McDonald’s world-famous meat product shaped like a tiny rack of ribs is returning just in time for the holidays. Starting next month, hungry customers can buy not only the McRib sandwich again, but also a jug of the sauce it’s slathered in. Are you not loving it?
The unholy combo arrives at participating McDonald’s on December 3. The $5 sandwich apparently isn’t tempting fate enough for some enthusiasts, so for just $20 more, people can also pick up a half-gallon of the McRib sauce to do god knows what with. I can already see someone livestreaming the first McRib hot tub session. Nudity is banned on Twitch, but highly processed sauce-related acts of depravity are not.
The McRib was first introduced at the fast-food chain back in 1985. It was so disgusting, even for the sons and daughters of the Reagan Revolution, that it was removed from the menu just a few years later. Not until the post-9/11 Bush Jr. years, when McDonald’s started turning the sandwich into a limited-availability meme, did the McRib start to become a popular avatar for chemically altered food and free market excesses.
If you’ve never had a McRib before, bless you. It’s “boneless” pork, aka pork product molded into the shape of bones, comes on a long bun with sliced onions, pickles, and lots of sauce. It’s 520 calories of shame, gastral trauma, and transcendence, all mixed into one. Here’s how they’re (allegedly) made.
And here’s how the late Mike Fahey described it back in 2012:
It’s not about the pork. After eating two of these since Saturday evening, I cannot for the life of me describe how the shoulder in this sandwich tastes. It’s not a flavor. It’s a texture delivery device for the wonderful combination of sauce, onions and pickles, something to chew on to keep us from mixing up a big ol’ jug of BBQ-pickle-onion-ade. Anything would taste the same under this onslaught of overpowering toppings—even Jesus.
Holiday FOMO still can’t convince me it’s better than a Big Mac, but to each their own. Just don’t go asking for the jug of sauce at the drive thru. They’re only available online at www.wholelottamcribsauce.com. May the powers that be have mercy on the souls of those whose job this season is to deliver it.