News Update
April 2, 2018
The Best Beef Every Time
Most days it’s ranchers who are the beef experts.
Not so in the Learning Lounge at the Cattle Industry Convention & NCBA Trade Show. For a few short hours, Chef Peter Rosenberg schooled a ranching audience on how best to prepare beef.
From slow cooker recipes to grilling, roasts and knife recommendations, the Certified Angus Beef® (CAB®) brand chef captivated the audience sharing his familiarity with the end product that so many of the onlookers work to produce.
When it comes to questions of tenderness, Rosenberg says you can cook a variety of beef cuts and still get an eating experience the whole family will enjoy.
“There’s a lot you can do in preparation to slowly cook beef; slice it across the grain and slice it thin to preserve tenderness,” he says. “However, it’s always easier when you start with a high-quality, well-marbled product.”
The convention setting in Phoenix had Rosenberg highlighting a regional cut that can’t always be found in butcher shops, grocery stores or ranch beef freezers — the tri-tip. It’s a triangular cut from the bottom sirloin subprimal that’s most popular on the West Coast.
Continue reading this Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA article online.
USDA Expands Focus on Program Integrity
Across All Nutrition Programs
As part of Agriculture Secretary Perdue’s strategic goal of ensuring that our programs are delivered efficiently, effectively and with integrity, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) announced an enhanced focus on program integrity March 29 that will include renewed attention on transparency, payment accuracy, fraud and waste prevention, and improved quality control.
“Where protection of taxpayer dollars is concerned — the job is never done,” said Acting Deputy Under Secretary for USDA Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Brandon Lipps. “Today we are renewing our commitment to ensuring that our nutrition programs are run as effectively and efficiently as possible; increasing program integrity while maintaining the nutrition safety net for those truly in need.”
To kick-off this renewed commitment, Lipps announced his intention to create a new position of chief integrity officer to manage oversight, improvements and overall integrity strategy. This position will be located in the Office of the Administrator at FNS and will be tasked with overseeing integrity initiatives in all 15 federal feeding programs administered by FNS.
In addition, FNS has initiated an independent, third-party review of its integrity efforts across the agency’s nutrition programs.
For more information, read the USDA news release online.
The Robots Are Coming
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes the well-known opening line of British author L.P. Hartly’s book, The Go-Between. Lowell Catlett likes to use that quote to describe the future.
“It will be different there,” he emphasized.
The fast rate of change moving us toward that future is already occurring.
“Every day the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of information,” Catlett reports. For reference, 1 quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeros.
Catlett, a futurist and retired regents professor in agricultural economics and agricultural business and extension economics at New Mexico State University, entertained Angus enthusiasts as the opening speaker of the International Genomics Symposium, which was a precursor to the 2017 Angus Convention Nov. 4-6 in Fort Worth, Texas.
His comments addressed an array of futuristic possibilities — from autonomous cars to renewable energy sources and fuel cells, to robots, telemedicine and 3-D printing.
He couched his remarks with a disclaimer noting, “Nobody can see around the corner.”
For perspective on how much the world is changing, Catlett advised first looking to the past. He noted that in 200 years, from 1704 to 1904, some changes occurred, but not a lot.
Read the full Angus Journal article online.
Smartphone Users Should Wash Hands
Do you watch video recipes on your smartphone while cooking? You always wash your hands before you start cooking, but has it occurred to you to wash them again each time you touch your phone? Did you know not doing so can make you sick?
Not to gross you out, but the average smartphone is 10 times dirtier than a toilet seat. In fact, the average person touches their smartphone 2,617 times a day, according to a study by dscout, a Chicago-based research firm.
Because people often take their phones with them everywhere, including into the bathroom, various microbes are transferred when the phones are touched. Some of those microbes can survive for up to 16 months, according to research published in 2006 in BMC Infectious Diseases.
Research has also shown that smartphones and tablets can harbor bacteria such as Streptococcus, Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), and even Escherichia coli (E. coli). S. aureus is particularly harmful considering it is a bacterium that is growing increasingly impervious to antibiotics and has emerged as a top killer of hospitalized patients, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School.
Learn more in this Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA article online.
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