Individual booths, red lights to mask colors, positive pressure ventilation to keep out unwanted smells and pass-through sample presentation doors – that’s the environment where trained sensory panelists do their work at the ISU Sensory Evaluation Unit. So, basically this is what you see, sitting in your little booth, waiting for samples to come through the little door. You cleanse …
Sensory Evaluation 101
How difficult could it be to figure out whether a piece of meat is tough or tender, dry or juicy, flavorful or not? A group of ag journalists found out this week as guests of Elanco Animal Health to a Sensory Evaluation Briefing at Iowa State University. Basically, we all got a crash course in how to be “sensory panelists.” …
Perception is Reality
When it comes to testing food, it’s all the senses that count, not just taste. “That’s because there’s only about four things we can taste,” says Dr. Ken Prusa with Iowa State University. “Sweet, salty, sour and bitter.” Which makes taste alone a pretty limited factor in the total experience of how we perceive a food. In fact, we use …
Designing Meat Quality Trials
Designing trials for a new animal health product to evaluate meat quality is expensive and complicated, according to Dr. Floyd McKeith with the University of Illinois Department of Animal Sciences. He was one of the speakers at a workshop for ag editors this week in Ames, Iowa sponsored by Elanco Animal Health. According to Dr. McKeith, some of the factors …
Elanco Sensory Evaluation Workshop
Bringing an animal health product to market requires a lot of testing – not just on how that product affects the animal, but also how it affects the meat that comes from that animal. That’s what a group of farm media folks, including myself, learned about this week at Iowa State University in Ames, courtesy of Elanco Animal Health. Pictured …
Beef Quality Counts
“In today’s consumer-driven environment, just one bad beef-eating experience has the potential for long-term impact for all segments of the food chain,” says Dr. Ken Prusa of Iowa State University. I will be hearing about that from Dr. Prusa and colleagues Dr. Floyd McKeith, University of Illinois, and Dr. Keith Belk, Colorado State University, at a sensory briefing and wet …
On the Air in the Hallway
The Missouri Corn Growers Association held a seminar last week in conjunction with their annual meeting on “Profiting in the New Paradigm – Feed and Fuel Security.” The focus was on how corn growers and livestock producers can work together to produce ethanol and still feed cows and pigs and chickens at a reasonable price. One of the speakers was …
Covering the President
Covering the visit of President Bush to the Advancing Renewable Energy conference in St. Louis made for an interesting day. It was most amazing to me how incredibly tight security was, especially for the press. The general convention attendees had more freedom than the press. The “local media” were confined to a “pen” – that’s what they called it – …
Farm Media at the Renewable Fuels Conference
The Advancing Renewable Energy Conference this week in St. Louis is subtitled “An American Rural Renaissance” and the media here have gotten an eduation in the importance of agriculture to the future energy security of this nation. The farm media here, like Peter Shinn with Brownfield Network, already knew that. It’s been very gratifying to hear so much about agriculture …
Johanns at the ID INFO EXPO
Second day of the National Institute for Animal Agriculture ID INFO Expo was a busy one, between the Secretary of Agriculture and the protesters. A small but vocal group gathered outside the Westin in Kansas City with signs and umbrellas saying “No to NAIS.” I figured that about 99 percent of the people passing by on Grand Avenue had no …