Squint and the flesh is sort of lovely, an ombre splattered on the counter. Pale peach bleeds right into a deeper brick crimson, crossed with bands of pink and champagne. I didn’t know physique components might are available such an array. I really feel unwell and awed without delay as every muscle is sewn collectively. When Julia Youngster did it to a goose, it felt elegant, however right here there isn’t any overlaying up the maniacal mashing collectively of useless our bodies like Barbie dolls. It’s so moist. And thru all of it, a darkish chanting: “Bacon strips. Bacon strips. Bacon strips.”
Uploaded to YouTube in 2010, “TurBaconEpic Thanksgiving” was Epic Meal Time’s fourth video, garnering greater than 19 million views since. In two and a half minutes, the staff of bros, led by host Harley Morenstein, stuffs a quail, a Cornish hen, a duck, and a rooster right into a turkey, then stuffs that right into a pig, layers all of it with bacon, after which smokes the entire thing. They calculate it’s 79,046 energy price of meals. I don’t know reality test them.
Within the early 2010s, this was meals tradition. It doesn’t matter in case you’ve by no means seen an Epic Meal Time video in your life; this group of Canadian boys, cooking like they had been single-handedly making an attempt to trigger a world bacon scarcity, was each the final word distillation of a second in cooking and a riotous inspiration for the whole lot that was to come back. This was meals as leisure, simply as everybody was starting to appreciate leisure could possibly be born or grossly manufactured on-line.
“We had been mainly the Jackass of meals.”
The idea was stupidly easy. In every episode, Morenstein (who didn’t reply to interview requests) and his band of pals — co-creator and cameraman Sterling Toth, Josh Elkin, Alex Perrault, Dave Heuff, Ameer Atari, and others, whose appearances fluctuated over time — would try and take advantage of outlandish, meat-laden dishes doable. Generally this was achieved by layering Massive Macs right into a lasagna; different instances, by making chili with 4 Loko and pouring the entire thing right into a bacon trough. Each recipe included bacon, and most concerned Jack Daniel’s. Sure, they’d eat it, however that wasn’t actually the purpose. It was the mounting pressure of seeing whether or not their unholy concepts — a sweet pizza, an 84-egg sandwich, a “meat automobile” — could possibly be realized. Even the title was a joke, a leetspeak-adjacent model at dwelling on an web filled with lolcats and pwnage.
“We had been mainly the Jackass of meals,” says Elkin, a member of Epic Meal Time from 2010 to 2015. Following the rampant success of the documentary Tremendous Dimension Me, the prevalence of weight-loss reality-competition reveals like The Largest Loser, and the publication of rehashed weight-reduction plan guides like Eat This Not That!, who wouldn’t welcome a half-hour reprieve of essentially the most ridiculous guys you “know” deliberately bucking the obsessive weight-reduction plan that outlined the ’90s and 2000s, going as far as to notice even the projected calorie rely of every dish? Lastly, cooking content material that valued punchlines and antics over monitoring trans fat.
Epic Meal Time was a product of the bigger pork trade’s affect. Within the early 2000s, the Nationwide Pork Board had instigated a selected mission to maneuver its reserves of pork stomach, after the anti-fat diets of the ’90s had made fattier cuts all however unsellable. “Just a few Pork Board entrepreneurs … got here up with a plan to reposition bacon as a ‘taste enhancer’ to the restaurant trade, as a result of there was a better likelihood of diners accepting bacon once they ate out,” wrote David Sax in 2014. They lobbied eating places so as to add bacon to their menus and switched their motto from “The Different White Meat” to “Bacon Makes It Higher.” It labored — “pork bellies, lengthy dormant, started shifting up in worth, from underneath 30¢ per pound in 1989 to nearly a greenback in 2006.”
The sudden omnipresence of bacon on quick meals and restaurant menus (hey, Wendy’s Baconator), paired with the Nice Recession, the delivery of the social web, and a backlash to the flavorless Snackwells each 20-year-old had been raised on, kick-started a craze for all meals, low-cost and indulgent. In 2008, Corey James launched bacontoday.com, a shrine to all issues edible and swine-centric. And Dave Heuff, one other former member of Epic Meal Time, says the inspiration for the group’s first video got here from shopping thisiswhyyourefat.com, a single-serving weblog launched in 2009 that chronicled outlandish menu choices like deep-fried s’mores and scorching canine pie. “I simply turned the pc round to the group, and so they’re like, ‘Oh, man, we should always get a pizza and put burgers on and fries and like, wouldn’t that simply be hilarious?’” he says. That’s precisely what they did. To tens of millions of followers, it was.
For a time, it appeared like there was no restrict to the absurdity of Epic Meal Time’s creations, and with Elkin because the de facto chef (round Episode 4, they begin filming in his condominium), they received barely extra difficult than simply throwing burgers on a pizza. There was a Cerberus of lambs’ heads and burgers, or contemporary pasta filled with Chef Boyardee. There was additionally the actually horrendous Turbaconepicentipede, impressed by the gross-out horror flick The Human Centipede, which concerned stitching 10 pigs, ass-to-mouth, down the eating desk, every in fact filled with turkey. And the extra these creators leaned into the sheer insanity of their creations, the extra it labored. Elkin remembers making a “meat salad,” basically a bowl of varied meats. “We thought, That is the top of us. That is the stupidest factor ever. And it grew to become so fashionable. There have been so many memes,” he says.
Morenstein’s threatening deadpan supply was rife with the comically self-serious depth of a person cursed to speak solely through wrestling promos.
“We’re catering to an Web, ADD era that’s into cooking reveals which are quick and in your face,” Morenstein stated in 2011. However Epic Meal Time wasn’t actually a cooking present as a lot as a parody of 1, which might solely exist if meals leisure was prevalent sufficient to be absolutely mainstream. Which, by 2010, it was: Prime Chef had been operating for 4 years, Man Fieri was consuming each massive sandwich in his approach, and contestants had simply began having to cook dinner by thriller packing containers on Chopped. “The entire idea of Epic Meal Time was we don’t know something about cooking,” says Elkin, “however we’re making the most well-liked cooking movies on the planet.”
Like Jackass, Epic Meal Time was extra difficult than it appeared. “There have been skits and scripts behind how we had been presenting issues,” Heuff says. “It was very music-driven in how we edited issues. It made it really feel such as you had been watching a narrative.” These hypermasculine characters and personae all hinged on Morenstein’s threatening deadpan supply, rife with the comically self-serious depth of a person cursed to speak solely through wrestling promos. However underneath the bravado and copiously layered and stuffed proteins was a bunch of fellows simply type of bro-ing out at nobody’s expense however their very own. Like every good actuality TV, it felt by some means extra trustworthy, even when there was a script. “A part of the key sauce in the beginning was [that] it was a bunch of bros that beloved one another,” Elkin says.
There’s an XKCD comedian revealed in 2006 that grew to become the blueprint for a way each millennial considered maturity. A stick determine explains to a different that their home is crammed with playpen balls “as a result of we’re grown-ups now, and it’s our flip to resolve what which means.” The 2 tumble into the ball pit collectively, utterly in love with the concept maturity might simply imply the power to lean into one’s silliest compulsions.
As millennials got here of age, the concept we shouldn’t adhere to the expectations of maturity was prevalent, particularly if we’d reap not one of the rewards. There was no purpose to desert infantile joys for accountability if the Nice Recession meant nobody might get a job or purchase a home anyway. Epic Meal Time was a conduit for that unfettered millennial id, this concept that you could and may retain the tastes and humor of a (white, male) teen as a result of, fuck it, why not? This was not aspirational in that you just wished to cook dinner what they had been making (although some actually tried), however the aspiration that getting drunk and refusing to eat greens in your mid-20s could possibly be some form of viable profession.
And for a second, it was! Out of the blue, you possibly can monetize dicking round with your mates. “It was a pivotal second in meals, nevertheless it was a pivotal second in YouTube, as effectively,” says Heuff. Inside a number of months of launching, Epic Meal Time was accredited for YouTube monetization, a considerably uncommon prevalence in 2010. They had been raking in “tens of millions,” says Elkin, from Adsense and model sponsorships (in 2014, Hormel signed on to be the official bacon provider for a 12 months), and based on Mashed, the model earned $5 million in its first 12 months. “We had been, I feel, one of many first YouTubers to have merch,” Heuff says. They weren’t the one ones on the market making an attempt to monetize the bros, however “I feel we actually paved the best way for lots of larger YouTubers afterwards.”
As millennials got here of age, the concept we shouldn’t adhere to the expectations of maturity was prevalent, particularly if we’d reap not one of the rewards.
But when they had been pioneers of YouTube’s riches, then they too had been the earliest examples of the social video app’s most iconic attracts: the content material creator breakup. Maybe it’s greatest to not combine friendship and enterprise. In 2011, Sterling Toth filed a lawsuit in opposition to Morenstein and says he was subsequently pushed out of the corporate. Different featured gamers — like Alex Perrault, aka “Muscle tissues Glasses” — trickled out. Elkin and Heuff each left in 2015. “I type of noticed the writing on the wall,” says Elkin. “There was simply no future in Epic Meal Time. The views had been lowering, the eye to element was lowering, and the love for it was simply not there anymore. The creativity was utterly shot within the ass.”
Except for the interpersonal disputes, Epic Meal Time’s decline is a story as previous because the media trade — underdog will get a success, and a giant canine is available in and strips it for all it’s price earlier than the pattern goes stale. In 2024, Morenstein defined to Joblo that the staff “couldn’t sustain with these mega [corporate] firms that had been actually banging out 50 meals movies per week, a few of which had been concepts that we’d already accomplished earlier than, however they had been getting 10 instances extra views as they’d perception into the algorithm.” Corporations like Buzzfeed or Vice might flood the zone with outlandish meals content material. And largely, the joke received previous. There’s solely so many instances you may watch a bunch of drunk guys wrap bacon round another cholesterol-laden meals, and as soon as you already know what’s going to occur, why hassle? Nowadays on Epic Meal Time’s YouTube, Morenstein sometimes creates a monstrosity like a 25-pound caffeinated doughnut, however he has largely pivoted to meals challenges and, in the end, a podcast.
That doesn’t imply the channel’s affect is caught up to now. Elkin, who now makes his personal epic meals for 1.3 million Instagram followers, says youthful TikTok meals creators nonetheless look to the present: “They are saying that with out Epic Meal Time, it will be a totally totally different panorama.” As a result of take a look at how far we’ve are available our pursuit of meals leisure that embraces doing essentially the most: Would Mr. Beast have dumped 4 million cookies on somebody’s garden if Epic Meal Time hadn’t dropped 2,000 cookies off a 100-foot crane? Would mukbangs and meals challenges and people deliberately disgusting viral movies garner tens of millions of views? Hell, what’s the chaos cooking creation of Evil Cooks’ octopus al pastor if not “Meat Cthulu”? Audiences by no means stopped wanting a great stunt, solely to be wowed and just a little grossed out on the similar time. There isn’t a query we’re residing in Epic Meal Time’s shadow.
In line with Heuff, who now helps YouTube creators develop their audiences, the best legacy of Epic Meal Time is that it proved that “common dudes might simply begin one thing. You’ve an concept, and you place it on the market, and it could possibly be the factor that carries you.” What appears like an excerpt from The Secret is in the end the lesson of the entire web, with just a little Ratatouille thrown in: You didn’t must be an expert or know something in any respect a few topic, frankly, to make a profession out of it. Liking bacon was sufficient to turn into a star. As a result of the celebs, they’re identical to us.
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein
