One Year Later, The Makers Of ‘Pink Slime’ Are Hanging On, And Fighting Back

Five weeks before the Internet went mad over the presence of “pink slime” in ground beef across the U.S., the product’s creator was being inducted into the Nebraska Business Hall of Fame.

It was Feb. 2, 2012, and Eldon Roth – a man without a college degree – was being celebrated for his life’s work: inventing a method of extracting lean beef from the scraps that would otherwise have been discarded during the butchering process. He was hailed as an innovator in his field, not only for utilizing previously wasted beef, but also for an almost fanatical concern with food safety. The Dakota Dunes, South Dakota-based company he founded, Beef Products, Inc., had developed a reputation for going beyond federal sanitation guidelines in order to prevent bacteria and other microbes from infiltrating its product, according to food scientists who routinely visited the plant. But mostly it was known for producing a leaner and less expensive beef product by combining conventional ground beef with Roth’s unique innovation: lean finely textured beef, or LFTB.

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