Article: The jerky boys: taking aim at the teen scene, GoodMark Food uses savvy marketing to turn its premier meat snack into a cash cow. (GoodMark Foods Inc. markets its line of meat snacks)

Leaf through The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste and you'll find them between maraschino cherries and mime. Meat snacks. "They're a part of American pop culture that gets no respect whatsoever," says Michael Stern, who wrote the book with his wife. They're devoured, as Stern puts it, by "people for whom going to McDonald's is a special event. Or let's say Red Lobster."

There are hundreds of meat snacks on the market, but only one has cultural-icon status: Slim Jim. Conjuring up images of rednecks and truckers and consumed mostly by teen-agers, the beef stick is the butt of countless jokes. David Letterman lists eating Slim Jims as one of the top 10 things about being an ...

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