Matthew Miller

mrmiller@lsj.com

Gale Strasburg balks at the suggestion that he is trying to save Thanksgiving. He is a food scientist. He doesn’t rescue holidays.

But he is trying to save the rest of us from a future of dry and stringy Thanksgiving turkeys.

Turkeys as it happens, are vulnerable to heat and cold. Exposure to extreme temperatures early in their development can create changes in the quality of their meat that last all the way to the dining room table.

“With climate change, as we understand it, there is predicted to be more variation in the weather patterns, so we expect temperature swings from very hot weather to very cold weather,” said Strasburg, a professor of food science and human nutrition at Michigan State University.

Strasburg is one of a growing number of scientists working to figure out how the animals we use for food might be able to adapt to a hotter and less predicable climate. His latest project, on how extreme temperatures impact turkey development, is backed by a nearly $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

When turkeys are exposed to particularly hot or particularly cold temperatures, “what you typically would see in the birds that go to market are increased deposits of fat in the turkey breast, some muscle fiber disorganization, some effects on the ability of the meat to hold water, and so the meat may be not as juicy,” Strasburg said.

The term in the industry is PSE, for pale, soft and exudative (which refers to the loss of fluid from the muscles and tissues).

“We see that happening more frequently with a period of hot muggy weather in the summer,” Strasburg said. “When there’s a sudden temperature swing, the industry will say they will see as much as 40 percent of the turkeys manifesting this PSE phenomenon.”

A fact to remember for those those preparing this season’s feasts: not every dry, stringy Thanksgiving turkey is the fault of the cook.

“With longer growing seasons and an increased number of extreme weather events, climate-related changes are increasingly posing new challenges and risks for America’s producers,” said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, when he announced Strasburg’s grant and a spate of others last spring.

The discoveries the grants would lead to “will be invaluable for American farmers whose livelihoods directly depend on the nation’s land and water resources,” he said.

Michael Bowers frames it more inclusively.

“Everyone wants to be able to eat in the future,” said Bowers, who is the national program leader of the USDA Division of Global Climate Change, “and very few people would disagree that climate change and variability is happening. It is. So one of our goals is to adapt these production systems to a changing and more variable climate.”

It’s a relatively recent effort, but since 2010 the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture has spent more than $160 million on climate-change related research.

Carl Schmidt, a professor of animal and food sciences at the University of Delaware, studies chickens, not turkeys. And, if he’s looking at problems similar to the ones that interest Strasburg, he is coming at them from the opposite direction.

He and his colleagues have studies the genetic make up of chickens that already survive in hot climates.

“What we did was go to backyard farms in Uganda and Rwanda and sample chickens that were maintained by families,” Schmidt said. “These birds are pretty much just left to fend for themselves, so they’re exposed to all sorts of environmental challenges, with the idea that they’ve been under selective pressure to survive, not just heat stress, but also some disease stress.”

By comparing those birds’ genomes to those of the chickens raised in the U.S., they’re hoping to be able to single out genes that help African birds thrive in the heat.

“There’s pretty broad acceptance that the next generation of people and the generation after that is going to be confronted with some pretty severe agricultural challenges,” Schmidt said. “You’ll be feeding 9 billion people at the same time that the climate is changing.”