The Big Flop - The Battle Over Pink Slime with Van Lathan and Brad Leone | 56

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

For years, “lean finely textured beef” was added to meat products that could be found in supermarkets, fast food restaurants, and school cafeterias across America. Most consumers had no idea that this gooey, salmon-colored substance was in their food. Finely textured beef was a million dollar business, but it wound up setting off an all out PR-war between a meat magnate and some food bloggers that brought one of the biggest beef companies in the U.S. to the brink of collapse. It all started when people started calling the product by a new name that really matched its looks: Pink Slime.Brad Leone (It's Alive with Brad, Makin' It, Local Legends) and Van Lathan (TMZ Live, Higher Learning) join Misha to beef up their knowledge of Pink Slime.Follow The Big Flop on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Big Flop early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to The Big Flop early and ad free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. The year is 2002 and Gerald Zernstein, a microbiologist who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is at his desk writing an angry email to some of his colleagues. He and a group of other scientists are frantically exchanging info about a recent USDA decision that they think is dead wrong. decision that they think is dead wrong. Gerald is outraged. He can't believe the USDA gave a seal of approval to a meat product called lean finely textured beef.

It's basically leftover scraps of beef that are put in a centrifuge, mashed up, sprayed with ammonia, and mixed in with other meat products like ground beef. This finely textured beef slop is everywhere and people have no idea. Gerald shakes his head as he remembers what this stuff looks like. The name finely textured beef doesn't come close to describing this gunk. It's slippery.

It's squishy. It's got this weird salmon color. The only thing you could call it is, ah-ha, pink slime. Zernstein fires off his email. For now, he thinks this is going to stay between him and his coworkers. But little does he know that it will eventually make its way into a New York Times article, leading to a showdown between a millionaire meat mogul and a food blogger changing the course of food history in America. But now, it's time to decide what to make for dinner.

And for some reason, he's got a hankering for hamburgers. Hmm. What BPI has done is taken a process so that even more of the animal can be utilized. Beef trimmings that were once used only in dog food and cooking oil now sprayed with ammonia to make them safe to eat and then added to most ground beef as a cheaper filler. For over 30 years, people like me have been eating this along with my family. Okay, this is not fit for human consumption. A whistleblower has come forward to tell consumers about the filler the whistleblower calls pink

slime. From Wondering and Atwill Media, this is The Big Flop, where we chronicle the greatest flubs, fails, and blunders of all time. I'm your host, Misha Brown, social media superstar and former vegan at Don't Cross the Game Man. And today we're talking about the meat product that made its inventor a big beefy success, but became a PR and branding disaster, pink slime.

PR and branding disaster, pink slime. On our show today, we have an amazing chef who you might know from his YouTube shows, Making It and Local Legends. It's local legend, Brad Leone. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, man. Yeah, you were very good at that introduction, Misha. I've had some practice.

Yeah, that was good. We also have an incredible podcaster. He's the co-host of Higher Learning. It's Van Latham. Welcome to the show, Van. Yeah, you're disturbingly good. Like, you're... If I was ushering people into the gates of hell and I wanted them to feel okay about it,

I'd have you come out and do the intros. Like, it's like a horror movie good in a way. You're very, very perfect at it. Wow. Yeah, Misha might be a zero. Yeah, like, I can see it right there. Right from the top. So I guess before we get into pink slime,

are you someone who worries about what's in the food you eat? Like if you're chomping on a hot dog or a chicken nugget, do you stop and look at the ingredients or do you just go for it? The only time I really get freaked out about what's in the food is when I learned, you know what I mean? Like I'll have somebody come over from overseas and they'll be like, Hey, you

know, you're eating that those Doritos you're eating. And I'm like, yeah, they'll be like, they're illegal in Italy. They're illegal everywhere. Like everywhere else. And he's like, no, you can't put what you guys put in your food and our food. Then I get freaked out. Yeah. And then you're going down a rabbit hole about the FDA and what is legal in our food.

And then you want to like buy a farm and grow corn and shit, you know? Exactly. Exactly. Today, we are having the slime of our lives, and we owe it all to you. We're talking about finely textured beef, the product that was a big hit with the meat and fast food companies before it became the lead villain in a food blogger's war against artificial processed food, bringing a major meat company to the brink of collapse with bad press, layoffs, and millions of dollars

in losses. The inventor of finely textured beef, aka pink slime, is Eldon Roth. In the 1970s, he's a young man with dreams of making a splash in the world of meat. They must have been pissed off when someone started calling it pink slime instead of finely textured, whatever marketing bullshit that name was. Finely textured beef. Is that what you said? Or meat? Specifically beef.

Oh, I would have thought there were some pork in there or like, what? You know, old dairy cows, hooves and shit ground up. It is just beef, though. I don't believe it, because I have to be honest with you, Misha, and I don't want to head you off at the pass here before we get into the whole delightful history of pink slime. But if it is just beef that's been ultra, ultra, ultra, ultra processed, you know, I might have to throw out some words and sentiments

in favor of pink slime if there's no other additives in it. I want to hear the story here. Now I'm interested Pink Salon if there's no other additives in it. I wanna hear the story here. Now I'm interested, Misha, now you've got me. Now I want a little of the Jenna Sequa. Now I wanna hear what's going on. The people are ready, let's go, let's dive into it. It's not gonna end well.

Well, Elden doesn't have a college degree, but he's got the spirit of an inventor and he has big ideas. You can just imagine little Eldon in kindergarten, other kids, they want to grow up to be movie stars or firefighters and Eldon wants to make meat inventions or meat ventures if you prefer. Little Eldon.

Have you ever had any genius food invention ideas of your own? So growing up down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, there was something that inspired you to invent new foods and it was called poverty. That'll have you making sugar sandwiches. That'll have you taking a little bit of the government cheese and making some delectable delights with that.

Cup of noodles, too. You probably don't sleep on the cup of noodles, man. The cup of noodles, bruh. By the time we get to the cup of noodles, now you're hooking up, like like Michelin star-type situations. Well, unfortunately, when we're talking about meat inventions, we don't mean like helicopters made out of hot dogs. This is a little boring, but Elden's first major creation is the roller press freezer, which he creates in 1971. I mean, previously, it would take between three and

five days for meat to freeze. But with Elden's creation, you can completely chill your chicken in just two minutes. After inventing that roller press freezer, Elden, he just keeps on rolling. And in 1981, he opens his first factory and the roller press freezer is a key piece of equipment that helps his business boom. That same year, he also founds his own meat processing company and calls it Beef Products Inc., or BPI for short. Sketchy, red flag. Not exactly the most creative or appealing name. Come on, Elden.

He may be a genius when it comes to meat, but it's a different story when it comes to branding, which we will see becomes a major problem for him. Okay, if you owned a beef processing company, what would you call it? Heavy meat. Oof. Mine would be all innuendo. Yeah.

It'd work, probably. Yeah. Well, Elden gets the inspiration for finely textured beef when he realizes that beef processing plans are letting a lot of meat go to waste. There are all these fatty leftover bits of beef that get tossed out after they get trimmed from larger cuts of meat. So he does what any of us might do in his shoes.

He buys up all these rando beef bits, puts them into a centrifuge, spins them around to remove the fat and then chops up and freezes what's left. The result is a product that can be mixed into ground beef to lower the fat content. So Elden calls his invention lean, finely textured beef. So far, what he's just crushing meat, freezing it thinly, and then centrifuging it to separate the fat and the proteins? Yeah. Are there additives yet, Misha?

No, not yet. Let's go. Now let's meet the man himself. We've got a clip of him explaining how all those scraps of beef that he wants to save were going to waste. Let's watch. Years ago, you had all that, and you'd take a knife and cut it off and when you cut that off you'd always cut some red off and you really didn't think much of it. It wasn't that

much of what you bought but if you take that times in you know 33 million cattle or whatever it's a whole bunch. That's him? Are you f**king... that dude looks like the guy that sees somebody throwing away scraps in the sawyer house and goes, because you know what he basically did to make all of his money? He basically was, look, are you gonna eat that? That's what he did. Right, he looks like the, are you gonna eat that guy?

Actually, that should have been the name of the product. Now you're on to something. Are you gonna eat that? And then you put it in there and boom. Well, let's recap real quick. The process of creating finely textured beef. You take the parts of the cow that nobody else wanted to use. You spin it around real fast. You smash it up and then you freeze it to mix into other meat. It obviously does not sound very appealing and probably needs someone with a slick sense of marketing,

which Eldon does not seem to have based on that video clip of him. But we can't put this off forever. So prepare your eyeballs and let's bite the bullet. We've got to take a gander at what finely textured beef actually looks like. Yeah. Brace yourself. Here it is. Huh. Can you describe what it looks like for the listeners? Yeah, sure. It looks like a little bit. it looks gross, but it looks like a little bit long, pink, like rabbit food or like fucking little like wood pellets. You know what I mean? If you've ever seen a Slim Jim, it looks like a fatter Slim Jim that's undercooked.

It looks like a raw Slim Jim. It looks kind of good. It doesn't look like anything you should be eating. Okay, well, there is another more famous image of pink slime that you may have seen. So let's take a look at that and see if you think that one looks worse. Yeah, see, it almost looks like soft serve strawberry ice cream. Looks disgusting. Yeah.

They're putting it in just like cardboard beef boxes and there's a garbage can behind it. They're filling that shit with pink slime. If you guys have ever seen a movie that shows you a dystopian society and human beings have to eat something that is nondescript disgusting, but it's completely antithetical to the delectable food that we ate during the good old times. You nailed it. We had actual chickens and beef patties and lamb chops. But now, because we've been reckless with the environment

and we've over consumed, we have to eat this stuff. That is what this looks like. Right next to it's a yellow one that's chicken slime. Right. And then there's pork slime. And it comes out of a machine. You just get your vat. So here's the thing, whatever that is,

it's definitely pink and slimy, but it isn't actually lean, finely textured beef. It's most likely mechanically separated chicken, the raw materials for chicken nuggets. Yeah, I knew it. Oh man, wow. So in the 90s, there are a number of high profile cases Yeah, I knew it. Oh man. Wow. So in the 90s, there are a number of high profile cases of E. coli poisoning involving

ground beef causing a 90s frenzy that's even bigger than the release of a limited edition beanie baby. Speaking of which, don't forget to check out our whole episode on Beanie Babies. Now, in response, in 1994, Elden starts working on a special supplement for finely textured beef, one that's designed to help prevent contamination. His idea, kill E. coli and other germs by putting some ammonia gas into the finely textured beef mix. Delicious, delicious ammonia. Everyone's favorite treat. Now it is important to note that in 2001, Eldon gets approval from the Department of Agriculture and the FDA for the technique,

and he is praised for developing it. Shout out to the FDA, man. They're the best ones out there. You can trust them. As long as they're approving it, not a problem. Not a problem. Not a problem Now also beef already has naturally occurring ammonia in it, but still Do you know what famously smells like ammonia?

urine pee yes Urine you're probably gonna have to add something else into it now to get rid of your But you know what? It probably off gases, right? What's his name? Sheldon? What's this guy's name again? Elden.

Elden. You know what? They probably blast it. They gas pasteurize it essentially, right? With this ammonia gas. Maybe it kills and then they let it sit in vats and it probably smells like meat piss in this factory or whatever, but I would imagine that they off gases

after it kills. And then you're left with what they've convinced, you know, the FDA, which probably wasn't too hard. They probably just paid them. Just gave them some money. Sketch. Well, like I said, the ideas that Elden comes up with, they're not bad.

The marketing, terrible. So because it's not the sort of thing you want to hear if you're the consumer picking out food to eat for dinner, like, ooh, I think we should go with the meat that has subtle hints of pee in it. Oh, God. But one outlet describes the ammonia procedure as the meat being sprayed with a sanitizing mist,

which really makes it sound like it's getting spritzed with Windex to me. You wish it was Windex. Whatever you spray the meat with, we just assume that it's cancerous. There's almost nothing that you can't spray the meat with that won't feel like a carcinogen. They should do the barbecue route.

Spray some vinegar on the shit, you know, maybe? Yeah. A little salt water. Yeah. But to be clear, all accounts say that this product is safe. The problem is that it all sounds and smells pretty unappealing. But for now, it's not a problem, since the product is not being marketed directly to consumers.

It's mainly being sold to large meat companies who mix it into their products. Sounds like a sneaky back door right there. Well, you actually are selling it to consumers. You're just not telling. You're hiding it. Yeah. But when consumers, especially health-conscious parents and food bloggers, hear about how all of this works,

they're not going to like it. But at the moment, these consumers, they don't know the first thing about finely textured beef. Chomping down McDonald's, Burger King, all of that stuff in and out. We don't know what's going on. What year are we talking here? What year are we in?

1994. Okay, all right. So internet's not on your phone in everyone's hand either, so. No. Easier to get away with this shit, you know? We are chomping on that fast food and say, I'm loving it, you know?

Exactly. Yeah. I'm Pablo Torre, the host of Pablo Torre Finds Out, where we ask guests like Action Bronson to solve mysteries like this. When was the last time you wore pants? I don't... probably 15 to 20 years. The last time I put pants on, I had an accident. And I never wore them again. So for more investigative journalism like this, unlike anything else in podcasting,

subscribe to Pablo Torre Finds Out and listen wherever you get your podcasts. All the usual suspects are all in on Elden's Beef. We are talking Burger King, Taco Bell, of course McDonald's. But finely textured beef is also picked up by big stores like Kroger and Walmart. And in order to keep up with demand, Eldon starts opening up additional factories. Another major buyer, which will be very important later, is the Federal School Lunch Program, which at one point uses 5.5 million pounds of finely textured beef in a single year.

Now that tracks. Government meat now. Government meat. So I hope you school kids are hungry for sloppy joes, because you're going to be eating a lot of them. No doubt. They don't have the culinary expertise to cover up the taste of the pea when you're eating it in school. You take a bite and you go, something's wrong. You're like, you know what I mean? So, at its peak, how many pounds of finely textured beef do you think BPI is making per year?

Oh, God, I bet you it's going to be more than this. I bet you like 200 million pounds or something. Little higher. What? 500 million pounds. That's nuts. That's nuts. Our guys rolling in the money too.

Corporate, big corporate chains are loving it. You know, they, a bunch of people got bonuses. They just, they knocked off like 7% on their beef costs annually, which turns into like a billion dollars. And everyone's fired up, man. Keep rolling and spinning that shit. Yeah. To give you a sense of how common finely textured beef is, Craig Lech, who is chief of safety and quality at BPI and also Elden's son-in-law, says, if you had a hamburger between 1992 and 2012, quote, odds are lean, finely textured beef was a part of that.

I'm literally just like trying to add up the damage that I've done to myself with this stuff. I've come to terms with what's inside of me. Mm-hmm. Listen, if you get rid of the ammonia and didn't do it on this massive industrial scale, like if I like made a little weird operation that could pull this off at my house and use like really good products, it'd probably be good. You know, he probably started off as a good idea

and now it became this massive money making monster. And you know how that goes. Next year, you got to make more profit and now you're poisoning kids in schools and shit, Sheldon. Sheldon. Now, although that whole process has been approved by the Department of Agriculture and the FDA, one insider will still turn out to be a big problem for Eldon. In 2002, a USDA microbiologist named Gerald Zernstein sends an email that will deal a huge blow to Eldon's business.

Gerald is convinced that the FDA and the USDA have approved finely textured beef without actually knowing whether it was safe or not. And he's written an internal email to his colleagues to let them know that he thinks this stuff is bad news. The most crucial part of this email is that he uses two words to describe Elden's product, pink slime. Wow.

There it is. He coined the phrase. He coined the phrase. He's a whistleblower. Yeah. Put him up there with the Enron people, put him up there with Christian Bale from The Big Short. This needs to be a movie.

Yeah, it's a movie. He's a whistleblower, the guy from the insider. He deserves his props for blowing the whistle on Pink Slime, man. It's also, can I be honest with you, though? Yeah. I also could Perry Mason this. I mean, I could argue the other side. You know what I mean?

I could argue that Pink Slime is kind of a pejorative for this stuff that is essentially super ground beef. Vansalobius for textured food products. I knew it. So Gerald also says in that same email, quote, I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling, which to be clear is just Gerald's opinion. It was never proven to be fraudulent.

So how do you think the general public's going to react? They're gonna be freaked out. What do you mean? Like... What? Especially if some images get leaked. They must have, I'm sure there was not a lot of photos in the factory. If I was Elden, I gotta sure there was not a lot of photos of the factory.

If I was Eldon, I gotta be honest with you. What's the guy's name that was the whistleblower? Gerald Zernstein. If I'm Eldon, I gotta press a button on old boy, man. I gotta get him out of here. In my mind, this is where the story goes. It started off as a Spielberg movie and now it's a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Hilden has to hire a couple of heavies from down in South Florida, the Bronx, someplace like that, and they got to pay a visit to this guy who's making trouble. But a whole enterprise of pink slime. He's got to bring in the Gambino's the bananas or something like that. Man, we're talking pink slime money. All right. This is going to be clean. All right. It's just going to blow his car up, or it's just than that, man. We're talking pink slime money, all right? This is gonna be clean, all right? It's gonna blow his car up, or it's just gonna drive into a tree at 120 miles an hour for no reason.

Just throw him in the centrifuge. That's the way the crazy movie ends. Yeah, obviously. This guy ends up becoming pink slime. Heck yeah, that's how they do them. So in December of 2009, the New York Times drops an exposé about finely textured beef. The article is not about how processed or unpleasant looking finely textured beef is. Articles about that will come later.

It's about BPI's safety record and how they use ammonia to remove contaminants. The article claims that despite the ammonia treatment, allegedly there were dozens of times when E. coli and salmonella were found in BPI beef, including in products that were headed to school lunchrooms. Though it wasn't proven that any contaminated meat left the factory, and BPI isn't linked to any illness or outbreaks. As part of the report, the Times got their hands on some internal USDA emails trashing finely textured beef, including the one from microbiologist Gerald Zernstein. Crucially, the article quotes Gerald's line describing the finely textured beef as pink slime, it's only a brief mention, but now the term is out there just waiting for the public to take notice and jump all

over it. The Times Exposé doesn't immediately take a bite out of BPI's very nice estimated $440 million in annual profits. Man, oh man. Could you imagine? But soon, Elden's going to be in an all-out PR war to save the image of his finely textured beef and stop people from calling it pink slime, damn it. I don't know why he's going down with the shit, man.

You know he's got a dump truck full of money somewhere. Walk away, bud. All right, just go fly fish or whatever the frig you're into. Have a pig farm, Elden. But you should have just walked away with your money. This is the part of the movie that I always wonder about. It's not the money. It's the winning.

It's excitement. When is the excitement? This guy right here doesn't want Zernstein, who is definitely a hater. Yeah, he's a hater. Okay, he doesn't want Zernstein to win. So now it's him versus Zernstein. That's the whole movie.

Well, in this movie, we're introducing a new character. A food blogger. Bettina Elias Siegel is a former lawyer who went to Yale and Harvard Law. Bettina is involved in her local Houston school district's parent committee on food. She's very concerned about what kids are eating in their cafeterias.

And in 2010, she starts a blog called The Lunch Tray. Her blog posts have titles like The Chocolate Milk Wars, or The Kids Snack Hall of Shame and Pushing the Limits of Gluttony. The first one was kind of awesome. Yeah. But then it got, it got, it puts in the limits of gluttony. That one got a little dark.

Yeah. Yeah, that got a little like seven in the movie. Yeah. So as you can imagine, the Times article about pink slime and E. coli and salmonella almost getting into cafeterias has her ready to start smacking the Salisbury steak out of the kids' hands. On July 7th of that year, she writes a blog post about the article saying that anyone should, quote, shudder when watching a child eat a hamburger in a public school lunchroom. Ooh. I really wouldn't eat the lunch in high school.

It wasn't like a thing, you know? Oh, it's hot lunch, baby. Give me that chicken patty. Ooh. Well, Bettina is not the only person who has taken note of pink slime. In April of 2011, Jamie Oliver, the celebrity cook known as the Naked Chef, does a segment in which he makes his own pink slime. Let's watch. So this is how I imagine the process to be. Over here I have something that you probably know well.

They don't really put it in a washing machine. They put it into a centrifuge and they spin it. It splits the fat from the meat and separates it. So then you end up with stuff like this. the fat from the meat and separate it. So then you end up with stuff like this. So for the listeners, he threw some meat into a washing machine. Yeah, he threw like a chopped up brisket out of a bus tub into a, looked like a dryer actually. And he put it on a spin spike, oh man, just be, yeah.

Yeah. Wild. Now, as we've already established, and as Jamie Oliver admits, this isn't how the process actually works. It's exaggerated for dramatic effect. Elden would never use a dryer. But 5.4 million viewers tune in to watch the episode on ABC and the clip goes on to be viewed over one and a half million times. Now all this starts to cement the image of finely textured beef as pink slime in the public mind. And this is all happening at a time when Elden should be

having the best moment of his career because he's being inducted into the Meat Industry Hall of Fame. Hell yeah. It's a real thing. Is Ray Kroc in the meat hall of fame? Ray Kroc? Who's Ray Kroc? He's the founder of McDonald's.

You ever saw that movie? No. With Michael Keaton? No. Wow. Oh yeah. That's a good movie. It shows how he completely defrauded the two guys that actually started McDonald's out

of their entire business, their logo, their name, and goes down in America as one of the great winners of all time. Well that is that's that's a classic American story of corporate takeover. We have word Ray Kroc is in the Hall of Fame. Hell yeah. Boom. That's like the meat Hall of Fame is basically a cover upup for just like, like, domestic supervillains. Right.

Van, if you were getting inducted into the Hall of Fame, what would you say in your speech? Oh, the Meat Hall of Fame? Yeah. I would say, listen, man, you know, it took a lot, a lot of work and a lot of heart disease and a lot of heart disease for me to get where I am right now to all of the people that had to pass out a too much bacon, a too much ground meat. May your grave sites line my path to immortality. And then I will drop the mic and I will leave.

That's stand up ovation, man. Yeah. He gets it. That's how you make Hall of Fame, with an attitude like that. ["The Bad Press Theme"] So in response to all of the bad press, Elden and BPI put out some videos of their own, trying to set the record straight, and let's take a look at one about ammonia.

Oh, hell yeah. When most people think of ammonia, they probably think of household cleaners. I'll bet you can smell it in your mind, can't you? Ammonia exists in many products, and household cleaners are merely one of them. But there is so much more to ammonia than you may know beyond products. The fact is, your body produces about 4,200 milligrams of ammonia every single day.

That didn't give me a lot. I could do a better job selling ammonia to the people. Oh yeah, we can get away with it. This is how I would have done the ammonia thing to make ammonia seem cool. You guys ready? Yeah. It would have been how ammonia saved the people. Oh yeah, we can get away with it. This is how I would have done the ammonia thing to make ammonia seem cool. You guys ready? Yeah. It would have been how ammonia saved the world.

Yeah. Oh, you're feeding starving children. I mean, the people aren't looking at it in the right light here. Exactly. Yeah. We, back in the day, had harvested all the nitrogen out of the soil, and we were going to starve until a gentleman named Fritz Haber invented ammonia, and then after he invented ammonia

to put nitrogen back into the soil, then we were able to fertilize and grow. All of that stuff now. Well, he was able to pull nitrogen out of the air, as opposed from out of the soil, right? I think is what his- Right, and then used that to actually use the nitrogen to fertilize the soil.

He created ammonia, all of this whole thing. He made some weapons of World War I. We're not going to look at that part of it. We're talking about food. And so, ammonia is part of the reason why you can grow. And if you have it a little bit in your beef, so what? And then that's the end of the commercial. That's the direction he should have gone in,

rather than this, like, awkward and boring video that he made, because he's somehow still managed to remind people that ammonia can be found in urine. So in 2011, as bad press around the product builds, Taco Bell, Burger King, and yes, even McDonald's, stopped using finely textured beef. They got away with it. They know how to stay alive. They get out of the game if shit starts getting a little weird.

Mm-hmm. They'll let Elrond or whatever his name, he can burn for all they care. They got away with it. They made a trillion dollars. They'll start grinding up chickens' feets and I don't know, like some type of soybean or something, and making chicken nuggets out of that. So they're on the new scandals.

Yes. They're all gonna be fine. But for Elden, when these companies halt the use of his finely textured beef, BPI loses a quarter of its business. Now, fortunately, Elden and BPI still have one buyer lined up the US Department of Agriculture, which is happy to use it as part of school lunches. So the Bastards. So the company isn't in complete meltdown mode yet, but things are about to get much, much worse for Elden. And surprise, it's going to involve a website

that was extremely popular in 2012. It was a sex video, wasn't it? I knew it. He looked creepy. On March 5th, 2012, Bettina Siegel reads an article about how the Department of Agriculture has just purchased seven million pounds of slime to use in kids' lunches. Now, remember, her whole thing is being the defender of school cafeterias. So people are outraged that a product that's not good enough for Taco Bell would be served to kids in school.

And Bettina very much one of those people. The next day, she jumps into action and she starts a petition on Change.org. Now that brings back some 2012 memories. Now, it was the golden age of Change.org petitions. Have you ever started a Change.org petition? No, no, I've signed them though, for whatever the social cause of the day is. I don't even know. Yeah, whatever.

My sister sends it to me and I just go, look, I signed it. Don't call again until the summer. Until my birthday. Thank you. Bettina's petition calls for an immediate end to the use of pink slime in our children's school food. The following evening, ABC airs a report on finely textured beef, and they ultimately do a total of 11 segments on the product. That is the kind of treatment that usually is reserved for political scandals. Like, this is really shaping up to be beefgate. There's not a movie about this. It's going to be a documentary or a scripted movie on Netflix.

Yeah. We should all be in it is what I'm getting at. So let's take a look at one of those ABC reports, which is accompanied by some unappealing graphics. Here's how it's done. Those waste trimmings are gathered, simmered at low heat to make it easier to separate fat from muscle, put in a centrifuge, and spun to finish the separation. Next, the mixture is sent through pipes,

where it's sprayed with ammonia gas to kill bacteria, and finally compressed into bricks and flash frozen for shipment to meat packers and grocery stores, where it's added to most ground beef. They'll then miss out on a real opportunity to have me involved in this whole thing. Mm-hmm. You could have saved him.

I definitely could have saved him because I can make an argument. I'm not that grossed out by what I just saw, man. Like, sometimes I look at the bottom of the chip bag and I see they told for like, Dys-toxetine, and I'm like, I shouldn't be eating. It still seems like there's relatively few ingredients in Pink Slime. It's what I'm like, I shouldn't be eating. It still seems like there's relatively few ingredients in pink slime.

That's what I'm saying. Considering like what you see in every package now, like pink slime ain't that bad, I guess. I know, right? So crazy. Shit, do I like pink slime now? Are we fans? I think that this whole experience has actually put me onto Pink Slime.

The consumer is just misinformed. I'm glad, Misha, it's people like you that could really shine a light on how Pink Slime actually is a health food product, essentially. And we should all be very grateful to be eating it. Well, whatever we think, the story was making massive waves at the time. And Siegel is surfing those waves all over social media to get more and more people to sign her little petition. And according to Change.org, she gets over 137,000 signatures in just one weekend.

And eventually, the total number of signatures reaches over 250,000. So people have some serious beef with this beef. Yeah. But all of the pressure here is starting to have an impact. On March 15th, just 10 days after the initial article was released, the USDA announced plans to leave it up to schools whether or not they want to buy products that include finely textured beef.

Man, them rich schools ain't buying that shit. You know it's going, just getting trucked in everywhere else. Boy, I tell you what. The passing of the buck right there is so fantastic. The actual entity that is responsible for oversight and setting the nutritional guidelines say, hey, you can eat it if you want. That's funny right there.

Well, in response, Elden runs a full page ad defending the company in the Wall Street Journal, and it backfires like some chunks of beef getting shot the wrong way out of a centrifuge. At the very top of the ad, in giant eye catching letters is a quote that includes the phrase, I am very skeptical and cynical about for-profit meat companies and their professed commitment to food safety. Uh, the quote goes on to say that actually BPI does a good job on food safety, but if you were flipping through the paper that morning and saw this ad,

the main thing you'd see is skeptical and cynical about for-profit meat companies. So my thing is this for him is with all the bread that he had rolling in, all the meat that he had rolling in, he couldn't hire some kind of hotshot Madison Avenue whiz kid to like get him out of this situation. He's just stepping on landmine after landmine trying to defend his product. Yeah. He just needed to invest in like a Don Draper or something, you know, like, let's let's get this going. Let's make this shit sexy. Let's sell this. But guys, guys, why would he have to spend all of that money when he could just start

a website called pink slime is a myth.com? No, stop. Brilliant! Yeah, truly wild. Saying pink slime is a myth makes it sound like the website is about how phony and artificial the product is. Also, by calling it pink slime, they're making that a term even more. But even after all of this, one thing that Elden says he refuses to do is change the name of finely textured beef. Like, just call it lean delicious normal beef.

Oh man, lean delicious is the best name. There's lean delicious. Clean, lean, delicious meat. Clean, lean, delicious. He's not an idea man. He's the nuts and bolts guy. Classic example why you need a team for success, okay? You can't do it all yourself, Sheldon.

Eldon. This is Wozniak trying to run Apple. You know what I mean? You build the computers. Let Jobs go out and sell the vision. He needed a Jobs. He would be running the entire meat industry right now. He would own McDonald's if he had some smooth talking mofo

in the turtleneck to come and sell the vision to people. I'm telling you. So this publicity campaign absolutely does not help. And some of Elden's big customers like Kroger and Walmart start to move away from products containing finely textured beef. Production at Eldon's plants take a nosedive, going from 5 million pounds per week down to 2 million pounds. By March 26th, Eldon has to shut down all of his factories but one.

Damn. And in the aftermath, the company loses more than $400 million. So they won't be having any filet mignon anytime soon. Should've got out. There's another possible way that Elden could've spun this. I'm just thinking about all of these things that pop into my mind. Okay.

If I'm Elden, I'm going, look, you guys are coming after Pink's line. If this works, Zernstein, you're going to cost Americans this many jobs. Boom! It's funny you say that, Van, because he does in fact use patriotism and politics as his next move. You have to. He's in the corner. He's going to see if he can make pink slime a darling of red states. Oh no, he lost me. Hell yeah. He brings in three Republican governors,

Rick Perry of Texas, Terry Branstad of Iowa, and Sam Brownback of Kansas to take part in a press conference where they say pink slime is tasty and safe. Dude, Dick Cheney, you know how much pink slime that guy probably ate? Is he still alive? Yes. He was made of pink slime. Normally, you know, I'm into the partisan politics, but this was his last swing. He had to go out swinging.

Had to. Yeah. Cause I'm going to be honest with you. I'm on his side. We know this isn't fair. What happened to him. And I'll be honest with you. I'm on his side. Yeah. We know. This isn't fair, what happened to him. And I'll be honest with you, I'm looking for Zernstein right now. I want to have him on the podcast. Zernstein, come talk to me on higher learning.

Well, to put your mind at ease, in addition to that gubernatorial stunt, Elden also sues ABC News for the sum of, wait for it, $1.2 billion. Yeah, should have went for two. Now, in 2017, Disney, ABC's parent company, winds up settling for a still sizable amount of $177 million. ABC settles without admitting any wrongdoing. They actually maintain that their reporting is accurate.

But in any case, BPI actually gets some of that Disney money. Hell yeah. But it's still not enough to cover the $400 million in losses. You gotta walk away, man. That was your last American nut right there. You gotta walk away, Elton. So even though those red, meat-loving state governors rallied around BPI and ABC settled the lawsuit, it's too late.

The damage is done. He's lost hundreds of millions of dollars, closed down his plans, and had to lay off hundreds of employees. Eventually, Elton steps down as the head of BPI and the name of the company is changed to Empirical Foods. It took him almost 40 years but he finally came up with a slightly better name than Beef Products Inc. But for the vast majority of consumers, finely textured beef will always be known as Pink

Slime, the brand that will never be the same again. And food bloggers are victorious. So it's gone. No, they just changed the name and changed the process. Are you kidding me? Like, there's way too much money in that. They didn't just, like, start throwing it in the garbage. Well, let's do a little where are they now?

So sales of finely textured beef actually bounced back when beef got more expensive. So people are willing to eat slime, but only as long as it'll save them a few bucks. And speaking of a few bucks, empirical food is still kicking and doing well. There you go. So not cooking like they were in the heyday, but still getting it popping over there. People are filling their pockets with beef. Also, the Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service recently decided that lean, finely textured beef could be called just...

...ground beef. Oh, woo. Because that's what it is! But Tina, she spearheaded two more Change.org petitions. One about chicken produced in China, and another about a truly lame nutrition education video produced by McDonald's. So all you home chefs better watch out if you've been passing off store-bought sauce as secret family recipes, her next petition might just be about you.

So here on the Big Flop, we try to be positive people and end on an upswing. So are there any silver linings that you can think of that came around from finely textured beef and the pink slime fiasco? I think we're still, I think it's still a major part of ground meat and processed meat products in America. Overall, I kind of feel more positive about the whole product after this conversation in general. I think the overall positive is this, you know, everyone has different motivations on

the internet and all that stuff like that, but we have got to care about what's in our food. We have to. Yeah. You know, conversations about what it means to go farm the table and what it means to go organic and what it means to have whole foods in our bodies, then the conversation around Pink Slime and products like Pink Slime is part of the narrative or the public discourse, should I say, that probably got us to that.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think the part that made it kind of sketchy, right? Well, it seems like it was the ammonia process. I think so. Yeah. So their argument, if there was no ammonia in it, then it was just a different technique of kind of separating and mixing meat. I mean, it looked disgusting, but like, yeah, I mean, yeah, you are what you eat, man. It's cliche for a reason. Well, now that you both know about pink slime, the beef blend that brought in big bucks before developing a bad reputation, would you consider this a baby flop, a big flop or a mega flop? Mega flop in the fact that it seemed to be, and to Vans' point,

with the right team and the right mindsets, I mean, these guys were kind of dorks. It seemed like right, man, like they could have pulled this off. You know, they really blew a good thing. They were on the road to becoming a billion dollar company. And and they really blew it, man. They really blew it. I'm gonna have to go mega too. Just cause of so many of the opportunities

they had to pull a game seven out and they just missed free throws, they fouled, they didn't play the clock right. And really, it took down an empire. It took down 400 million a year, or 400 million he was making. It took down an empire. Well, thank you so much to our delectable guests, Brad Leone and Van Lathan, for joining us here on The Big Flop.

And thanks to all of you for listening. Remember, if you're enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review. We'll be back next week to teach you how to say no to drugs. Maybe? It's the drug prevention program of our youth. Dare. Bye. See you guys later. Bye guys. If you like the big flop, you can listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.

Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. The Big Flop is a production of Wondery and At Will Media, hosted by Misha Brown, produced by Sequoia Thomas, Harry Huggins, and Tina Turner, written by Anna Rubinova and Luke Burns, engineered by Anna Rubinova with support from Andrew Holzberger. Managing producer is Molly Getman. Executive producers are Kate Walsh and Will Mulnati for At Will Media. Legal support by Carolyn Levin of Miller, Korzenik, Summers and Raymond. Producers for Wondery are Adam Azarath and Matt Beagle.

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