The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Judging Meat, Vampire Fish Invasion, the Rise of White Castle

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

This episode celebrates our latest digital issue going live! Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Corinne Iozzio: www.twitter.com/CorinneIOZO Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week.

And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Pramita Saha. and I'm Corinne Iosio. Corinne, welcome to the show.

We all know by now what this means. What are you doing here? Oh, my goodness. Could there be a digital edition of Popsai coming out? There could be. This is our editor-in-chief Corinne, and she is here to talk about the latest issue of popular science, a magazine. Yesterday, the digital edition of Popsi our fourth and final one of 2021.

The winter issue is out. You can head to popsye.com to check it out. It is all about taste and yumminess. And this was a particularly fun issue for us. We've been wanting to do a food issue for a very long time. But the challenge with a food issue is that food is so big and broad. We really wanted to find a way to talk about food that felt fresh and new and fun. And that's why we landed on the taste issue. It's not about the science of food and how we're going to eat on Mars and like soilant, future nutrients and all that other crazy advanced stuff. There is advanced science in here, to be clear.

However, what this issue is about is parsing what it is that we like about different foods, different flavors, and why we like them and how that changes over time, which is really fascinating because taste is, yes, actually hard to account for, but also very much a moving target. And so we just really wanted to peel that onion and find all the deliciousness in that. inside. Ooh, delicious. Yeah, it's a great issue for this time of year, too, because we have a lot of holidays about eating this time of year.

I'm still full. I know it's been like two weeks. Yeah, same. I am just preparing my body for Christmas and New Year's. So today, as always, as we do quarterly, we have gathered to tell some stories that fit the theme of our latest issue. Some of these may have to do with pieces you can dive into in full if you go check out the issue on popside.com. But others are just, you know, other tasty morsels, other nuggets of information that we thought would be fun to share. So let's get into it.

On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, making a delicious magazine, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Corinne, why don't you start with your teas? I want to talk about the time that White Castle worked to convince the American public that hamburgers were health food.

They aren't? I'm so sorry, Perbita. Wow. And then they realized that I, Actually, the only marketing they would ever need to do was the movie Harold and Kumar. They literally can coast on that for the rest of time. Well, I can't wait to hear more about that. Perbito, what's your tease?

I'm going to chat about how we can possibly save our favorite fishies by cooking up super invasive bloodsuckers. Oh, super invasive bloods, you say. Not just regular invasive. Yeah, not just regular bloodsuckers. Okay, cool. Sibs. So my tease is just quite simply. I don't think I need to dress it up.

I want to talk about intercollegiate competitive meat judging, which exists. Yeah, I'd drop the mic on that one too. What should we start with today? Maybe we should do our meat. stories on opposite ends. Yes. Let's make a vampire sandwich. Yes.

Oh, delicious. Great. Okay, so why don't we start with White Castle, Currant? Okay. Before I dive into this, I do want to give a shout out to Dax King, who's a columnist at one of our favorite sibling brands, Mel Magazine, who is the one who first alerted me to this really, truly bizarre little diversion in American Fast-Whorst. food and scientific history that we're about to go down.

So I don't know if any of you out there in podcast land or even on this particular recording session have ever seen White Castle advertising from the mid to late 1930s. I can't say I have. I thought you were going to say like the 90s. And I was going to be like, Corinne, I'm not that young. I've seen a TV commercial. But no, I have not seen White Castle ads in the 1930s. I feel like White Castle is still in the 19th.

30s. Like it has such an old school look to it. Yeah, it does. It does. They embrace their throwback vibes, but they have done some things to update, which we'll get into it a little bit later. These pop up on the internet every now and again, because the weird thing about White Castle ads from the late 30s and into the 40s is that they were touting the health benefits of eating their sliders. Now, this is actual ad copy from display ads for White Castle. Energy building vitamins and White Castle hamburgers, which like, okay, true, there are. There is energy. It's meat, that's fair. Calories are energy.

Yes. A balanced meal for growing bodies. Which I think we're starting to get a little hairy there. And of course. Well, there are onions on them, right? Isn't that like the thing that makes them? Yes, and there's ketchup. So I guess maybe that's fruit.

You know, you're your veggies. Yes. So as we know, this is sort of sending up our spitey sense because we know that by modern advertising standards, you probably would not be able to get away with any of this. especially a burger joint and especially especially a fast food burger joint. But in the 1930s, the business minds behind White Castle felt like they had what they needed to back this up. I'll explain.

So the White Castle founder was a fellow named Edgar Waldo Billy Engram. And he in the late 20s and into the early 30s had found him. to be in a bit of a PR pickle, if you will. Americans didn't really want to eat meat. They specifically really, really didn't want to eat ground processed meat. And there were a couple things going on here. About 20 years prior, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, which had some, as we all know, really disgusting and downright disturbing depictions of conditions. in meat processing facilities in the United States. He described filthy conditions, people scraping like meat refuse off of floors with

shovels and throwing it back into the processing line, rats getting ground into sausage, and in some instances, workers falling into machinery and actually getting ground into the meat itself. To be clear, yes, yikes. To be clear, the jungle was a work of fiction, but it was not plucked entirely out of thin air, right? There were some truly appalling conditions happening across the U.S. in all kinds of industries, but meat really hit home for a lot of people. So the uproar was swift. Sinclair started corresponding with people in the federal government.

They wanted to know how he had drawn this depiction, what his sources were. And eventually this did lead to some real federal oversight into the meat industry and just really consistent pressure for them to clean up their acts literally. feed people actually something akin to what they said that they were feeding them. Unfortunately, not a lot of the same self-reflection in terms of labor rights. No, no, but that's a whole other podcast. But rich people weren't eating ground-up labor rights. Exactly. But you hit the point exactly, right?

Like the damage was done, right? Right. eventually U.S. meat sales, this number is particularly for overseas, dipped 50%, which is a pretty big freaking hit. And consumer advocates of the time were equally unkind to the meat processing industry. And this was early days of consumer advocacy journalism. And some people were taken some swings, but they were also sort of laying the groundwork for the type of work that, you know, consumer reports and similar publications do now. I was a fellow named Arthur Kallay, who was a consumer advocate, and he wrote a book called 100 million guinea pigs. And in this book, he wrote,

quote, The hamburger habit is just about as safe as walking in a garden while the arsenic spray is being applied. For beyond all doubt, the garbage can is where the chopped meat sold by most butchers belongs, as well as a large percentage of all the hamburger that goes into sandwiches. is. Up until this point, Billy Ingram had been flying pretty high. White Castle is, if you don't know, the first legit fast food chain in the U.S. And Ingram himself had pioneered the idea of takeout. But his business was hurting. And despite his best efforts to extol the quality assurance measures that he put all of the meat that went into his burgers through, it just wasn't making a dent. And He talked to newspapers about the meats that they bought as whole cuts and the specialized equipment that he required his butchers to use.

They had a food lab that they trotted out as a public relations measure to talk about all of the work that they do to make sure that their burgers are burgers and that the food that they're giving you is wonderful and amazing and everything that they say. but it just wasn't making a dent. So Mr. Ingram decided he needed science. Yes. And he put out a call and the person he ended up recruiting was a physiological chemist named Jesse McClendon, who at the time was working out of the University of Minnesota. And McClendon had some decent bona fides. He had been studying digestion for quite some time.

He had been at Cornell University before he was at University of Minnesota, had done some foundational research on hemoglobin and digestion and his claim to fame other than the burger jaunt that we're about to go down was that he took the first in-situ measurement of the acidity level of a human stomach, which basically means he was the first person to swallow a pH sensor, and then retrieve it and see what it said. So he knew some things about meat-based diets. He had done some reading. He had seen studies about dogs that had eaten all protein diets and fared rather well. Of course, a dog is not a person, so he also looked at previous research about humans that

were on all meat or high protein diets. And at the time, he didn't turn up any that showed any real major dietary deficiencies. Again, this does not bear into the present day. We all know precisely what a ketogenic-style diet does to your body, but we're not going even open that particular rabbit hole right now. So what McClendon proposed was a 13-week experiment in which a single participant would subsist on an all-white Castle burger diet. They would eat 10 sliders a meal, three meals a day. And for anybody who's counting, that does total exactly one Crave case.

Now, if based on the current calorie counts of White Castle burgers published on their website, it's about 150 calories per burger or 4,500 calories a day, which is a lot. Yeah, yeah. Sizable. Yeah. He found his willing participant who was a med student named Bernard Fleish. And overall, the study went okay. And this is just what's reported.

Nobody has found the original paper. So this is all reporting and conjecture and whatever was available through University of Minnesota archives that people were able to find. So Ingram, the study concluded, quote, The student maintained good health throughout the three-month period and was eating 20 to 24 hamburgers a day during the last. few weeks. He clearly could not handle 30. Like it just became far too much. The Ingram then went on to conclude that a person could, quote, eat nothing but our sandwiches

and water and fully develop all their physical and mental facilities. Now, for those of you who are counting along with calorie counts, even if we go down to 20 burgers a day, which is two-thirds of a crave case, that's still 3,000 calories a day, which is not tremendously more than the average person should be eating, but it's towards the, like, the, it's in the range of what a full-grown adult male should be targeting. And retellings of this also note that Ingram got a food scientist to sign off specifically on the claim that his burgers were good for children growing big and strong on all burger diets. The only ill effect that anybody reported came years later from Fleish's daughter.

She said that he never willingly ate a hamburger again. I mean, that makes sense. That's really reasonable. Wait, so the sample size for the experiment was one person? Was one. Oh. Was one person. Underwhelmed. Yes.

No, this whole thing is just, this would not stand in modern advertising. But Ingram had what he wanted. He had proof, albeit dubious by any modern scientific standard, that burgers were not, not only not bad for you, but that they were healthy. And this obviously draws comparisons to Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me is the way that fast food culture has just gone completely off the rails since the mid-20th century. Just a quick recap, in Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock ate McDonald's three times a day for a month. He gained 24 pounds, had horrible mood swing, sexual dysfunction, and needed 14 months in a total vegan diet to fix the damage he'd done in 30 days. And of course, now there's no shortage of studies documenting just how terrible fast food is for us.

One 2016 review dubbed it a main risk factor for lower diet quality, higher calorie and fat intake, lower micronutrient density, also increased risk of diabetes, developmental disease, cardiovascular disease, inflammation stress, and so on and so on. And the modern solution that fast food chains are offering for this are their own types of healthy options, which in many cases are plant-based meat substitutes from impossible and beyond. White Castle actually has an impossible-based version of its famous sliders. The calorie count is higher than the other slider, which is just a reminder that just because, in this particular instance, just because something might be healthier for the planet, which is also very debatable. It certainly doesn't make it healthier for you. Just replacing meat doesn't take the health impacts of fast food out.

That's the White Castle journey. Yeah. Well, there's a lot there. Yeah, you know, I think it's, you know, obviously there's a lot of emphasis on low calorie, low fat diet that, you know, makes fast food, like really easy to demonize. And certainly it's not something people should aim to eat every day. But then it's also like, I don't know, sometimes when people are like, well, yeah, the impossible slider isn't good for you.

I'm like, yeah, that's not the point. It's a burger. Yeah. Nobody's pretending that it's like we shouldn't pretend. Yeah. that fast food is ever going to be good for you, we should just accept that fast food can't be the only food you eat. Yeah, totally. I do love that. Well, because like, you know, White Castle was not like the only brand doing this. I mean, like, Coca-Cola was like, you know, put some pep in your

step, give it to your baby. I mean, cigarette companies used to make, like, claims about how wonderful they would open up your lungs. Totally. Well, I'm sure, you know, I know I say this like every episode but if we're lucky enough to be around as a species in a hundred years I am sure there are things that we think are good for us today or that are marketed as good for us that people be like what the heck yeah this the whole ad campaign reminded me a little of like the got milk like dairy press push that I think it still continues I'm just not their target audience anymore But I mean, like yes, calorie and protein are important to a growing body, but like this this whole idea that, you know, kids up to their teens like need to continue drinking

milk every day like that, I think the science behind that is still like, hmm, not sure about that one. But yeah, it was just very good marketing again. which we're, I guess we're seeing a little bit of a shift now with non-dairy milks, but, but then there's like a backlash to that where there are a bunch of adults who are like, I drink whole milk, whatever. And I'm like, yeah, good for you. I mean, that like would make my guts fall out. But, yeah, happy for you. All right. We're going to take a quick break. And then we'll be back with some more facts.

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Oh, yeah. Actually, that's very good seg because I'm talking about the so-called vampire fish. So, well, I have to give a shout out to Matt Hengold's Hetling, who was one of the feature contributors in our taste issue. He wrote this excellent story about eating invasive species here in the U.S. It's called Appetite for Destruction in the magazine, so please check it out. But one of the wildlife he mentions in the story, and, um, Originally, he had wanted to write a lot more about this species, so I'm going to bring his dream to life here on the podcast. It's the sea lamp ray, which is a surprisingly common fish that I didn't know about in Atlantic waters that's slowly making its, well, no, no, no, I should not say slowly, pretty quickly making its reign of terror in the northern U.S.

So just to step back for a minute, you know, if you enjoy, if fish is a regular part of your diet, it seems potentially inevitable that one day you'll be dining on C-Lampbray Frisch, maybe even within the next decade. I can't really say that that's a fact, but more of a premonition, but it's certainly supported by some facts that I will share now. So first I wanted to discuss what sea lampraise are because it's kind of something I'm still trying to figure out According to some internet drama queens

They are the most disgusting fish on the planet They're also the stars of the 2014 indie horror movie Blood Lake attack of the killer lamprays A favorite, a classic And sometimes they rain down from the sky Yes, that's why I know about that. lampreys. Are they also in the shark nato? Oh, is that a combo? No, no. No, they should be. Just they should be. That's true. But just in real life, sometimes they fall from the sky because they're

late enough to get pulled up into the clouds with the water. And then they plop down and everyone's like, what the, what is this? What is this hellfish? That featured on a past podcast episode, right? I mentioned it briefly when I talked about the Kentucky meat shower, which was not lampreys. The Kentucky meat shower was unidentified chunks of meat. When lampreys fall from the sky, they are whole and toothsome. Okay, I didn't even come across that fact. So that is awesome and makes me love them even more. But honestly, I feel like they can't be that bad because people across

the Western Hemisphere, eat them and seem to enjoy it. I was trying to figure out what exactly the flavor of a sea lamprey was. Some people report that it's mildly mushroomy. Others say it's similar to squid or liver. So if you haven't searched what a sea lamprey looks like just yet, they basically, they look very similar to eels. You know, they're a jawless vertebrate, like longish fish. Some can grow, I think, up to like maybe six feet long, but typically they're a little shorter.

But what's really creepy about them is their mouth. So I said they're jawless, but they're not toothless. They actually have this circle of teeth that looks like a ring of hell. and what they do with it is they actually like twist it and bore it into their prey. So they'll eat fish that are much larger than them and they'll just like latch on like a little sucker, bore through the scales and the skin, and then they suck out like the blood and the bloodly fluids from their prey. And that's how they live. That's their niche.

I mean, I also saw Dune last night. Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The sand. It's a giant freaking lamprey. Yeah, actually, that's a great point. I'm going to have such a hard time sleeping. Yeah, there's that one scene where you're looking straight down into, sorry, what's the name of the creature?

Sandworm? Sandworms, yeah. Yeah. Where you're looking, it was actually a very beautiful scene when you're looking right into the sandworm's mouth. while they're in the helicopter. Yeah, that's, I can imagine sea lamprey is looking kind of similar. Luckily, much smaller, though. But much smaller, thankfully.

Not in my dreams. So like I said, they're pretty common across the Atlantic Ocean, but they don't, we haven't, historically they haven't been found inland in the U.S. So, you know, if you're going out for a swim, like off the Jersey shore, yeah, maybe you'll have a little lamprey encounter. What? Maybe. They don't, I should preface that there aren't any reports of them, like, latching onto humans and vampiring on humans. So, no fear there.

But, yeah, again, if you're, you know, like if you're out in Idaho on the lake, you're, you're, you're. Lamper encounters are close to nil. Just leeches there. But it's a different case up in the Great Lakes and kind of the border along Canada and some of the northern U.S. states. What? Oh, hello to producer Jess up in Illinois. Up over in Chicago. Like, what the what is it?

This should hit close to home, Jess. So in the late 80s. in the late 1800s, that's kind of when the first reports of sea lamp rays like inland in the U.S. first popped up. They were spotted in Lake Ontario and the New York Finger Lakes. And they were kind of contained to those bodies of water, largely because of Niagara Falls, which served as a barrier to some of the other Great Lakes. but what really perpetuated their spread from there was the canal systems.

So, like, again, these, you know, lampreys can't get anywhere without water, and most of the lakes are not naturally connected, but as humans created these shipping routes through the Erie Canal and smaller waterways, the lamprays found new routes to new places. and though they're a marine species, they're kind of like salmon. So when they reproduce, they can easily go into freshwater and adapt to a totally different condition and habitat. So again, this just makes them even more suited to be invasive. And there's some interesting research into whether lamp rays are truly invasive to the

the Great Lakes. We don't really know how they showed up in Lake Ontario, though, you know, like a lot of invasive seafood. It's usually, again, perpetuated by boats and humans bringing them over. So there's a biologist from Queens College who's used environmental DNA, which is just like genetic imprints of a particular like organism in like the surrounding habitat or environment to actually show that sea lamp rays might be native to Lake Ontario. So if that were true, you know, that would shift this whole invasive narrative. But it doesn't change the fact that this species is causing a major problem up in the Great Lakes. So we talked about how sea lamprays just destroy their prey, right?

and they're doing this to a lot of important fishery species in the U.S. And that includes everything from brook trout to lake sturgeon to walleye. And these are like these are fish that people typically just like to go out and catch on a line and eat, you know, as part of their regular pescatarian diets. But the sea lampreys also like to eat them. they're having a heyday up there. And they've even potentially like wiped out a couple smaller species that can only be found in the Great Lakes region.

So all to say that they are a big problem, like we can't just let them spread across the northern U.S. And so there are like there are actual tactical units. that are dedicated to managing sea lamp rays at this point. So again, it's been like 150 years since they started spreading. And at this point, the estimates show that there are probably tens of millions of them in the Upper Midwest. They've tried releasing pheromones that can maybe, like, corral the lamp rays and, like,

drive them away from places they haven't spread yet. They've used these lures called jerkbait. And they kind of just look like rubber lampreys, and they'll hand them out to like fishers and anglers to try and catch the sea lampreys. But it really, it doesn't work. These vampire fish are just, they're incorrigible. So the solution that's been presented by some, and it's still kind of a niche solution, but this is kind of the whole thesis of, of the invasive species feature in our magazine is why don't we just eat them? I mean, humans are the ones who created this problem and, you know, we're one of the most

powerful predator species out there. Why not just snag a couple lamprey and cook them up? Because they're freaky looking for people. They are. And that's the stigma that has been hard to break through, especially here in the U.S. Again, they've been eaten, people have been eating Lampere for centuries. In Europe, people have been fishing them since ancient Roman times, like just treating them like escargo or some type of classy surf and turf. In Iceland, home of fermented shark, cooks will throw them into traditional fish stew.

And in some villages in Portugal, there's a very popular dish where, um, They boiled the lamprey in its own blood and then served that over rice, like pretty straight up. And it's supposed to be delicious. And then even like the British royals, like they, I think one of them, one of the King Henry's, he actually died from eating too much lamprey. What? He was a glutton for lamprey. Buried the lead.

Sorry. There's just, there's so many facts. I mean, we were speaking about pie during our break, and one of the proposed ways to eat Lampere is just cooking it up like a meat pie. So it's really a blank slate. It's kind of like tofu. You can do so many things with it. And one of the chefs in our magazine story, he's based here in Vermont, chef, Doug Payne at the Juniper Bar and restaurant. And he hasn't gotten like a steady source of Lampre just yet, but he talks about like all the things he dreams of like doing with it.

Like frying it in beer batter is like one of the things he would love to do. And I've read about people cooking them in wine sauce, which honestly sounds delicious. So again, it's getting over the grossness of the lampre's mouth. But people are out there eating squid and eel. Like, why not the lamprey? It's common. It's, it's, it's, it. And I mean, it's just a matter of getting over that initial visual hurdle.

Like, you should have seen my face the first time I saw, like, a celery root. Celery root is horrifying. Totally. I actually haven't seen that. It's like, it's like a mutant, um, artichoke. It was like tentacles. Yeah, it looks like a tumor. With like legs and spines.

But it's delicious. So eat your lamprey. Yeah, I mean, you're never, you're probably never going to see it on your plate as it looks to a brook trout who glances back at it. Well, I guess I don't know if fish can turn their heads that far. but I just glances back at its mirror. Oh, crap. He's a lantern prey like sucking out its insides. Oh, Lord.

Yeah, no, I hope I never see a lamb prey like that. Wow. Well, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the whole idea of just like eating our way out of the invasive species problem is really cool. And I'm really, that future is such a great one. I'm looking forward to people reading it. I do think that, like, I am slightly skeptical, not of the, like, the people we talk about in the future definitely, like, have the right idea. But I'm just so skeptical of, like, American consumerism that I'm like, we're going to decide that lamprey is the hot new thing. And then rich people are going to make them farm lamb prey.

And then it's just going to be a whole thing all over again. But, you know, that's a problem for another day. Yeah. And that's something that did come, like it is one actual criticism of what's called invasive orism. Or, yeah, like you said, Rachel, eating our way out of the invasive problem. There is the possibility that harvesting these species will actually perpetuate their spread further, whether it be because of capitalism, because of companies seeing an opportunity

to like increase these population numbers or like more natural means of like stimulating like some species response to threats is to reproduce more and sea lamprey is already reproduce like whoa so there's the possibility that taking some of them out will like they'll try and balance you know the odds by just growing more and more I feel like the key is really like to keep it very tied to like locovorism, right? Like it definitely is like unabashedly good for people to consume invasive species at restaurants in the towns where those species are invading. Head to the farmer's market. And then like do your thing.

Once you start shipping stuff around the country, I start to be like a little more like, ah. Yeah, that's a good point. So maybe Jess can have her fill of lampreys and we can focus on like Japanese not weed. Before you know what, Jess was going to be doing. doing a thrifty black market lamprey trade. Just like sneaking suitcases to New York. I'll just lander my name in this way. We were just complimenting your enterprising nature.

All right. We're going to take a quick break. Hopefully not to eat some lamprey. And then we'll be back with one more fact. This summer serve up the cookout classics, Heinz ketchup and craft singles. Every good burger needs. needs a layer of perfectly milty cheese and thick rich ketchup.

We all know it's not a cookout without Heinz and Kraft. Okay, we're back. And I'm here to talk about competitive meat judging, integrally did competitive meat judging. Okay, so first things first, meat judging is a sport. And the sport is not having the best meat. The sport is judging the meat the best,

which is, I feel like, the most surprising part. There's this great video from like the Texas Tech newsroom and that opens with these students being like, people are just like, are you eating steaks all the time? And then the news person's voice is like, there are many misconceptions. I'm just going to do a dramatic reenactment because I can't play this video.

And then, you know, the students like, or people are like, are you butchering the stuff? you in there with knives, but there is much more to competitive meat judging than meets the eye. Anyway. Oh, boy. So, no, you don't eat meat. You don't butcher meat. You're not preparing the best meat.

So what is competitive meat judging? I will tell you. So it seems to have started in 1926 when it was introduced at the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago. And it was for like 70 years, the national livestock and meat board oversaw it. But ever since 1996, it's fallen under the purview of the American Meat Science Association. There are six competitions every year, two in the spring and four in the fall. And the international intercollegiate meat judging contest in Dakota City, Nebraska every November, is the headline event.

that's nationals, you know. They train all years. They do. I'm going to tell you how. It's high stakes, Corinne. I'm going to be so hungry by the time we're done with this. Yeah. So these days, the main competitions, they're intercollegiate.

So like there are college teams. They are competing to judge meat. What does that mean? So basically there are beef, pork, and lamb carcasses and cuts, various carcasses in various state of preparation to become consumer meat. And as a competitive meat judge, your job is to do things like evaluate the amount of marbling, fat marbling that's in a meat. So you know that intramuscular fat that makes meat so juicy and delicious. You do something called,

yield grading, which is estimating the amount of meat versus fat on a particular cut in square inches. And you can't use your hands as a reference. You just eyeball it. So say, for example, you're looking at like a steak and you need to be able to look at it and say how many square inches are meat, how many square inches are fat, how much is the total yield just by looking at it. No banana for scale.

And yeah, so it's all about like figuring out the quality and characteristics of meat just by looking at it. You have to make snap decisions. You have to trust your gut. And it is, like I said, very high stakes. I mean, the way the competitions work are kind of funny because you can have like a big team that's there. But your coach is only allowed to pick four people whose scores will. count and they have to pick them before the competition starts. But those people don't know who they are. So like, say, for example, you might have a dozen people who are there from your school.

And as far as you know, your scores could count for your team's team score, you know, for the score that's going to matter. Your coach has pre-selected four of you. And those are the only scores they're going to get to count. So you can lose just by picking the wrong team. Like sometimes the person with the best overall scores, their coach just did not pick them. And they're not. for that day and that means the team loses. It's really like emotional high is and lows. Also, and I don't know why, I don't know why the rules are the way they are. These are the rules and they seem very intense to me. The other rule is that you only get to participate in one year of competition. So like, that's it and you're done. I guess I don't know if it's that like

there's only so much meat you can stare at before you become like really good at. I eyeballing meat and it would be like impossible for anyone to beat you. I don't know. But you get one year of competition and then like you can become um a judge for the meat judges. So you can become one of the people. Because again, remember it's not the meat itself. Again, I, you know, I must remind listeners that it is not the meat itself which which yields good scores. It is how well you characterize the meat. So someone else has to score how well. how well and accurately you scored the meat. And something about that degree of separation just like really blows my mind.

I'm just, I'm struggling a lot with the same, right? The layers, the parfe of this thing. There's so many. There's so much. But I just keep coming back to people do this. Why? Like is this training for a particular profession or something? Oh my gosh.

Great question, Corin. And there are, I mean, I found out about competitive meat judging because someone randomly retweeted a Sports Illustrated story from 2019. And I didn't check to, I didn't write down who the tweet was from because I didn't realize it was an old story. So if it happened to be someone who listens to this podcast, thank you. But yeah, in 2019, Sports Illustrated wrote about this. And that then inspired this wave of articles from more agricultural-centric, publications or in places that are more

do more thinking about meat than Sports Illustrated being like of course we already knew what meat judging was I guess now Sports Illustrated is on the bandwagon so there were a lot of like very very obnoxious articles being like oh now meat judging is cool and I'm like it's still not cool no offense to any meat judges on the call so but yes the question of why people do this

So at Texas Tech, for example, there's a class you take that then qualifies you to be on the team. But that's the only prerequisite. Like you can be any major. And once you're on the team, like you practice for hours, like 12 hours at a stretch on like every Saturday. That's the level of commitment we're talking about. And that practice also is like you're on your feet. You're in like a freezer room. So it's actually quite physically demanding.

I mean, not in a traditional athletic sense. but you're quite uncomfortable physically. And you have to do all of this like mental calculus and remember a bunch of facts. So it is very challenging from like a full body and mind perspective. I don't know why you would do it. Yeah. Definitely fair that the act is challenging. I will grant that.

Exactly. For sure. Because I was thinking about it parallel to like sommelier certifications and things like that. Or it's like you're, there are judges who judge the people who want to be judges because there's a profession associated with it. But we're, we don't have that here. Yeah. So, so with meat judging, it can turn into a career for sure because you, you basically can become someone either for the USDA or more lucratively for a private company who makes these kind of assessments on meat. Right.

And I'll get a little bit more into the whole meat assessment thing in a second. But in terms of why people do this, that is kind of a more complex question because certainly some people go into associated industries. For example, the guy who co-invented luncheables was a former competitive meat judge. All hail. Yeah, yeah, hail, hail. Also, he was like behind the rebranding of Slim Jims or something. Like, you didn't, like, Slim Gym already existed.

Obviously, it's beef jerky. He was like, let's bring it back. So, you know, a real processed meat genius, responsible for countless nitrates in American bloodstreams. But, yeah, a lot of people don't go into the meat industry or agricultural industries at all and are still like really, there are really passionate alumni associations for this sport. And everybody says it's like, it's because. first of all, it's an incredibly bonding experience because it is very much a team sport. And it's a team sport where like even the weakest member of the team could like be the person who matters that day.

Like you really, you all have to be bringing your game all the time. You all have to really like trust that your team is going to, that everybody is going to perform to their best ability. And then also like that whole thing where. is very physically demanding in a weird way and requires a lot of memorization, but then a lot of, like, thinking critically, very quickly and, like, learning to trust your own judgment. So the people who love competitive meat judging say that, like, it fosters all of these skills that are transferable to any job or just, like, being a well-rounded person. So the way people talk about it, it really is,

like I would not be the person I am today, if not for competitive meat judging. So I guess, I guess don't knock until you try it. I even found a couple of studies where people attempted to like show that competitive meat judging training and, you know, being on the competition circuit, like demonstrably improved critical thinking skills, et cetera. And they were really small studies, of course, because like there just aren't that many competitive meat judges. So, um, I think it is safe to say that no one has like proven that definitively, but that is the kind of thing that people who are really into competitive meat judging very strongly believe about it. Wow. I would love a March Madness version of meat judging.

Do you know how many schools have meat judging teams? Or like is there a? There are, I think when the SI article came out, there were like 19. And I don't know if that's increased at all due to. Sports Illustrated. But the thing is that, like, it really is, there are schools where there's a team, but it's like there isn't a lot of, they don't have a lot of funding. They have to like, sometimes they'll like sell meat that they use like for training, like to fund the, uh, their program. But then there are, um, there are also schools like Texas Tech that like they take this really

seriously and they will actually recruit because there are pre-collegiate meet judging competitions. And again, once you're in the collegiate circuit, you only get one year to compete, which again, it makes it so intense. There's something I really love about that. It creates drama. I would love to see like a cheer style Netflix documentary that's just like, it's your one shot. But before you get to college, if you get into this through like 4-H program, for example, they're kids as young as elementary school students who are doing competitive

meat judging. And so now basically what happened is that like enough years of really passionate alums, like influenced schools that now there are programs that are so competitive that they're like trying to recruit high schoolers who are winning 4-H medals for competitive meat judging. which is and like they'll give them scholarships which again is wild to me because they can only compete for one year but I think they'll often stay around to then train people you know in in the school's program. So yeah it's like it's a real thing where like you can get recruited and your school has a coach and you spend all of your free time for that one shot at glory that one year just a lot of time

in Nebraska. Just a lot of times staring at meat. Yeah. And that is what practice is. It's like, and you know, there are things like you can buy like USDA marbling cards that like show you what different grades of marbling look like and there are various training aids like that. But a lot of it is just looking at meat from all angles and learning all these signs to look for. And by the way, like what are they grading? You might ask.

most meat the kinds of grading they're looking at is actually like a voluntary grading system so like when you buy like prime rib like that has they have voluntarily like had that graded so that they can call it prime most you know ground beef has just been uh evaluated for safety like maybe if you're getting really fancy ground beef they they might say it's like ground prime surloin or something. And that means someone did voluntarily say to the USDA, like, come check our meat. So the people who are doing this professionally, big companies will have people on staff who are evaluating the meat. And then ultimately someone from the USDA is coming to confirm that the meat is that great. And it all comes down to this very actually like complex,

interesting table that has to do with a cow's age. So cows under 30 months of age can get the highest designations, which are prime choice select and standard. And it has to do with fat marbling, and then the quality grade of the animal. Basically, the older cow gets, the higher they have to score in terms of like fat marbling and other signs of quality. Because the the older the cow gets, the less inherently good the meat is going to get. And once your past 30 months of age, like there's no way for the cow to actually qualify. I'm talking about beef specifically, but I assume there are similar grading systems for the lamb and the pork. But yeah, you get to a certain age and you just are not prime beef anymore.

There's no way, which is relatable. And then you, there are these other categories called cutter, canner, and utility grade beef. And when you get like a cow that's like when you're talking about a cow that's like four years old, like you're not, that's like meat that's going to go in like a can, for example. Or and utility is like worse than that, like maybe some pet food. So yeah, I mentioned that grading system, first of all, because, you know, that that is the kind of, like, they are looking for, for the sorts of signs that can, like, pinpoint exactly where on that scale a carcass will fit. And then not to mention, like, estimating size and yield and, like, pointing out, like, oh, that was cut wrong. Like, you know, they took off too much of the bleh and not enough of the blue.

There's too much rump on this roast. Exactly. There's this great anecdote from one of the articles about this noble sport that I'll link to where somebody from the South Dakota State team is like standing in the competition floor, the meat locker, it's cold. And he's staring at a place where one of the rib tips of the carcass has turned from cartilage to bone, which is what's called a hard bone. and it indicates in an animal is at least four years old. And he's like, that has to be wrong because like that means it's not a beef cow. That means it's like an old dairy cow that they dragged in here. It's like a trick question.

And he was like, he doubled back three or four times. And then he was like, no, you know what? My initial reaction was right. And he was correct. It was a trick question. They had brought in this old cow that would never be used for beef. And it had this physiological indication that it was. was an old ass cow.

And also in that same story, if I'm remembering correctly, that guy's team lost because he was not one of the people picked on the roster. He was not one of the four. I could be wrong. I read several stories about competing with me judging. But anyway, those are the kind of emotional stakes we're talking about in looking at these stakes. So yeah, I think after all of that, I really started out being like, what the heck?

And I ended being like, yeah, no, I can see how this would be a sport, a sport. This would be a competition that would really like help you learn to think critically in like not great situations and to really like trust that you know what you're talking about that like I have done the prep I know everything I need to know and this was my this was my eye went right to this piece of bone and told me everything I needed to know and I need to trust that and follow through and I'm like that is those are good life skills me undercover gotta bring home the bacon sorry what I said send me undercover Karen it's only one year it's only one year no but it's all the training before that one year pervita like it's a lot this is a whole college

I can do that on top of my popside duties. Perfectly reasonable use of your time. I did think about it. I was like, my college experience could have been so different. Yeah. There's also like there's like a wool judging competition. They're similar like agricultural. You get judge based on how well you judge the quality of this thing.

There's even kind of like model UN style competitions where you like evaluate the sustainability of a dairy or like random stuff like that. Not random. I mean, very important. But that is all to say that the agricultural sciences are rich, ever innovating. And if you are interested in like doing really critical thinking about how we produce the food we eat, And you're headed to college, like consider a school with a great agricultural science program. They do not get enough credit. That's my whole thing.

I'm done. Also, if you go to a great agricultural school, they usually have like a creamery. You can get like fresh ice cream like at U. Delaware. So that's also another plus. I imagine some of these competitive teams just having a mascot with like a live cow, Which would be so Which

That's just terrible irony This is a lot Yeah I don't Yeah I don't think any of them have mascots But they should start Not a live cat though Like a guy in a cow costume

Or just a giant steak Shanky the lamb shank Anyway What was the weirdest thing we live this week? I mean I got to go with meat judging Yeah knowing that exists in this world just the fact that it yeah like i mean you pretty much had me after the first two sentences but i loved the rest of the ride wow thank you so much i'm i'm thrilled that i could

i could make i could win for the first time in ages so thank you oh we should say some stuff about the issue to wrap it up the issue is not all about me no it's not yeah no uh the taste issue is not all about meat. There are a lot of other great stories to hear read however you wish. You can get it read to you on Apple News Plus. It's true. And there is a story that will make you feel really, really pretty decent about having an impulse to have a glass of wine. Oh, yeah. That was a great story. All right. Well, hopefully we have wet your appetites enough that you will go to popsye.com and check out the latest issue of the magazine. You will not regret it. It's delicious. It goes down smooth. Has a cake that looks like soup on the cover. So enjoy that. Bone apple tea.

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