There’s a common complaint in the ag world that we don’t often preach beyond our own choir. We really need to communicate outside our own communities.
Jennifer Houston, president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), got the chance recently when she presented at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Global Food Forum, held Monday, Oct. 7.
This was the fourth such event held by the WSJ. This year’s forum focus was “to explore key risks and opportunities shaping the global business of food.” The event’s program showed a rapid-fire list of panels, each moderated by a member of the WSJ staff. Most of the panel topics focused on food industry technology, consumer behavior, and some resource issues, particularly water.
“I think it was well worth doing,” Houston told WLJ after the event.
She described the event’s audience as comprised of a lot of CEOs, “anywhere from startups to names that you’d recognize.” She added that it was a more liberal audience than she usually talks to and that she’d been told she was the first rancher to participate. The producer representation on the panel list was notably small.
Houston spoke during a short, morning panel titled “Meatless Burgers? Milk-Free Dairy?” Other members of the panel were James Mulhern, president and CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation, and Jessica Almy, director of policy for the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit group aimed at supporting the plant-based “clean meat” industry. The WSJinterviewer/moderator of the panel was Heather Haddon, a WSJ reporter.
“I thought our panel went very well—very civil,” Houston told WLJ, noting that she was able to bring up several points about beef that mainstream audiences might not have heard before.
“If you read the mainstream media, you’d think you’re saving the planet eating an Impossible Burger, but you’d just be fooling yourself,” she said.
“U.S. beef is less than 2 percent of greenhouse gases and, globally, U.S. beef is less than one half of 1 percent. That was a message I wanted to get across so that people would start thinking about beef in a different way than maybe it’s been portrayed with all the media hype the plant-based burgers have been getting lately.”
She also stressed that, while consumer choice is welcome, misleading labeling is not.
“We will not stand for deceptive, misleading, or disparaging labels and we want it to be clear to consumers that they are getting an imitation product when they buy plant-based burger or a plant-based product, as well as the sustainability story that beef has. We’re not the problem that social media paints us.”
The WSJ coverage of the panel described it as the milk and meat industries fighting to defend their turf from plant-based alternatives. It additionally noted that plant-based “milk’s” impacts on the milk industry serves as a cautionary tale to the meat industry.
The WSJ coverage additionally noted that U.S. sales of plant-based “meats” rose 8 percent by volume in the year through late August, whereas meat sales were called “flat,” citing Nielsen, the consumer behavior data/measurement company. It also pointed out that, according to Nielsen, plant-based “meats” made up 1 percent of the meat market.
Houston told WLJ that the WSJ reached out to her as a participant and that there are plans for more beef industry interaction with the paper.
“I’ve already been asked for a follow-up article from them. So, I think that was a nice platform for us to get our message out there. I really do.” — Kerry Halladay,WLJ editor
