The Free Press, Mankato, MN

Brian Ojanpa

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January 8, 2010

McRib sandwich comes calling again

“The government investigated yet another terrorist threat today. Luckily it was just McDonald’s announcing they’re bringing back the McRib sandwich.”

That’s a not-so-great Jay Leno joke about a great sandwich. Well, maybe not great, exactly. More like, OK.

Well, maybe not OK. More like mediocre.

Well, maybe not that either.

Let’s cut to the quick: Among bizarrely iconic American foodstuffs that have become punchlines unto themselves, the McRib may be second only to the genre’s gold standard, Spam.

The McRib, alternately offered and yanked from McDonald’s menus since 1981, is making yet another nationwide comeback, albeit only at franchise outlets that choose to sell them.

Even among McDonald’s franchisees, this glutinous vagabond is treated like a drunken uncle who shows up at your door way too often.

For the uninitiated, the McRib is a processed-to-smithereens boneless pork patty, machine-molded to give the illusion rib bones are present, and dunked whole in a cloying ooze claiming to be barbecue sauce.

In the interest of masochism, I put one to my lips a few years ago. Let’s just say it was like a blind date with a leper — a singular experience that won’t be repeated.

The meat-ish part of this 500-calorie, 26 fat-gram sandwich appears to exist solely for heft and laughs, and essentially serves as a transport platform for the sauce, pickles, onion and bun.

Yes, it’s really pork, but in the same way that that’s really Cher’s face. If U.S. pork industry folks had to use the McRib as their poster child, you’d have to talk them off ledges.

Yet the sandwich endures for two reasons — McDonald’s deft and repeated use of “scarcity marketing” and because a lot of people like them.

There is even a Web site called McRib Locator that uses Google maps to pinpoint the latest reports of McRib sightings at McDonald’s restaurants nationwide. I really wish I were making that up.

There are a couple of Twin Cities locations where the McRib is available, but Mankato-area McDonald’s aren’t participating in its latest comeback.

I don’t know what that says about local franchisees, or about the McRib, for that matter. All I know is that it, like Spam, has become a slander-proof slab of virtual meat. As the axiom says, call me anything you want, just don’t call me late to dinner.

The real heroes of the McRib phenomena are the people in lab coats. That its taste remotely resembles a barbecue sandwich is a stunning achievement of science.



Brian Ojanpa is a Free Press staff writer. Call him at 344-6316 or e-mail bojanpa@mankatofreepress.com .

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