First Signs Special Report: The McRib

I'm a sucker for gimmick sandwiches at fast food joints. How many of you remember the Quad-Stacker? With four burger patties, eight pieces of bacon and four slices of cheese; it was every fast food lover's wet dream. It was the kind of sandwich you eat when you're considering suicide, hoping that the grease and calories take you out in delicious glory. The KFC Double Downs was a recent favorite. Advertised as a sandwich without a bun, the Double Down is the most insane yet amazing creation ever devised. You can imagine that Colonel Sanders himself dictated the sandwich recipe to its creator by a Ouija board from his home in Hell, where he spends all eternity getting tortured by badly treated chickens. This is the only possible explanation for the sweet chicken-on-bacon-on-chicken goodness that has been gifted to man by the devil himself on a mission to clog arteries.

Forget buns.

The McRib has been around off-and-on McDonald's menu for awhile. The McRib is like that ex-girlfriend of yours that still bothers you on Facebook. To be fair, McRib is really just one big marketing scheme. McDonald's takes it off the menu until you care about it again. All the same it became a punchline and even had its own episode on the Simpsons. There were even commercials about it when the Flinstones movie came out, using the live action stone age family as marketing fodder for the porky goodness.

I've always heard about the McRib as the pinnacle of fast food sinfulness in pop culture. A sandwich perfected by the unhealthy experts at McDonald's to be mindblowingly awesome. A molded patty of pork, smothered in BBQ sauce (which goes good on everything), and topped with onions and pickles. Now, it's back for a brief amount of time and McDonald's is probably making bank off of me and my friends finally being able to try it. While before you may have needed special tracking software to find it, it's everywhere now.

My friends and I were finally able to get our hands on the pop-culture/fast food white whale today. We ordered it all at the same time and refused to open our sandwich boxes until we were all ready, in some form of unspoken reverence. My one friend ate two and immediately regretted it. Friend #2 tried one of them and felt sick to his stomach. It was finally my turn and after a bite I was shocked. There was no fanfare, no unanswered questions resolved or enlightenment. It tasted just how I expected it to. It was good and all, I finished it, but it just made me think that the whole McRib cult was one big sham. An astroturfed minority that would buy anything they were told to. I can't attest to the health aspect of the McRib but I can tell you it wasn't anything special. For those worrying if they are adequate happy meal substitutes, remember that the Flinstones endorsed it and the Flinstones could never endorse anything harmful. They make their own vitamins for god's sake.

Aww crap...