’t believe it has been almost two months here at USMEF, and I have learned so much about exports in a way that I could never have imagined. Since my last blog, I have completed my animal health fact sheet focusing on explaining how animal diseases affect trading, a beef dry-aging guide for foreign importers and another fact sheet on how USDA quality grade affects palatability.

Let’s talk about the animal disease fact sheet first. From a meat scientist prospective, I worry about food safety, but mostly at the human level, such as food poisoning from E. Coli 0157. I never think about how animal diseases can affect exports. However, in the meat trading world, it is a completely different story. Governments, including the U.S. government, usually place strict import requirements on meat because of their worries regarding animal disease transmission from meat. For example, many countries have trade barriers on fresh U.S. pork because of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS). Even if PRRS is not transmissible to humans, these countries are afraid of PRRS transmission to their herds through feeding of raw swill that could contain contaminated pork. Therefore, eliminating many key animal diseases such as brucellosis, PRRS and scrapie can really help to boost the export business.

I have also completed a beef dry-aging guide for international importers. It is basically a "dry-aging for dummies" booklet that teaches importers how to dry age U.S. beef in their countries. It will eventually be translated into many different languages and distributed to importers through USMEF international offices.

My most recent work is the fact sheet promoting USDA Quality Grades. This fact sheet focuses on showing consumers that marbling and physiological maturity have direct effects on tenderness, flavor and juiciness, and as USDA Quality Grades advance, the consumer eating experiences improve.

I am currently working on organizing each state’s status on the new Animal Disease Traceability rule. We, as a country, are often attacked by other major beef exporting countries for lacking traceability. It is absolutely essential for the U.S. cattle industry to implement full traceability if we want to compete at the global level. There are so many more topics for me to work on in the near future, and I will update you all again in a month. I hope you had a wonderful Fourth of July!

Hello from my family at Rocky Mountain National Park!