Consumers want facts, not fluff, when it comes to meat

Can you make carcase balance sexy?

Probably not. (Nor should you be trying to.)

But turns out you can make it really rather interesting – even for a consumer audience.

That’s precisely what the team at Tell Me Something I Don’t Know (a podcast from the team behind Freakonomics) managed to pull off in one of their recent episodes.

The concept of TMSIDK is simple: candidates present (what they deem to be) a fascinating bit of insight into a niche subject of their choice; their claims are verified by a fact-checking team; and the audience votes on their favourite to crown a winner.

But back to carcase balance.

The 7 November episode of TMSIDK featured Sam Garwin, a New York butcher whose chosen piece of specialist knowledge concerned the ins and outs of balancing beef carcases.

If you are at all familiar with the meat trade, much of what she had to say won’t be breaking news to you, though I was fascinated to learn of Gramercy Tavern in NYC, which does its own carcase balancing through an innovative approach to steak specials.

But what really stood out to me was how the panel and audience responded to Garwin and her chosen subject.

No squeamishness, no urghs and bleurghs, no attempts to make any of this somehow ‘consumer friendly’ by putting a cutesy spin on things. Instead, genuine curiosity about how this stuff works – plus, some good-natured chuckling at the terms ‘carcase balance’ (“sounds like a Cirque de Soleil move…”) and ‘beef animal’.

Soon, the questions Garwin had to field went far beyond carcase balancing: How does dry aging work? Can you age chicken or pork? What’s the oldest piece of meat you’ve ever eaten (365 days, it turns out)? Which bits of the animal go into mince anyway?

All in all, it was an experience a million miles removed from the received wisdom around meat comms: keep it clean, keep it vague; no one wants to know how the sausage is made.

Aggressive campaigning from anti-meat groups has no doubt contributed to this attitude, but there is also an awful lot of deep-rooted unease within the meat industry about lifting the lid on production processes.

So it was worth being reminded that some people do want to know how the sausage is made – and they are smart, reasonable people who are receptive to facts and don’t need a PG, sunshine and lollipops version of meat production.

At a time when standards in in the meat industry are once again under heavy scrutiny, it’s good to remember that facts, openness and transparency are often the most compelling comms strategies of all.