Still, when beef is not just “ground,” but rendered into fine paste through an intensely mechanical process, the question remains: What should we call it? If it can’t be called “pink slime,” what words should we use?

Since 1994, the government’s stance has been clear. Lean finely textured beef (LFTB) has been a “qualified component” of hamburger, meaning it can be included in ground beef without being independently disclosed. But it could not itself be called ground beef, suggesting that, in the eyes of regulators it was something else—a padding or additive, but not the real deal.

Some at USDA weren’t comfortable even with that classification. Though ABC made the term “pink slime” famous, the network didn’t actually coin it. The term originated with a USDA microbiologist, David Zirnstein, who used it in a 2002 email to agency staff. According to a 2009 report from The New York Times’s Michael Moss—part of a series of articles on food safety in the ground beef industry that would ultimately earn him a Pulitzer Prize—Zirnstein was troubled by the production method. “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,” he wrote in the email, according to Moss’s report.

Several years later, ABC released the now-infamous segment that lead to the “pink slime” hysteria of 2012. BPI argued that the network’s characterization was false and defamatory, ultimately suing it for 1.9 billion dollars. That lawsuit was settled out of court in 2017 for an undisclosed sum, though The Chicago Tribune and other outlets have reported a settlement of at least $177 million paid out by ABC so far. ABC, according to the terms of its settlement, admits no wrongdoing and has stood by its report. And though BPI has managed to recoup some of the economic damage from the fallout, most Americans still think of “lean finely textured beef” as “pink slime.”

That may be about to change. Since the 2012 incident, BPI has launched a campaign called “Dude, it’s beef,” trying to spread awareness about its processes while insisting on language it feels is fair. “Ground beef has always been made with beef trimmed from the whole muscle cuts,” the company points out on its website. “The difference is the precision with which we are able to trim the meat.”

That effort culminated in 2018, when BPI, citing advancements to its process, formally asked FSIS to consider whether its product might just be called “ground beef.”

“It was an extensive review that took well over six months and included consumer reviews, nutritional panels, tours of the plant where agency folks could get a first-hand look at the process and understand what we are doing at BPI,” Nick Ross, BPI’s vice president of engineering, told Beef Magazine, a trade publication that covers the cattle industry.

I wanted to learn more about how the process has changed since the ABC report, to see whether it was technological changes that finally won the government over, or whether FSIS simply came around to BPI’s semantic argument. When I reached out to BPI, the company provided a written statement through a spokesman.