It’s that time again when your local McDonald’s puts its famous McRib sandwich on the menu,
a magical meal of mushed-up mystery meat,
an imposter of sorts pretending to be something it's not.
The McRib might just be a nutritional nightmare. And sure,
it might be a bad actor in a terrible B-movie that arguably should never have been made,
but it has history and that’s important. It might even have saved lives.
So, the next time you find yourself biting into one of these pioneering pieces of peculiar pork,
this video should be on your mind. Let’s start with the basics, though,
before we get to the mostly unknown genesis of the marvelous McRib.
When you’re eating food, especially meat products, there’s one word that doesn’t exactly shout
“healthy.” That word is “reconstructed.” In short, it means making a foodstuff look like a different
foodstuff. What you are getting is a fake, a pretender; an imposter.
The McRib is about as far away from being meat-lined bones that have been taken from
a pig as what Disney World’s Space Mountain rollercoaster is to actually flying through space.
It’s a simulation burger, a pseudo-rib, containing large doses of salt, sugar, and saturated fat.
It’s no coincidence that people who’ve starred in My 600lb Life did a lot of their shopping at
Mcdonald's. In high doses, the McRib can cause obesity, America’s favorite national problem.
It’s packed with un-goodness (That’s a word we just invented because it fits so well with the
McDonald’s menu). And if you commit yourself to some cursory research, you can find that McRibs
ribs are not ribs or even rib meat. They have nothing to do with ribs. They are merely ribby.
They are “primarily composed” of ground pork shoulder. It’s just too expensive for a capitalist
powerhouse like McDonald’s to use all decent quality meat. Don’t forget this. It’s a matter
of great importance today. The McRib was designed not only to trick you but to also save on pennies.
So, with that in mind, a better name for the McRib would be the
McThing. Here’s a definition of the McThing: “Restructured meat products are commonly
manufactured by using lower-valued meat trimmings reduced in size by comminution (flaking,
chunking, grinding, chopping, or slicing). The comminuted meat mixture is mixed with salt and
water to extract salt-soluble proteins.” It’s the proteins that act as the glue to
make the thing stick together. But we know what you are interested in is the “lower-valued meat
trimmings” part. This is generally kept secret from the consumer, so when you get some heart
or eye with your hotdog, the package will just say something like “meat products”.
Always be wary of the terrifying vagueness of a meat product.
It could be a bull’s John Thomas, a sheep’s ding-dongs, a chicken’s eyeball. If you are
getting a meat product, you can almost guarantee it consists of some unsavoury animal parts.
If you eat a McRib, you could be enoying the taste of an animal’s heart, tripe, or scalded
stomach. If you don’t know already, tripe comes from the lining of an animal’s stomach. It’s a
delicacy in some places, and waste in others. Before the McRib made its first appearance on
McDonald’s menus in 1981, it was the brainchild of a successful chef. His name was Rene Arend, a cook
from Luxembourg who ended up working in Chicago with one of the most respected chefs in the world.
Yep, a gourmet chef invented the McRib. Go figure. Arend was first in his class at the renowned
“College Technique Hotelier de Strasbourg.” He could have gone anywhere after that,
from restaurants where a bottle of wine costs more than the dishwasher’s yearly wage
to your local Five Guys. He did go places, too. He made dishes for Queen Elizabeth,
the King of Belgium, and the Italian actress Sophia Loren. None of whom you could imagine
wolfing down a plate of tripe and vinegar. But then in the 1970s, Ray Kroc, the man
who made McDonald’s the global phenomenon it is today, made Arend an offer he couldn’t refuse.
When Arend was offered the job, his initial reply was,
“I am not a hamburger man. I am a chef. We are completely different.”
But that’s exactly what Kroc wanted. Selling the people of the US waste meat products would
look a lot better if the man behind them was an up-and-coming top-shelf chef. Make no mistake,
when a new product came out, Mcdonald's let people know its creator had once cooked for the Queen.
So, for more money, Arend quit working in the kitchens of gourmet chefs and went to work
at a place where a red-haired clown seduced kids into happily
embracing the promise of adulthood diabetes. When Arend started in the late 70s, he was trying
to come up with a dish to make Mcdonald's even more popular. The restaurant had gotten incredibly
popular over a short period of time. In the US alone it was serving around 17 million customers
every day, but more needed to be done. Arend knew he needed something that could
be made really fast at a low cost. This is why he came up with chicken McNugget. It took him
and his team another three months just to find a suitable source for the ingredients.
McNuggets were an instant hit. In fact, soon McDonald’s had to construct three new processing
plants for the hit dish. This is where every day people would sit on a production line taking
chicken bones out from already processed chickens. When Arend was asked what happens to all the
other parts of the chicken once they had the meatiest bits picked off, he replied,
“From chicken, nothing is lost.” This is what he was good at; using every
part of the animal and somehow making the final product taste ok. He had help, though, for the
science part of the creations. When you are making heavily processed foods you need scientists just
as much as you need someone’s culinary skills. The scientist, in this case, was named Roger
Mandigo. His name now sits in the Meat Industry Hall of Fame.
Yep, that actually exists. One of the reasons why
Mandigo reached such heady heights in the business of murdering animals
was because he was a pioneer in the process we told you about: reconstructing meaty things.
He once famously explained how he managed to get regular folks to eat mystery meat:
“Most people would be extremely unhappy if they were served heart or tongue on a plate.
But flaked into a restructured product it loses its identity. Such products as tripe,
heart, and scalded stomachs are high in protein, completely edible, wholesome,
and nutritious, and most are already used in sausage without objection.”
Arend once explained why he and Mandigo started working together on the McRib.
“There wasn’t a system to supply enough chicken. We had to come up with something to give the
other franchises as a new product. So, the McRib came about because of the shortage of chickens.”
He said he got the idea when he visited some of the poorer parts of the USA’s South,
where he said he saw folks barbecuing the cheapest cuts of pork and smothering them with sauce.
The McRib was almost immediately a big hit. Mcdonald's started making even more money in
an era when it was basically already printing its own banknotes. But then
the McRib craze suddenly stopped. Customers seemed to go off the McRib really quickly.
The socio-psychological reason is that the McRib is a niche product.
It has a bit of a cult following, but people usually enjoy something different only so many
times. They usually go back to beef in the end. Another reason why McDonald's only puts it on
the menu every now and again is because pork trimmings can be hard to get your hands on,
unlike beef trimmings. And if McDonald’s buys lots of hard-to-get
pork trimmings their price starts to shoot up. Selling the McRib as a novelty item solved the
problem. Mcdonald’s also creates a buzz around the meal, telling folks their special pork dish
is back. This doesn’t happen in Germany, though, where the McRib is sold all year round. Savages!
Avid consumers of the McRib probably don’t know that there are about 70
ingredients in one 500-calorie McRib. One of the ingredients is the additive azodicarbonamide,
aka, the “yoga mat” chemical. It’s nicknamed that because it's often used to make foamed
plastic things. It’s actually used for the bun, to keep the bun looking, er, bunny.
Many fast-food restaurants use it in their buns. There are plenty of other additives in the McRib,
although in Europe and Australia they won’t allow companies to use azodicarbonamide
as a food additive. Over there, they don’t like mixing their yoga mats with their edibles.
They say azodicarbonamide might cause respiratory problems such as asthma.
When a restaurant has to stack something with ample additives, flavorings and addictive
properties such as sugar, it’s because the raw product would taste like hell.
Fast food was never just about getting food to customers fast, but more about giving millions
and millions of people something cheap that didn’t taste too bad. The McRib is to sandwiches
what homemade Fentanyl is to pure opium. With all this in mind, where do you think
something like the McRib would be useful? Answer: On the battlefield.
During the Second World War, it wasn’t easy to get fresh meat to soldiers, or for that matter,
much of the poorer public. Meat was a luxury. This is why another wonder of
the mystery meat world really took off. That was the meat product we call spam.
So, when talking about the evolution of the McRib, we can go a bit farther back
than when Monsieur Arend and Mr. Mandigo were helping MacDonald’s make a killing
out of nothing-goes-to-waist pigs. In the 1960s, the Natick Soldier
Center for Research and Development in the US was thinking about how to feed American
soldiers when they were on missions. They needed something nutritional but cheap.
This is why they came up with MREs, Meal Ready-to-Eat.
They apparently don't taste too bad. On a forum, a former soldier was asked what
MREs were like. This was his reply: “In all honesty, they taste a lot
like cheap canned foods, think canned spaghetti, spam, Vienna sausages, etc.
If you want the experience tonight go get a can of spaghetti and meatballs, eat it cold with some
stale saltines. Don’t skimp on the Tabasco.” Another soldier said the taste is sometimes
the last thing you think about when you’ve been walking all day with a heavy load on your back.
He said you simply need the calories. The meals are not supposed to titillate your palette.
They are made to be just edible. When it comes to MREs, the nutritional
value is important, and that’s a good thing because often the parts of the animal that many
people don’t like to eat, the intestines and the internal organs, pack loads of nutrients.
This is why the Natick Soldier Center for Research and Development got in touch with
a food production company in Ohio and asked them if they could buy all the unwanted meat mush. They
then turned it into something that looked like a burger and the soldiers may have thought they
were eating a regular burger when in fact they were munching on stuff they would probably throw
away if they were butchering an animal at home. The center then went a step further and asked
meat-packing factories to turn the mush into nice shapes, to make the mystery
meat look more presentable. Hey, presto. The military soon started saving a ton of cash
and soldiers thought they were getting burgers, albeit ones that came in a can or a bag. By the
1970s, soldiers were getting reconstructed lamb chops, pork chops, veal steaks, and beefsteaks.
So, when commercial entities started seeing imposter meat products being made by the army
from what used to be waste, they started doing the same. All they had to do was make
the thing look real and add so many additives, preservatives and flavorings that it lasted a
long time and tasted alright. McDonald’s copied the army’s recipe almost to a tee.
Mandigo admitted to this, saying, “The military allowed us to use the processes they'd developed.”
This is why we can say the US army actually pioneered the McRib. Army
rations even include them now, as part of what one journalist jokingly said was the “The McRib
industrial complex.” A journalist writing for US Veterans Magazine got his hands on one,
although it was described on the packet as “Rib Shaped, Barbecue Flavor Pork Patty.”
He opened it up and had a taste. His short review went like this:
“The pebbly textured meat is caramel brown and crossed by four raised ‘bones.’ Not unappealing,
except if you peek in the package. The meat juice is a bizarrely bright yellowish-orange;
I quickly tilt the pouch up to keep it from splashing out…. I slice off an end with a knife
and fork. It’s porky and slightly smoky, although there’s a tinny aftertaste, probably from some of
the preservatives used to keep it fresh so long.” He proceeded to embellish the strange dish with
relish and wrote, “Not bad! Scatter a couple of onion slices and pickles on top, and the whole
thing would be pretty damn close to a McRib.” So, the next time you bite into a McRib,
just remember that you’re doing what soldiers did in the deserts of Afghanistan and jungles
of Southeast Asia. As for why you’d pay good money for this dish of deviance in
the safety of your hometown, well, you tell us why you’d do something so bloody reckless.
Now you need to watch “I Only Ate Fast Food For 30 Days And This Is What Happened - Funny
Challenge.” Or, have a look at “Reason Why McDonald's Tastes Better Outside United States.”