McDonald’s, McRibs and McIndigestion: Why we eat crap in a bun

There are only a handful of American traditions that people will dare to truly question: Why should I have to pay taxes? Is everything really bigger in Texas? How can you be too old for American Idol?

Yet the question that prompts the most soul searching, the most gut-wrenching existential doubt in the heart of Americans everywhere goes to the very core of what it means to live in a free country: Why the hell can’t I stop myself from eating McRibs?

McDonald’s cult-favorite mystery-meat sandwich, a gelatinous pork patty slathered with barbecue sauce and wilted pickles, is back for a limited three-week engagement this month and it plans on keeping your bowels occupied for the entire duration. A congealed, rib-shaped, steamed, meat-flavored Jello brick, the McRib will literally warm your heart … and then it will stop it.

Depending on your tastes, all that sounds like either an unholy fast food monster or a defining example of everything our nation was founded upon. Because believe it or not people eat McRibs. Actually, people eat A LOT of McRibs. Last year McDonald’s credited the sandwich with boosting its November sales by 4.8% — no small feat considering the chain reported global profits of $24 billion in 2010. By my math that translates to around $96,000,000 in McRib sales, or 32,000,000 patties, enough to build an unstoppable army of reconstituted pig soldiers.

Obviously, people love their rib-shaped pork burgers. But what is it about a fast food sandwich (one we know is terrible for us) that we find so appetizing? Why do a full third of the people in our country — or at least just a few really hungry ones — intentionally eat so much whatchamacarcass meat? And where do our taste buds get off getting off on food made out of the same materials found in gym mats and shoe soles?

Individual taste aside, part of it is just pure shock value.

Reactions to the McRib are equally split between the hungry and the horrified, and many of the latter seem to do it out of pure spite to the former. People eat this kind of food precisely BECAUSE it’s bad for you. What’s that you say? Bacon and cheese are bad for your heart? Fuck you give me double. It’s vindictive gluttony. Connoisseurs of these culinary Frankensteins don’t care about ingredients or preparation. Good food is not “good” because of the quality, rather because of how quickly its processed, how well it fits into a deep-fryer, and whether or not you can pair it with Rocky Road ice cream.

It’s this rebellious you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-eat bravado that gives fast food chains the balls to market single-serving heart attacks. And the McRib fits right in. First debuting in 1985, the sandwich is an early example of the over-the-top creations that have gripped America’s flavor fancy recently. Like the infamous chicken-on-chicken violence of KFC’s Double Down sandwich, or Burger King’s Meat’normous Omelet Sandwich, or Hardee’s colon-choking Monster Thickburger (1420 calories, 107 g of fat). Then there’s Colonel Sanders’ most recent belly buster, the Cheesy Bacon Bowl, which comic Patton Oswalt once called “a failure pile in a sadness bowl.”

Yet McDonald’s has pushed the McRib beyond these other chefs-d’oeuvre, simply by dangling it in front of people. The Golden Arches keeps demand for the McRib at a fever pitch by releasing the sandwich only every so often. Since 2006 it has been available only sporadically and at random locations, prompting fans to glut themselves whenever it makes an appearance in an effort to build up pork storage in their bodies for the long McRibless winter ahead.

These factors — the sandwich’s manufactured rarity; its manufactured hysteria; the manufactured illusion that you’re getting premium meat — fuel the narrative that this is something you MUST try. Not bad for what essentially amounts to a Spam patty with A1 sauce.

So is there a Fort Knox of McRibs stockpiled somewhere, waiting patiently to be bottlenecked into restaurants? Maybe. Do people (myself included) honestly enjoy burgers that look like turds? Obviously. But McDonald’s’ empire, and America’s fast food culture in general, was built on the appetites of turd lovers.

That’s why the McRib story is such a familiar one: an underdog of undetermined origin overcomes the odds to attain immense success. You can’t get much more American than that.