Walking across rooms with hanging carcasses and blood is an everyday scene for Caleb Sehnert. As UC Davis’s meat lab director, Sehnert is teaching students that slaughterhouses aren’t as dim and gory as most believe.
“A lot of people have these ideas of slaughterhouses being dark, bloody and dirty,” explains Sehnert, sitting in his UC Davis office. “But a lot of students come in and they’re like ‘wow it’s so clean’ and ‘it’s not as bad as I thought.’”
Built in the mid ‘60s, the meat lab is part of the university’s animal science department and used for teaching and research. Sehnert performs all day-to-day functions of the lab along with teaching his “basic meats” course where students learn meat sanitation, slaughter, fabrication and grading.
His class has turned into a “bucket list” item for most students, he added, and grown from about nine students to capping the course at 20 — though he lets a few lucky undergraduates slide past the threshold.
All animals processed here are owned and raised by UC Davis. Lessons at the meat lab overlap with teachings happening at the schools’s sheep and swine farms, feed lot and beef unit.
“Everything kind of comes to a head at this facility,” the director noted. “They learn the USDA slaughter process, how to humanely and safely process animals; nutrition, grading the carcass and evaluate maturity, marbling and yield grading.”
Sehnert’s lesson plans for students typically leave in someone’s grocery bag the following Thursday or Friday. In addition to research, the meat lab serves as a meat market every Thursday and Friday from 1 to 5:30 p.m. People stand in line outside of Harold Cole Facility Building “C” with their tote bags and cash or checks in hand.
“Working here is a really nice integration of culinary art and I really like food plus animal agriculture,” said student Rebecca Laemmel, as she works as cashier and hands change to a customer. “Before working here, I didn’t see myself working at a slaughterhouse. The reality is, most people eat meat — I eat meat. And being able to connect that with animal agriculture is really satisfying. I get to feel like I’m helping people get food and be involved with the science.”
A big push for students enrolling in his course is the farm-to-fork movement. With a growing interest among millennials about where food comes from, working at the meat lab is natural progression for “foodies” in the agriculture department.
Each year, 600 to 800 total heads of red meat species are processed at the meat lab, including beef, hogs, sheep and sometimes goats. As a USDA lab, inspectors are present at all slaughters and check for lymph nodes, abnormalities or anything that would declare meat inedible.
“We’ve had only one condemned animal in the 10 years that I’ve been here. It was cut into pieces and thrown away, it had cancer,” he explained. “The inspector said it was the first animal in 20 years (at the lab) that was condemned.”
Since starting as manager a decade ago, Sehnert reports quadrupled retail sales and twice the amount of teaching at the lab. As part of curriculum, he takes students on tours to see how other meat facilities operate and different methods used.
“A lot of these old time meat guys are really excited about students and kids being excited about (butchering) now because it’s really becoming a dying art,” he said. “We have a lot of big slaughterhouses and packing plants shipping meat everywhere, but people don’t really know how to make bacon or sausage from scratch. That’s what’s cool about this place.”
His meat team is smoking 15 varieties of bacon for its next competition. Wood chips are slowly churned into a fire that smokes the dangling racks of pork inside of an environmental oven. The oven controls everything from air flow, humidity, smoke and moisture. Once the meat meets its 148 degree internal temperature, the machine shuts off.
At the end of February, UC Davis’s meat team will defend its nine year winning-streak at the California Association of Meat Production, hosted on campus. The competition consist of a cured meat contest, informative seminars, a trade show and an awards dinner.
“I wish I could get (students) as freshman so they could participate here and we have a meats team that they can participate in too,” he added. “(Animals) come in as farm animals and they’re leaving in people’s grocery bags in the cleanest way possible. Students see that, and all the awards we’ve won and they’re really excited to be a part of our team.”
Contact Jenice Tupolo at 530-406-6239.
