What is slop on Big Brother?
Slop is the food punishment on Big Brother — a bland oat-based mush that Have-Nots must live on for a week at a time. Have-Nots also sleep in a specially designed uncomfortable bedroom and take cold showers. Slop debuted in Big Brother 7, replacing the old peanut butter and jelly punishment, and Big Brother 11 introduced the modern Have/Have-Not format including the dedicated Have-Not room.
What is Big Brother slop made of?
The ingredients are no secret. Slop is:
- Steel-cut oats
- Water
- Unflavored whey protein isolate
- Unflavored soy protein
- Vitamin and mineral powder
Nutritionally it covers what a person needs. That is the entire point — it is designed to keep houseguests functional while being deeply unpleasant to eat. The texture is the part everyone complains about, not the taste.
Slop and Have-Nots quick facts
- What slop is: An oat-based mush — oats, water, unflavored whey protein, unflavored soy protein, and vitamin and mineral powder.
- What a Have-Not is: A houseguest serving the weekly punishment — slop only, the Have-Not room, and cold showers.
- Slop debuted: Big Brother 7 (All-Stars), replacing the peanut butter and jelly punishment.
- Have-Nots debuted: Big Brother 11 — the season that introduced the modern Have/Have-Not format and the dedicated Have-Not room.
- How long it lasts: One week, ending at the next Have-Not selection.
- Celebrity seasons: No Have-Nots, ever.
What is a Have-Not on Big Brother?
A Have-Not is a houseguest serving the week’s food-and-comfort punishment. Three things come with it:
- Slop only. No regular house food for the length of the punishment.
- The Have-Not room. A purpose-built bedroom, redesigned every season to be as uncomfortable as production can make it.
- Cold showers. The hot water is switched off for them.
In several seasons, America has also voted on additional foods the Have-Nots were allowed alongside slop — a vote that has produced some genuinely cruel pairings over the years.
How do you become a Have-Not?
It depends on the era.
- Big Brother 1–6: No slop. The food punishment was peanut butter and jelly.
- Big Brother 7–10: Slop arrives. Food competitions decide who eats it.
- Big Brother 11 onward: The Have/Have-Not format arrives, and the method of choosing has varied by season and even week to week. Houseguests have become Have-Nots through competitions, HOH selections, endurance competition forfeits, and volunteering.
The shift toward the HOH choosing is what turned Have-Nots into a strategic problem rather than bad luck. Once a name is picked rather than lost, the choice says something — and the HOH has to decide whether to use it as a message or hand it to whoever volunteers.
What can Have-Nots eat?
Slop and permitted condiments, plus any additional foods production allows that week.
Condiments are the loophole every cast eventually discovers. Houseguests have spent whole weeks working out how to make slop edible — hot sauce, cinnamon, sweetener, anything in the pantry that isn’t technically food. In seasons with an audience food vote, the choices have swung between merciful and deliberately absurd depending on what the crowd was in the mood for.
Notable Have-Not foods
Slop is the constant. The extras are where the punishment gets interesting — and where it swings hardest between merciful, absurd, and production having a joke at the house’s expense. Eight weeks across seven seasons cover the range.
Big Brother 12 — broccoli and bean dip. The house walked in from the Have/Have-Not competition, still in cowboy costumes, to find a pile of broccoli waiting on the kitchen table. Britney read the announcement out loud and the reaction was relief: it was better than what they had been given before. Brendon, Hayden and Enzo took the week, and immediately started working out how to make it edible — Enzo would salt it, Brendon wanted it grilled, Hayden read the nutrition label off the bean dip while Brendon shouted through from the kitchen asking for the protein and carbs. Lane asked whether chips were allowed. They were not. How Enzo, Brendon and Hayden handled the broccoli.
Big Brother 13 — sardines and seaweed. Announced in the storage room on 29 July 2011, and the house split on it inside ten minutes. Jordan sat in the backyard working through a bowl of slop with a face like thunder. Brendon went straight at the seaweed. Same punishment, same afternoon, two completely different weeks. The BB13 house splits over sardines and seaweed.
Big Brother 14 — cod fish and candy canes. Joe, Shane, Danielle and Britney drew the week, and the same punishment landed two completely different ways. Boogie, talking a furious Britney down in the bathroom, thought it was nothing: “I mean Cod.. Joe probably knows how cook that a million different ways.” Britney was less interested in the menu than in the competition that produced it, and spent the afternoon doing an impression of Joe screaming at the smaller girls to move faster up the ramp. Joe, Shane, Danielle and Britney draw cod fish and candy canes.
Big Brother 15 — head cheese and habaneros. The other end of the scale, and this one came from the audience. Head cheese is a cold cut made from the flesh of a calf or pig’s head; the habaneros sat beside it. Andy’s verdict on the vote was that America had really screwed them over. Amanda could smell it from across the room — “Ewwww, I can smell the head cheese s— from here” — and Elissa agreed it was disgusting. Spencer had won the competition for the men, so the Have-Nots that week were every woman in the house: GinaMarie, Amanda, Helen and Elissa. GinaMarie spent her birthday on it, with an ankle she had hurt in the comp. The night head cheese and habaneros landed in the BB15 house.
Big Brother 15 — ramen and raisins. A second Have-Not week that same summer, announced on 26 July 2013.
Big Brother 16 — peanut butter and jelly fish. Production’s own joke, and a callback to the punishment slop replaced: peanut butter and jelly, plus jellyfish. Christine named Donny and Zach on 9 August 2014, reasoning that they had done it the least, and Cody thanked her for leaving him off. The peanut butter was organic. Caleb’s assessment: “It’s the good stuff.” Christine names the BB16 Have-Nots.
Big Brother 17 — gum-slop. The season’s final Have-Not week, 28 August 2015, and the extra was named on the feeds as gum-slop. Steve’s reaction was to count the room: with four Have-Nots named at once, it was half the house. Julia’s was shorter — “I am over this havenot bulls—. I am pissed!” Vanessa picks four Have-Nots for gum-slop.
Big Brother 18 — all the berries you can eat. The one week the Have-Not food was good enough that the house went looking for the catch. Blueberries, strawberries and coconut were already laid out when Paulie read the card: Da’Vonne, Paul and Zakiyah were Have-Nots because their team had collected the fewest berries in the HOH competition, and their reward was “All the berries you can eat” on top of the slop. Paul was unmoved — “PISSED so PISSED.. guess we’re dieting again” — while Victor, safe on the winning team, enjoyed it thoroughly: “it pays to be good at comps.” Da’Vonne, Paul and Zakiyah get all the berries they can eat.
The week the food vote got swung
The audience vote was never a neutral instrument, and Big Brother 16 is where the house caught on. Sitting in the living room that same afternoon, Derrick put together why an earlier Have-Not week had come with unusually good food: Frankie’s sister is the singer Ariana Grande, and her fans had been voting.
Derrick: “It all falls into place now — when they were Have-Nots they got the best food possible. It was all Ariana’s fans.”
Frankie: “And my fans.”
Derrick: “Oh, I keep forgetting you have a million followers. That’s why I hate you. Okay, struggling Broadway actor my ass.”
It is the clearest example on record of what the food vote actually measured. Not what the audience thought of the punishment, but which houseguest could turn out the most people on a given night. Derrick works out who is behind the food vote.
Volunteering, and getting out of it
Once the HOH picked the Have-Nots, the job stopped being a competition result and started being a negotiation. Big Brother 17 shows both halves of that in a single afternoon.
Vanessa was told to name four — half the remaining house. Two of them, Johnny Mac and Julia, put their own hands up before she had to choose, which is the quiet convention of the era: volunteering early buys goodwill and takes the decision away from the HOH. Vanessa filled the last two spots with James and Meg.
Then she did the other thing the era allowed. She pointed at Austin and said she could not nominate him, because of a deal between them. An alliance agreement, made weeks earlier for an entirely different purpose, worked as an exemption from a punishment. Meg’s response was the right one: what other deals do they have?
It is also worth noting what Vanessa said as she started: this was the last Have-Not week of the season. The punishment is retired before the finale — there is no Have-Not in the final weeks. Vanessa names four, and Austin talks his way out.
Has anyone been hurt by slop?
Yes.
Big Brother 9 had two medical incidents on the same day. Amanda suffered a seizure associated with dangerously low blood sugar, and Allison suffered a severe allergic reaction. Both were taken to hospital and both returned to the house.
Slop passes, penalties and getting caught
Slop has been used as currency almost since it existed.
In Big Brother 8, Evel Dick won a slop pass and gave it to Jen. Later that season Jen went the other way entirely — she ate a turkey burger while still under her slop restriction, and took the first penalty vote in the show’s history for it.
Big Brother 12’s Enzo repeatedly snuck regular food while he was a Have-Not — at one point hiding it inside the penguin costume he was already wearing as a separate veto punishment. The most valuable escape of all is the Never Not Pass, which takes a houseguest off the Have-Not list permanently rather than for a week. Four have held one: Jeremy won the first on the Big Brother 15 premiere, Becky claimed one mid-competition in Big Brother 17, Natalie was handed one by America’s first Care Package in Big Brother 18 — in the same week she had already been named a Have-Not — and Drew took the last power out of the Big Brother 28 Time Capsule. It has been offered twice more and gone unclaimed both times. Read the full history of the Never Not Pass.
And in Big Brother 19, Matt took a deliberate penalty vote — eating while on slop on purpose — to protect Raven. Not a mistake. A strategy.
What other punishments come with slop?
Slop is the food half. The costume half is separate, and the two are handed out by different mechanisms — slop by the Have-Not selection, costumes and forfeits by veto competitions, Pandora’s Box and the occasional audience vote. A houseguest can be carrying both at once.
- The unitard. The costume punishment everyone remembers. Jen wore the Big Brother 8 version, and the format has come back in different colours and cuts ever since. It is worn constantly — slept in, showered in, competed in.
- Costume punishments. Enzo spent part of Big Brother 12 in a penguin costume from a veto competition while he was already a Have-Not, and used it to smuggle food he was not supposed to be eating.
- The Slop-tard. Big Brother 22 combined the two outright — a costume punishment named for the food one, handed out in a prize-and-punishment veto competition alongside a home gym, $5,000 and 500 laps on a tricycle track.
- Repetition forfeits. Lap counts, bell-ringing and similar tasks that run for a set number or a set time, checked by production and enforced with penalty votes.
The common thread is that none of them are secret. The house sees the punishment handed out, which is the point — the humiliation is public and the whole season gets to watch it play out on the feeds.
The Have-Not room, season by season
The room is where production has the most fun. A partial history:
- Big Brother 11: Bare metal room with slab beds.
- Big Brother 12: Industrial dock, lawn chairs to sleep on, jars of bugs for decoration.
- Big Brother 13: A padded cell. Asylum theme, lights left on 24 hours a day.
- Big Brother 14: Spiral hypnosis walls and tilted diamond-shaped beds.
- Big Brother 15: Airplane seats.
- Big Brother 16: An ice box, with icicle beds.
- Big Brother 17: Dentist chairs.
- Big Brother 18: Carnival theme with bumper-car beds — the consensus worst room in the show’s history.
Big Brother 21 is the strange one. Have-Nots were postponed entirely for the first four weeks because Camp Comeback was using the room. From Day 1 to Day 30 there were no Have-Nots at all — instead, evicted-but-not-gone houseguests lived up there in uniforms, in Have-Not-like conditions, but allowed to eat anything. When Cliff won the comeback competition on Day 30 and the other three went home, the active house inherited the cabin as the real Have-Not room for the rest of the summer.
Who are the Have-Nots this week on Big Brother 28?
The Week 5 Have-Nots are Drew, Chuk, Haley and Barrett.