Meat Talk

If you visit a modern meat, poultry, or even fish processing plant, you might be surprised at how similar they are – no matter where you are in the world. But what surprise you even more that all our modern plants can be traced back to two Chicago meat packing rivals, who created the system...

Over 25-years ago, an outbreak of E coli O157 in Jack in the Box restaurants in the States made people wake up to the fact that their hamburger could kill them. It would seem that the innocence, the fun, the love, American consumers had with burgers disappeared as newspapers became filled with stories about the...

The USA’s largest export market for beef and pork is Japan, but perhaps never before has this market been hanging on tethers such as it is now. With a lack of trade deal, countries that do have one with Japan – including beef powerhouse Australia – are ready to bounce. However, one advantage the US...

While it might seem hard to believe but once upon a time, the British people weren’t giving a thought to US chicken washed in chlorine, nor were there any US poultry producers even looking on a map to see where the UK was located. The UK poultry industry produced over 70 percent of chicken consumed...

An egg producer comes to your food safety agency about a slightly high level of a very regulated insecticide in his eggs. How it got there, he has no idea, but suspects a detergent he’s been using to control red mites. While it’s above the allowed safety level, it is not by much, so you...

While once saying the word ‘Klondike’ to a gold prospector brought about a sudden distant look off to the far horizon, today it’s a term used in the finance sector and in the commercial fishing industry to pretty much describe the exact same thing – the next big fishing grounds. In the meat/poultry industry, Meat...

In this episode we’ll be talking about meat snacks, one of the most exciting sub-industries in the world’s meat/poultry whole-shebang. Why do we think this? Taken as a whole – meaning jerky, biltong, salami, salumi, Parma and Prosciutto ham, cured meat, Chinese lap chong, etc – the global meat snack industry is worth today around...

It must have been 2004. I was at Brussel’s Seafood, the largest seafood show in the world, and was looking at a mussel company’s display. The mussels were sealed in black plastic boxes, each holding about a half pound of the shellfish. A guy at the stand came over. “How long do you think their...

If you visit a modern meat, poultry, or even fish processing plant, you might be surprised at how similar they are – no matter where you are in the world. But what surprise you even more that all our modern plants can be traced back to two Chicago meat packing rivals, who created the system...

When Meat Talk visited Poland, things were getting a bit crazy weather-wise. Hotter than blazes, even the animals were feeling it with livestock going off feed and wolves attacking people. But, besides the weather, something else has been heating up in Poland, something for the last 10 years, and that’s its poultry industry, now rated...