Meat Sciences
The primary goal of the applied meat science research program at the University of Florida is to produce well-trained graduate students who can go on to be leaders in industry or academia. The goal of the discipline is to build a better beef steak or pork chop and determine which factors impact the quality and safety of those products. Most disciplines studied within our department: genetics, nutrition, management, immunology, reproduction, physiology, and microbiology are reflected in end-product quantity and quality. Additionally, meat science and the meat industry are exceptionally interdisciplinary relative to sustainability, packaging, logistics, human nutrition, marketing, economics, consumer science, and food insecurity.
Aside from worker safety and sustainability modeling, efforts of the meat science research program include collaborations with the applied sciences (carcass data, sample collection, tenderness, and palatability testing) and molecular and cellular biology. Many of these collective efforts aim to improve the quality of beef produced from heat tolerant Bos indicus cattle breeds which are integral to Florida’s cattle industry. Additionally, we help Florida’s niche meat marketers differentiate the products they produce from commodity products, based on differences in production or marketing cost.
The meat science program has served as co-investigators for several nationally funded projects by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and National Pork Board to quantify the fresh meat and eating quality of beef and pork products available from processing plants and/or retail markets. These audits are widely recognized throughout the industry to be “snapshots” to benchmark change in the meat industry over time and identify problems and interventions.