Tagged: Beef

"It's an un-obvious chunk of meat that has been sitting there — a little diamond surrounded by a bunch of coal," Steve Price told me last year. "I'd love to tell you more. We just can't."

Today, Price told me everything. More to the point, he emailed me this link:

If there's one thing we love more than talking about beef here at The Salt, it's visualizing the U.S.'s insatiable appetite for meat through infographics and charts.

So when we ran across Sarah Hallacher's Beef Stakes project over at Fast Company's Co.Design blog, our eyes lit up like the charcoal grill on Super Bowl Sunday.

Tony Mata is a meat inventor; his job is figuring out new things to do with meat. He thinks he recently discovered a new steak — a novel way to cut up a chunk of beef that's currently not worth much. Mata is so excited about his discovery that he's trying to patent it.

This raises a basic question: Can you patent a steak?

On today's show, we talk to Mata. We visit the workshop of Gene Gagliardi, the inventor of Steak-Umm and KFC's popcorn chicken. And we try to figure out what meat inventors tell us about patents and innovation.

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