Public Health – Seattle & King County was awarded a KCD Regional Food System Grant to replace an unsafe and sometimes illegal meat supply chain with a safe, legal, local, and culturally appropriate meat supply chain for King County’s 100,000 person and growing East African immigrant population by working with a partnership of producers, processors, distributors, consumers and agencies.
The three overarching objectives of the project included:
- Fully identify community-specific needs and goals for meat processing, sourcing, and consumption; in collaboration with East African community groups (Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Somali).
- Characterize the meat supply chain and propose an improved supply chain that can meet the needs of the communities; in collaboration with licensed meat processors and East African community farm groups.
- Develop an educational meat safety video that will help inform community members on how to source, transport, and consume meat in safe ways; along with community leaders and in compliance with local and federal meat regulations, and be culturally respectful.
The projected resulted in this short video produced in Amharic, Tigrinya, and English:
A longer version was also produced:
One of the objectives of this project was to develop meat safety videos in multiple languages to reach the communities. Based on survey results, the training videos were prepared to teach the community how to source safely, transport, handle, and consume custom meat and meat from retail meat shops.
The mini videos were tailored to the following situations captured in our process maps. However, for continuity, the videos primarily focus on what consumers can do to check for safety and sourcing while also informing delivery personnel and retail meat shops and restaurants as a secondary audience.
- General consumers: How to source, safely receive, store, and consume. This can be for custom meat products (e.g., whole sheep) and meat from butcher shops (e.g., for kitfo).
- Delivery personnel: How to store properly and safely, package, and transport meat to customers. The focus for this one can be the delivery of custom meat products to individual households, not to grocery/restaurants.
- Retail meat shops and Restaurants: How to source USDA-inspected meat, inspect delivery, safely store, and handle.
- Details about WSDA and USDA meat businesses, farms, and live animal auctions in KC and region. This focuses on the U.S. regulatory system and current licensed facilities models for selling livestock.
Collaboration
- Ethiopian Community in Seattle (Tsega Desta)
- Somali Health Board (Rahma Ahmad)
- Eritrean Community in Seattle and Vicinity (Yordanos Teferi and Marta Kidane)