In McDefense of McRib

Fellow Fitness Nerd Steve Edwards has been having a party over at his Straight Dope blog featuring something he likes to call "National People Behaving Badly Week." I told him I'd plug it today, although frankly, I don't see the point. Steve's blog is super popular and judging by his comments section, my readers already read it - and then some.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Anyway, yesterday Steve-o took a swing at the McRib.

“As much as I love ribs there is one part that I hate: the ribs,” jokes Stephen Colbert while lambasting one of the more curious eating phenomenons’s in US history. Apparently in some areas folks have lined up around the block for this odd food item that more resembles something you’d see in one of those old toy ovens that served plastic food than, well, anything that we might eat that comes from nature.

He also gives Men's Health magazine a drubbing for endorsing the McRib.

I might let this slide if this were, say, Smoke Signals or Gourmet (though I’m sure their editors wouldn’t), or pretty anything down at the corner newsstand. But Men’s Health, seriously?! They—which I say because the piece has no author—even take an uppity tone with The View’s Joy Behar for panning it,

Joy Behar makes a big point about the McRib having a lot of fat. Really? The first rule of fat loss is to not overeat, and a 500-calorie sandwich isn’t a waist-expanding indulgence, no matter how many of its calories come from fat.

Um, really?! How many readers does this magazine have? This is their editorial staff‘s “first rule of fat loss”. Let me borrow a phrase from my buddy Jack LaLanne about charlatans, “these people should be in jail.”

Not overeating is not a rule of fat loss. It’s a concept that has a few hooks on it, namely that you need to make a nutrient swap. Using their example you’d be well off on a diet of gummy candies and Diet Coke just so long as you didn’t overeat. I submit that you’d be dead within a month.

Steve has several valid points, but I'd like to look at the other side of the McCoin here. While Mickey D's certainly knows a thing or two about pulverizing animal byproducts into a fine paste and reshaping them into "food" like the McRib and its feathered cousin the McNugget, they're hardly innovators. We've been re-engineering meat since the dawn of man. In a word: Sausage. And I'm guessing you, the Nerd Herd, are well aware that this All-American, tube of meaty mystery shoved into a sheep intestine isn't quite the symbol of light, patriotism, and good health that BBQ dealers and baseball franchise owners would like you to think it is.

As Upton Sinclair points out in The Jungle, his 1906 assault on the meat industry, "For it was the custom, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage." He later adds, "They use everything of the pig except the squeal." Or, as Dan Aykroyd so succinctly put it in the 1988 comedy tour-de-force, The Great Outdoors, "Hot dogs! You know what they're made of, Chet? Huh? Lips and assholes!"

While I question if these meat-like foods are quite that nefarious, I'm still certain they contain stuff you wouldn't eat if I served it to you intact - even if I breaded it. But frankly, I'm wondering if that's a bad thing, from an environmental and ethical perspective. Given pigs are as smart as dogs, I personally am not a pork fan, but I understand that most of you want your bacon, damnit, and I accept that. But it's a little sad if Wilber dies, has his choice bits carved up and the rest of him thrown in the trash heap. It doesn't really honor his death. It's a little like how a zombie will got all the effort to chase you down and tear your flesh to ribbons with his broken teeth and jagged nails - then just eat your brain. That's not right! He should at least taste your liver before shuffling off. What makes that zombie feel he has the right to be so discerning? Gourmet zombies are bullshit! Zombies are simply not very good at environmentally sustainable eating. They really need to work on that.

But I digress. if you're going to eat the pig, you should eat the whole pig, tail to snout. That's the way Native Americans treated buffalo. So maybe McDonald's is doing society a great service by making those undesirable bits more palatable. We should send them a damn medal or at least some kind of commendation. A thank you note, maybe? "Dear Ronald, thank you for grinding pig guts into a fine paste and feeding them to stoned college students. You're making the world a better place."