The Communication Scarcity in Agriculture

Jessica Eise, Whitney Hodde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317231295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Today, the general public craves information on food and agriculture with an unprecedented passion. But the agricultural sector, unaccustomed to an interested and inquisitive society, has largely failed to respond to the public's demands for information. Instead, corporations, time-pressed journalists, bloggers, media celebrities, film-makers, authors and concerned consumers jumped in to fill the void. Food is emotional, and these players - some well-intentioned and others not - got a lot of traction playing off consumer fears of the unknown.

This critical and timely book explains how changing demographics, cultural shifts, technological advances and agriculture's silence all combined to create the perfect storm – a great chasm between those who know, and those who don't know, agriculture. The ramifications of a poorly-informed consumer base are now becoming clear in our policy debates and consumer-driven business decisions. There is a lot of common ground between the agricultural sector and their consumer base, but each group largely fails to appreciate it, and the consequences of such a divide grow increasingly dire.

Drawing on a wide-range of expertise, from leading agricultural researchers to major agribusiness leaders to consumer advocates, Eise and Hodde lay out exactly why communication is so urgently critical to our modern-day agricultural system. They outline the major themes affecting agricultural communication – perception, emotion, technology, science - and what we can do now to improve the debate and safeguard our future food supply for generations to come.This book is suitable for those who study agriculture, environmental economics and mass media and communication.

PART I The reality

DOI: 10.4324/9781315625201-1

From the ick factor of ‘pink slime,’ a company’s ruthlessly efficient marketing campaign to the allure of celebrities’ unscientific health advice and more, Part I tackles a carefully selected sample of challenges that underscore the reality of modern communication. Broken down into five chapters, it presents a stark, no-nonsense picture of today’s agricultural conversation in its entirety.

1 PINK SLIME

When a media frenzy strikes

DOI: 10.4324/9781315625201-2

American consumers love beef. Ground beef is a particular favorite for home-cooked meals, eaten with gusto in kitchens across the nation. Some 60 percent of beef consumption in kitchens around America is ground beef.¹ To get into the nitty gritty, which these families generally don’t, ground beef is produced from any part of the boneless beef carcass. It must have no more than 30 percent fat and contain no added water, phosphates, binders, or extenders.²

There is a company in South Dakota, named Beef Products, Inc. (BPI), which manufactures boneless lean beef. They were established in 1981 and as demand for beef products grew, so did they. In 1991, the company decided to minimize waste in the meat industry. They started to take the lean trimmings from other processing facilities and create a byproduct. These trimmings were mostly fat and a little strip of protein. In processing trimmings that would normally have gone to waste, they were able to extract the sliver of red meat that was usually tossed out with the fat. From this, they produced a product known within the industry as lean finely textured beef (LFTB).³

In 2011, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver decided to tackle the issue of LFTB in his popular TV show Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.⁴ He began the segment by bringing a live cow, named Scarlett, in front of a smiling audience of wholesome children and parents. Scarlett wanders calmly to the center of the set and stands peacefully, oblivious to the absurdity of her situation. The camera pans to a smiling young mother with a child in her arms.

“We’re going to show you a little story about beef!” quips Oliver in his cheery British accent. He walks around the live cow and shows them where the different cuts are and how much each one costs on the market. Scarlett’s body has been portioned off, presumably by chalk, to demonstrate her various consumable parts. Educational, one might think.

“Why am I doing all this? Did you come down here for a meat lesson?” Apparently not. Jamie Oliver, in a made-for-TV moment of drama, makes it clear that he is not doing this to teach us about the various cuts of the cow. He’s here to teach us about the horrors of trimmings. The scene theatrically flashes to Oliver sitting against a black backdrop, leaning forward. “In my industry, we call those trimmings sh**. Get rid of them.”

Camera cut back to the studio, Oliver takes some cow trimmings and walks boldly out into the crowd of parents and kids. He aggressively shoves the meat into the audience’s faces. They pull back in disgust (which begs the question, who wouldn’t pull back in disgust if an aggressive man in a plaid shirt shoved raw meat in your face?). But the message has been sent.

“So first thing, this is how I imagined the process to be … they take all those trimmings … they put it in a centrifuge and they spin it. And what does that do? It splits the fat from the meat and separates it,” says Oliver. He takes his bucket of trimmings and puts it in a dryer. Once it has run for a few moments, he removes the separated meat. He returns to his audience of families and children and shoves this new bucket of meat into their faces. Cue cringing and disgust. A petite, blond-haired little girl stares in horror. The camera zooms in on her innocent face.

Oliver dumps the bits of meat in a bin and opens a child-locked drawer full of household cleaning elements, oh-so-carefully placed at camera level so as to highlight his dramatic unlocking of the drawer. He takes out a larger container of ammonia (clearly marked ammonia in large print, visible to the camera) and dumps it on the meat. He mixes it up with his hands and then dumps it through a grinder. Lo and behold, Jamie Oliver created ‘pink slime’ as he, direct quote, “imagined the process to be.”

Imagination and Jamie Oliver aside, the reality of LFTB is somewhat more nuanced. A substantial portion of a beef carcass, about 25 percent, is lean beef trimmings.⁵ BPI was taking what would otherwise be wasted food and finding a purpose for it. This lean textured beef was considered ideal to sell to school lunch programs, fast food chains like McDonald’s, and other people making hamburgers. If you added it into hamburger beef, it could increase the leanness and create the perfect lean-to-fat ratio.

Amongst other processes to ensure food safety, Beef Products Inc. used a common intervention in the industry – they blasted the product with a small amount of ammonia. Ammonia in food is not new, nor is it rare.⁶ There is a natural amount of pure ammonium hydroxide in beef already. BPI increased this by a minute amount because it is a powerful defense against potential germs. It was thoroughly reviewed and approved by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as ammonia has proven to be one of the most effective advances in food safety today. It’s used in several other areas of the industry, including processing of baked goods, cheeses, and chocolate. With LFTB, USDA deemed it to be a processing aid and not an ingredient in the beef so they didn’t require it to be posted on the label.⁷

It wasn’t Oliver who coined the term ‘pink slime,’ a name subsequently picked up and touted by US media that came to haunt BPI. A 2009 article in the New York Times noted opposition to LFTB by two former USDA employees, dating back to the USDA’s approval of ammonium hydroxide more than ten years prior. An internal email that became public as part of a New York Times Freedom of Information Act request contained the term ‘pink slime.’⁸

The well-researched 2009 New York Times article brought little national attention to the issue. Jamie Oliver’s show dramatized the matter and started building momentum. Soon after, in 2012, ABC decided to pick up the story.⁹ It was then that public backlash to LFTB launched in earnest.¹⁰ ABC produced a series of reports and the matter snowballed. Other media picked up the story and it stormed the nation. In a rapid turn of events, food activists and consumers around the country were suddenly and actively involved in a “Stop Pink Slime” movement.

What happened? LFTB, and subsequently BPI, fell victim to a voracious media frenzy. The results were dire. As Reuters reported in March of 2013, the company was devastated: “Today, the South Dakota company’s revenues have plummeted from more than $650 million to about $130 million a year, and three of its plants are shuttered. Company officials blame the abrupt falloff on a series of ABC News broadcasts that began last March – stories that repeatedly called its product ‘pink slime.’”¹¹ BPI reported that more than 700 employees lost their jobs as a result of the furor.¹²

Chris Waldrop’s job as the Director of the Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of America is to promote food safety measures across government and industry to protect consumers. He is literally paid to make sure that consumer interest is represented on food safety decisions. In an interview with us, he explained the ‘pink slime’ issue and how it got so wildly out of control: “It is said that they [ABC] were sort of blurring the line between safety and the ‘ick factor.’ A lot of people thought that it was icky and didn’t want to eat it and they didn’t want their kids to be eating it. There was a lot of confusion between is it safe or is it just gross.” Consumers generally don’t fully understand where their food comes from, so when they hear about it for the first time, their immediate response may be, “I don’t want to eat that!”¹³ Waldrop, a consumer advocate, was not concerned about the safety of LFTB. In fact, with tempered frustration, he expressed his wish to mobilize consumers on other issues that warranted far more real concern.

The 24-hour media cycle got their fingers into something and they needed to fill airtime and get their ratings up. Consumers, concerned about their food, got swept along in a tide of righteous anger. As Waldrop said, “The nature of the media cycle is that you have reporters that just need to get something out quick, and so they may not spend as much time on it as they need to or probably should.” As such, consumers did not get the whole story, but neither were they actively looking for it. There’s nothing quite as catchy as ‘pink slime’ to get people paying attention, and people like gross, we pay attention to gross.

The repercussions of this massive miscommunication were real and severe – lost revenue, damaged reputations, increased waste, and more than 700 employees lost their jobs. As outrage has subsided and with beef prices hovering around an all-time high while school lunch budgets are tight, schools are once again embracing LFTB. Never having been conclusively proven to damage health, this low-cost and waste-saving product is creeping back onto the shelves.

Consumer influence is growing in a changing media landscape where information flows easily and quickly and is not always fact-checked. This increased influence has real consequences in the agricultural industry. “The LFTB controversy demonstrates that consumers’ perceptions and understanding of modern food production can quickly affect markets and/or a company’s business,” reported Joel L. Green, an analyst in agricultural policy for the Congressional Research Service.¹⁴

There is no turning back the clock. We live in a new age of information. J. Ross Pruitt and Joshua D. Detre, when both professors at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, wrote that a lack of transparency at various levels of the agricultural supply chain contributed to the public backlash against the inclusion of LFTB in a variety of outlets. They concluded, “Educating consumers about food production is a challenge not to be ignored.”¹⁵ We are no longer in a time where public relations crises will blow over in a couple days if kicked under the rug. On the contrary, ignoring a crisis will make the public suspect that there is something to hide.

Would better transparency have stood up to a major news network’s characterization of LFTB as ‘pink slime’? Perhaps, but perhaps not entirely. However, it would most certainly have diminished the intensity of the media frenzy or even prevented it from reaching such a heightened point in the first place. Enhanced transparency means communicating to consumers and stakeholders about what is going on ‘behind the scenes’ – in other words, anticipating what people should or would like to know and providing the information to them in a controlled manner. As demonstrated in this case, doing so – or neglecting to do so – can carry significant economic weight in today’s world.

Notes

1. National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, “Beef Industry Statistics,” Average Annual Per Capita Consumption, Beef Cuts and Ground Beef, and Beef at a Glance, January 2012, http://www.beefusa.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx.
2. 9 C.F.R. §319.15 (a). According to the regulation, ground beef may also contain beef cheek meat, but if it exceeds 25% by volume, it must be noted on the label. Extenders are described by the National Meat Association (NMA) as cereals, legumes, vegetables, roots, and tubers. Available at https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/granule/CFR-2012-title9-vol2/CFR-2012-title9-vol2-sec319-15.
3. Information on BPI is available at http://www.beefproducts.com/index.php.
4. “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution: Pink Slime—70% of America’s Beef Is Treated with Ammonia,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Z6AgHthJs. Accessed on June 23, 2015.
5. John R. Romans et al. (1994) The Meat We Eat, Danville, IL: Interstate Publishers, Inc., p. 591.
6. International Food Information Council Foundation, Food Insight, “Questions and Answers about Ammonium Hydroxide Use in Food Production,” December 29, 2009. See http://www.foodinsight.org/Resources/Detail.aspx?topic=Questions_and_Answers_about_Ammonium_Hydroxide_Use_in_Food_Production.
7. USDA, Food Safety and Inspecti...