Jamming on both sides of beef

Australia’s first BeefJam illustrated that the rural-urban divide is mostly about an absence of face-to-face contact. Media stories and Facebook can’t deliver the level of communication and rapport that happens when people actually meet.

A collaboration between Target 100, a community initiative of Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), and the Youth Food Movement (YFM), a food education organisation, BeefJam was conceived as a way of giving both sides of the fence some real perspective.

The aim was “transparency”, said MLA community engagement specialist Georgie Fraser, which meant that the eight young urban consumers were introduced to places that never feature in meat industry advertising.

Their introduction to the Australian red meat paddock-to-plate process took them to Queensland, and visits to a farm, a feedlot, a meat processor (including the stunning room and kill floor) and various butchers.

Afterwards, with seven young red meat producers, they engaged in a 48-hour “jam” - an intense group process investigating the way Australians produce and consume beef.

Assumptions were overturned on both sides of the divide.

Joshua Polley, a 29-year-­old Melbourne fitter and turner, recognised that those who slaughter animals for meat aren’t disengaged from the process.

“They’re not completely desensitised to what they’re doing,” he said. “They do have respect for the animals but they also understand the necessity for getting meat out there to the public.”

Bronwyn Roberts, a senior project officer at the Fitzroy Basin Association in Queensland and an enthusiastic promoter of the beef industry, found herself seated next to a vegan at dinner, a vegan actively running a campaign for people to eat less meat because of its contribution to global warming.

“A lot of the information they have comes from outside Australia, the United States in particular,” Ms Roberts said. “They didn’t realise how different our industry is in Australia”.

“For them to be so open and receptive to our industry, and to say, ‘we didn’t realise you did things like that’ - that was very rewarding.”

Ms Roberts also found herself viewing veganism through new eyes. Her companion chose the eating philosophy because she thought there were enough meat alternatives for her to live without having animals die on her account.

Ms Roberts found that she could respect that point of view in her companion, in a way that she hadn’t been able to respect the abstract notion of veganism.

“And for them, we attached real faces and real people to what is normally a very distant issue. When we got down to the commonalities we had, it was very easy to connect as people.

“They want a straight answer on the hard issues. They just want to know the truth.

“There is so much confusion and misconception around hormones, because of things like Coles’ No Added Hormones branding.

“Some of them wondered whether, if they bought meat without that branding, were they buying added hormones?”

Ms Roberts explained that they needed to eat 75 kilograms of hormone-treated beef to get the same hormonal load as they would get from an egg. And that because cows can physically eat only so much grass, the faster growth that comes from hormone treatment allows producers to go easier on their pastures.

“They hadn’t made those connections.”

The Youth Food Movement has a 16,000-person reach across Australia.

It might have been risky to expose eight highly connected young people to a warts-and-all look at the beef industry, but the Target 100 team felt that risk was low.

“The Australian beef industry has the best standards in the world, so we knew they weren’t going to see anything that would be frowned upon,” Georgie Fraser said.

“One of the biggest risks is not doing projects like BeefJam. If the industry isn’t going to be transparent, and talk about what we do and why, then someone else will do that. There’s a greater risk in not opening our doors.”

The insights developed during BeefJam will be used to refine the Target 100 program.

“Consumers are overwhelmed with information,” Ms Fraser said.

“That’s the role of Target 100 - to provide factual, unbiased information that consumers can use to make decisions.”

The Youth Food Movement (YFM), which whipped around its membership to find the eight Gen-Y consumers who took part in BeefJam, is on a mission.

“We’re trying to get consumers to give a damn about where they put their money,” YFM communications manager Helena Rosebery said.

“We’re telling them that there’s power in their food purchasing. It’s like voting: every time you purchase food, it’s a kind of vote for a system you believe in.”

A lot of people don’t believe in red meat. YFM doesn’t aim to preach food choices, but it does want people to have the right information, hence its involvement in BeefJam.

“We wanted to give consumers a transparent experience of how red meat is produced in Australia, rather than in America or other places,” Ms Rosebery said.

“The media that we have easy access to, like Cowspiracy, is based on American production, and that’s very different to what we do in Australia.”

Face-to-face contact was important. “There’s a lot of data out there, but we need story to create empathy. We wanted to have young consumers and young producers in a room so they could see each others point of view.”

The exercise was so successful in building connections that YFM wants to go further.

“Things like BeefJam need to happen more. There needs to be more opportunity for young people to have an experience like this together, and put a name and a face to this ‘other’ person and realise that they are really not that other.”

It also eroded some of the otherness that agriculture has assumed in the eyes of the urban consumer.

“Prior to BeefJam, some of the YFM consumers said they were quite nervous about seeing the beef processor. Some of them saw the kill floor, the stun gun, the boning room, and most of them walked away saying wow, that was actually a lot more humane than I thought it would be.”