If you've ever heard of "pink slime"—a pejorative name for a beef product treated with ammonia—you can probably thank Kit Foshee. He didn't coin the name, but he sure had a lot to do with the publicity surrounding it.

Foshee was a "corporate quality assurance manager" at a huge meat-processing company. The company blended its beef product with other ground beef and treated the mixture with ammonia, ostensibly to reduce dangerous pathogens. Based on his research, however, Foshee believed with other scientists that this "ammoniation" definitely wouldn't make the product safer, and he refused to tell customers that it would. Soon after he challenged the company on this, Foshee was fired.

That's when the fun began. Foshee sued the company for wrongful termination and looked for support from the Government Accountability Project (GAP), the nation's leading whistleblower protection organization (www.whistleblower.org). GAP took up Foshee's cause, wrote a widely published editorial coming down hard on the ammoniation process, and castigated current labeling guidelines. Foshee was then interviewed by media all over the country; the company claimed they lost 80% of their business in 28 days.

Foshee had his own losses. When he lost his $100,000+ annual income, it evidently took a toll on his marriage, which soon ended in divorce. "You try to explain to your spouse why you're giving up $30,000 bonuses," he said. And the company was consistently harassing him: Every time Foshee spoke in public, their lawyers were in the audience with their recorders.

At a Washington, D.C., conference organized by the GAP's Food Integrity Campaign, Foshee looked at the hostile attorneys and asked them if they were there—as the audience was—to protect whistleblowers and to support the Food Safety Modernization Act. Getting no response, he said:

"No, I am going to tell you right now, they're not here to protect whistleblowers. This is about me. They're here with their tape recorder because they are going to find a way to shut me up. They've got sealed documents [from Foshee's lawsuit] that if I say anything about, they're going to persecute me. So we're going to stick with the publicly available information, from their website, to stay safe."

And later: "Let's open up these documents and see who's lying. Let's get this all out into the open. Why don't you quit harassing me?"

And finally: "You want to sue me? Sue me, but quote your own studies correctly. It's on your website. Quit trying to mislead consumers to thinking that if they buy from a company that uses [your] products in its ground beef, it's safer—that's absolutely false."

Hours after the talk, the company deleted entire sections of its website. And seven months after that, Foshee got his perverse wish: The company sued him for defamation.

So Kit Foshee has paid for his whistleblowing: He lost his income, he lost his career, he lost his wife, he lost his privacy. In the end, he responds to questions of "Why did you do this?" the way so many other whistleblowers respond:

"I thought it was the right thing to do and that the public had a right to know."