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

The Big Flop

Wondery

Society & Culture, Comedy, Business

4.6 • 884 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the Big Flop early and ad-free.
0:05.3	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:14.8	The year is 2002, and Gerald Zernstein, a microbiologist who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture
0:27.6	is at his desk writing an angry email to some of his colleagues. He and a group of other scientists
0:35.5	are frantically exchanging info about a recent USDA decision
0:40.6	that they think is dead wrong. Gerald is outraged. He can't believe the USDA gave a seal of
0:48.9	approval to a meat product called lean, finely textured beef. Yuck.
0:55.0	It's basically leftover scraps of beef that are put in a centrifuge,
0:59.0	mashed up, sprayed with ammonia, and mixed in with other meat products like ground beef.
1:06.0	This finely textured beef slop is everywhere, and people have no idea.
1:15.6	Gerald shakes his head as he remembers what this stuff looks like.
1:20.6	The name finely textured beef doesn't come close to describing this gunk.
1:27.0	It's slippery. It's squishy. It's describing this gunk. It's slippery.
1:28.6	It's squishy.
1:29.9	It's got this weird salmon color.
1:33.1	The only thing you could call it is,
1:35.2	aha, pink slime.
1:38.6	Zernstein fires off his email.
1:41.2	For now, he thinks this is going to stay between him and his co-workers. But little does
1:46.8	he know that it will eventually make its way into a New York Times article leading to a showdown
1:54.3	between a millionaire meat mogul and a food blogger changing the course of food history in America.
2:02.2	But now, it's time to decide what to make for dinner.
	...

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