Stir Chili Up Front

Rupert Mendoza's Statement on Winning the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting

I used to work at Wendy’s, a fast-food chain that distinguished itself from its rivals with the boast, doubted by many, that the warm food it served was “always fresh, never frozen.” I can attest that the claim was true with regard to its hamburger patties, which were delivered each morning on crates from refrigerated trucks at great cost to the company. It was not true concerning the chili, unless one’s interpretation of the word “fresh” was especially charitable.

At the risk of betraying the confidence of the heralded institution that, for two halcyon years in high school, once employed me, allow me to spill the beans on the chili, and the incident that inspired me to pursue investigative journalism as a vocation.

Wendy’s chili contained meat we deemed “expired”: patties that had worn out their welcome on the grill, becoming rubbery and burnt; hamburgers that customers had returned, perhaps because they didn’t want mayo on their Baconator, perhaps because they’d dropped their triple quarter pounder on the floor. We collected these offerings in a meat bin throughout the course of the day, which we then placed in the freezer at closing time. In the hours before we opened the following day, I’d cut up the meat and add it to the chili vat, along with the contents of a plastic sack of red chili sauce mixture and a few cups of dried beans. The chili was then cooked for three hours at 170 degrees Fahrenheit before being served to customers. The long lead time was necessary for the beans to soften, and for the expired meat to turn succulent — or, at the very least, edible. Every so often, the vat would beep, demanding to be stirred. Fellow co-workers would yell, “Stir chili up front,” and I would do so, piercing the congealed top layer crust with a soup spoon and mixing up the steaming stew, which bubbled and plopped as any good chili should.

This is all by way of saying that I was intimately familiar with the chili life cycle at Wendy’s. I was there for all the steps in the process of midwifing it into the world. And it is why I, like so many others, could not make sense of what transpired on the evening of the 22nd of March, 2005. A woman sitting alone at a booth, consoling herself with a bowl of chili, began to gag and cough. Masticating faces from nearby tables raised from their meals and turned toward her. Fearing she was choking, I jogged to her table. She spat out a browned mass whose length and shape resembled a shriveled cocktail wiener.

“Oh my god,” she cried. “What was that?”

I could see my shift manager, the dreaded Darlene, waddle out from the back office to see what all the fuss was about. My heart sank at the thought that I might not have sufficiently sliced and diced the rubbery meat earlier in the day.

I apologized to the woman and made moves to sweep the meat away. But the woman held my arm. “Wait,” she said. “What is that?”

I focused on the object in question, which lay curled in pooling grease on the plastic table. I told her it was, in all likelihood, expired meat product — an admission I immediately regretted, worried as I was that I’d let slip that our slogan of “Always fresh, never frozen” was a lie. Darlene came over and began poking it with a plastic spoon. “Vegetable,” she said.

“No,” the woman said. She grabbed the piece of meat and shook it like a glass thermometer, denuding it of chili sauce, a not-small amount of which landed on my person. And that’s when I saw it: a long, manicured fingernail attached to the meaty tip.

“It’s a finger,” she yelled triumphantly, her raised hand holding the severed finger in the air for all to see. “It’s a fucking finger!”

The ensuing scandal, and its deleterious cost to Wendy’s, has been covered at length elsewhere, and I’ll not spill much ink over it here. What I will say is I knew from the start that it was a hoax. To be sure, I did not doubt that the finger was indeed a finger, as forensic tests later confirmed. And I was willing, at least initially, to countenance the possibility that the finger originated from some poor soul at the mysterious factories that mass-produced our chili sauce mixtures. (The only other explanation, that the finger came from our specific franchise, was eliminated upon confirmation that ten digits remained on our resident chili maker’s hands — namely, mine).

But the woman’s behavior that night suggested complicity in some nameless way I could not express and felt powerless to do anything about. In the weeks that followed, when she retained a lawyer who appeared alongside her on the morning talk shows as she sang her song of woe, I watched in despair as she almost single-handedly ruined the company I loved with her chili perfidy. “This is a guilty woman,” I wailed to my mother, to my cats. 

The intrepid work of journalists ultimately uncovered the full contours of the deceit. The finger was traced to a co-worker of the woman’s boyfriend, who had severed it in the tailgate of a truck and provided it to the boyfriend in lieu of paying off a $50 debt. The appendage was cooked before discovery, but not at 170 degrees for the requisite three hours. The woman had a history of scamming companies, including another fast-food chain. 

Watching the woman being led away in chains was one of the great joys of my short life. It was then that I knew my destiny: I would go into journalism, and lay waste to as many of these miscreants as I could, be they maladroit scammers or corrupt hedge fund managers. I would create Great Works of Investigation that made clear to all that nobody pulls a fast one on Rupert Mendoza. Nobody. 

I thank the Pulitzer Prize Board for this award.

Rejection Letter #1

Hi Ahmed -

Appreciate your considering us, but afraid we’re going to pass.

Best,

[REDACTED]

Rejection Letter #2

Hi Ahmed,

Thanks so much for submitting to [REDACTED]; we truly appreciate it. Unfortunately, we don't have enough staff to offer individual critiques, but please know that a department editor did review your work with thought and care. This piece isn't right for us, but we hope it finds an excellent home elsewhere — and we wish great success with your writing.

Warmly,

[REDACTED]

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