Pork industry finds out how to have it both ways

Alan Guebert - Farm File

via News-Sentinel.com

 

The marketing geniuses hired by the National Pork Board sure sold a lot of hams, bacons and butts when, in 1987, they began to promote pork as “The Other White Meat.”

Now, 25 years after that brilliant sleight of hand, the pork crowd wants to be known as something else – the other red meat, beef.

Two years ago, checkoff leaders from the Cattlemen's Beef Board (CBB) and the National Pork Board (NPB) voted to fund a joint research project to “reduce and eliminate consumer confusion at the meat case.”

The result was a complete overhaul of something that goes by the unappetizing name of URMIS, or the Uniform Retail Meat Identity Standards.

The makeover, according the beef, pork and lamb checkoff-funded website www.meattrack.com, “created a Common Name standard that simplifies cut names, reduces unappealing terms, eliminates redundancies and provides a unique name structure for meat cuts.”

Well, kind of.

For example, the complicated name “pork chop” is out and in is “pork porterhouse chop.” Other pork chops will get other new names. The “pork rib chop” will become the “pork ribeye chop” and the “pork top loin chop” will shed that completely unworkable name for the much preferred “pork New York chop.”

In all, “14 cuts of pork are getting new consumer-friendly cut names, many that align with already-famous beef names,” explains www.porkretail.org, a pork checkoff-funded website that dives into the pork-maiden/beef-married name thing.

Not surprisingly, the name changes “right out of the gate” will “help consumers think about pork in a whole new way: like a steak,” explains the website. This is “an unprecedented opportunity… to reap extraordinary benefits…”

Unless, of course, you're sitting on a horse looking at a herd of cattle that will become actual porterhouses, ribeyes and New York strips.

So how did the beef checkoff fund research that ended up with pork shoulder being sold — no kidding — in meatcases and restaurants as “brisket”?

Danni Beer, a South Dakota rancher and fellow CBB member, wrote USDA a letter in May, that asked that exact question. In it she explains how she was given a 223-page book on beef checkoff “Authorization Requests” back in 2011 to study.

Many of those “ARs,” noted Beer, included “Attachment A's' from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association,” the beef checkoff's main contractor. One of those NCBA attachments, she explained, included funding for tracking “consumer confusion at the meatcase.” But “nowhere,” she went on, “can I find a measurable objective that includes working with the National Pork Board… to develop across species a set of common names for retail cuts.”

Well, wrote the USDA in reply, maybe “the AR could have been written more clearly,” but since it was approved, it's now in effect.

And that's just how it is in the checkoff world where up is down, red meat is white meat and the very next pork checkoff slogan might be, Pork: And You Thought You Were Buying Beef!