About Janeal

I'm Janeal and I’m a Meat Scientist. Yes, that’s a thing.

I grew up in a small town in Texas where I showed sheep and pigs through FFA. Because I wasn't good enough to be on the livestock judging team and a couple of other kids quit judging meats, I ended up on the meats judging team freshman year in FFA. I've often said that the day I was asked to be on the meat judging team was the day that changed my life. So, I've been going into meat packing plants and looking at carcasses since I was 14.

I went to Texas Tech University and was on the 1998 Meat Judging Team. I graduated in 2000 with a Bachelor's in Animal Science. I went to graduate school at Kansas State University and received a Master's and Ph. D. in Meat Science. In graduate school, I studied beef and pork quality, but stopped studying carcasses long enough to meet a boy. It was there that I met my husband, Ed. He was also working on a Ph. D. in Meat Science. He grew up on a cattle ranch in Arkansas.

Our girls

Now, I am a meat scientist at the University of Arkansas, and my husband works in Research and Development at Tyson Foods. We have two little girls. They are my biggest accomplishment and have been my hardest challenge. For fun, we chase cows and kids, show Simmental cattle and occasionally go to college football games; K-State, Texas Tech, and Arkansas.



A group of students on a plant tour.
That's me, 2nd from the left.
Aren't hairnets sexy?

I love teaching and working with students. I teach classes, advise clubs, organize quiz bowl and quadrathlon teams, and help students with research. One of my favorite things to do is to travel with students and show them aspects of agriculture that they haven’t had a chance to see before.


I started my blog in 2011, inspired by my old college roommate, Dr. Chris Raines, who was blogging about meat. As a mom, I was already having lots of conversations about the meat industry with other moms. Most people know so little about how their food is produced, but the information available to them was often wrong. Moms I talked to were misinformed. They were worried about what they were feeding their families.

I try to write posts like I’m talking to another mom in the grocery store. She has questions and I have the expertise to have the answers. What I don’t know, I’ll find out.

This one is a couple of years old.

Ways to contact and keep up with me:
Email: jws09@uark.edu
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