meat

When researcher Linda Bacon showed 750 adults in Britain menus that included two plant-based entrees, they were half as likely to chose them if they were listed in a section called "Vegetarian Dishes." In a World Resources Institute blog, Bacon says the grouping "highlights the lack of meat or fish" and reduces interest for a variety of reasons.

After almost completely removing the growth-promoting drug ractopamine from its pigs, Canada is outpacing the U.S. in pork sales to China, where the drug is banned. Canada has only beat out the U.S. in pork sales a handful of times in the last 20 years, says Reuters.

Gov. Larry Hogan stood aside and let a Maryland law take effect without his signature that will bar use of medically important antibiotics to promote weight gain among cattle, hogs and poultry. The Maryland law will take effect on Jan. 1, 2018, the same implementation date as a similar law enacted in 2015 in California, the only other state to control antibiotic use with the goal of preserving the effectiveness of the drugs to fight disease in humans.

Jury selection starts this week for a lawsuit filed by Dakota Dunes-based Beef Products Inc. in 2012 against ABC News and correspondent Jim Avila over “pink slime.” BPI is seeking $1 billion in defamation charges, claiming that ABC made its product — beef that has had the fat removed and then ammonia gas added to kill bacteria — seem unsafe to consume.

Livestock producers typically want to get their animals to market weight quickly so they can sell them and make money. But in poultry, there's rising interest in broiler chickens that take longer to mature and are more expensive to raise, with the trade-off of tastier meat, says the New York Times.

The European Commission has been in a two-year deadlock over whether to remove formaldehyde from livestock feed. The chemical, which is used to kill salmonella, has been linked to cancer.

The Trump administration is mulling a draft executive order to pull the U.S. out of NAFTA, says a senior White House official, according to Reuters. NAFTA renegotiations were expected to start in August, but a withdrawal by the U.S. could rush the timeline.

Excrement from industrial livestock operations is poisoning Virginia’s Shenandoah River and putting people at risk for E. coli poisoning, says a report by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Ending a visit prompted by a meat-inspection scandal, the EU food safety commissioner said Brazil's meat inspection system "must be independent and not under the influence of politicians and other actors," reported Reuters. EU commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis told the wire service that EU restrictions and stepped-up checks of meat from Brazil may not be removed in the near term.

The largest meatpacker in the world, JBS, has suspended operations at 33 of its 36 plants in Brazil "amid the corruption scandal that has caused some of the country's biggest export markets to ban Brazilian meats," said Reuters. A police investigation says meat inspectors accepted bribes to allow sales of low-quality meat, or did not inspect plants at all; the Agriculture Ministry says only a couple of dozen plants were targeted.

With the safety of Brazilian beef in question in a meat-inspection scandal, the USDA said it will re-inspect and test fall shipments of beef from the South American country for pathogens. The USDA said none of the 21 facilities targeted by Brazilian police have shipped meat to the United States.

With a scandal clouding Brazil's meatpackers, Montana Sen. Jon Tester announced legislation for a 120-day ban on U.S. imports of meat from the South American country. The ban will give USDA "time to comprehensively investigate food safety threats and to determine which Brazilian beef sources put American consumers at risk," said Tester's office.

Per-capita consumption of meat will climb again this year, according to USDA estimates, up a bit more than 1 percent from 2016 to average out at 217.2 pounds. This time, Americans will proportionally eat more red meat — beef, pork and lamb — than poultry, such as chicken and turkey, but it will be close.

A San Francisco Bay-area food technology company served its test-tube chicken strips, grown from self-reproducing cells, to a handful of taste-testers, says the Wall Street Journal, "and the product tasted pretty much like chicken, according to people who were offered samples." The debut of Memphis Meat was the latest advance of "clean meat."