While it’s unlikely that Meatingplace has very many readers outside the industry, the stories (and even ads) within it matter a great deal to what ends up on people’s plates across the country. And for that reason, I called up Lisa Keefe, the magazine’s editor, hoping that her expertise and unusual perspective—covering the industry for the industry—might illuminate something about food production that isn’t otherwise accessible.

I spoke to Keefe earlier this month about what worries meat processors most at the moment, how the industry thinks about the animal-welfare movement, and the snazzy machinery I saw advertised in her magazine’s pages. The conversation that follows is the first installment of “Tricks of the Trade,” a series of interviews with the editors of trade publications, and it has been edited for length and clarity.

Joe Pinsker: What are people in the industry most excited about at the moment, and what're they most afraid of?

Lisa Keefe: Starting with the second question, the most immediate concern right now is trade. As American volume consumption has trailed off over the last 15, 20 years, the U.S. meat industry has done just fine because they're finding ways to export to other countries. Increasingly, meat is working its way into diets in some really impoverished countries; as these countries create a middle class, they start to eat more meat. If there is a disruption in our trade relationships, it's going to be very, very bad for the industry.

A lot of people in the ag industries in general, but specifically talking about meat, would have benefited tremendously from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. There's a real crazy quilt of tariffs and fees and things, and this would have simplified a lot of that for the Asian markets, which are huge markets for U.S. meat these days. And there's a lot of concern for the future of NAFTA. The official line is, “We're not looking to walk away from NAFTA—we're just trying to renegotiate it.” There's a lot of concern that in order to get, for example, more automobile manufacturing back on this side of the border from Mexico, they might be using ag products, specifically meat, as sort of a lever for that.

I think what they're really excited about is new avenues—you have this Millennial generation that's really much more open to different kinds of tastes and cuts, and the industry is kind of giddy about what they can do, and flavors that they can play with, and different presentations that are being sought out by audiences that have not been sought out previously.

Pinsker: Yeah, what trends do you see in how consumers buy and eat meat? What's on the rise, and what's falling by the wayside?

Keefe: What's on the rise is portion control. Consumers still want to go to a steakhouse, but they're not gonna go get a 64-ounce whatever. They're going to get a really good steak at a smaller portion. And, along with that, meat is becoming an ingredient in a dish instead of being at the center of the plate. This is big in the increase in popularity of ethnic cuisines, which often use meat as a part of a dish as opposed to the whole point of the whole dinner. The meat's by no means the dominant ingredient. That's where you get this seemingly divergent statistic where you have the number of meat-eaters at a very steady percentage, and yet you see the volumes declining over time. The way that people are eating meat is different.