Tom’s Big Picture

My alma mater’s administration tries so hard to move away from its roots and be like that Other University. But Aggies keep messing the P.R. job up by being good at Aggie stuff, like beef jerky:

Recently, however, beef jerky has earned a shred of respectability. In Texas, where all things beef find their meaning, researchers have been applying actual science to make better jerky at the E. M. “Manny” Rosenthal Meat Science and Technology Center, at Texas A & M University. The resulting Aggie jerky is apparently a breakthrough. As the Web site thrillist.com put it, it’s “a Unified Theory of Meat available by the ½-pound bag.”

The Aggie-culture-hating administration must cringe: a research program at A&M makes the New York Times for beef jerky. But I think most Aggies would agree: turning beef jerky into an engineering optimization problem is pretty cool.

And yes, there’s a website: beefjerky.tamu.edu. Lest anyone laugh, this is actually pretty complicated. I had a Food Engineering class where we were actually using little pistons hooked to computers to measure the “crunch curve” (newtons plotted over time) of a tortilla chip. The folks at Frito-Lay have a much tougher engineering job that just about anyone.

This probably won’t help the Newsweek rankings (which is mostly weighted towards what snotty college administrators think about other colleges), but that’s ok. Too much attention could ruin the environment over at what the liberals (affectionaly I’m sure) call Crackerland.