Achin’ for some bacon?

I can’t avert my eyes from the disgusting meat feast that is “Epic Mealtime.” Like a car wreck, or an episode of Jackass, you can’t help but watch on, both horrified and fascinated.

“Epic Mealtime” is a viral show about cramming together everything the American Heart Association tells you to avoid, and then stuffing your face with it.
Their motto? “We make your dreams come true…and then we eat them.”

Since October 2010 the show has gained a substantial following on YouTube. Why people watch it, I can’t say. I don’t even know why I watch it. The content of the show sickens me, and the fact that I continue to watch it disturbs me.

“Epic Mealtime” isn’t really a cooking show and it isn’t really an eating contest. “Epic Mealtime” is food porn at its very finest. If my dad walked in on me watching “Epic Mealtime,” I would switch over to CNN as fast I could, and pretend that I wasn’t just watching a bunch of Canadian sorority girls cram bacon Mac and cheese into their mouths.

Harley Morenstein and his ragtag group of friends film most of the episodes from their Quebec, Canada, home. They take well-known dishes: chili, meatballs, Mac and cheese, turkey, sushi, etc. and then (short of poison) make them as unhealthy as possible. Their love affair with bacon is so intense that the bacon industry will surely collapse if the show ends.

In the “Four Loko Chili” episode the “Epic Mealtime” gang make a trough out of bacon and fill it with meat-chili. Then they make a cup out of bacon and fill that with Four Loko, or as they like to call it, “alcoholic unicorn blood.” Then a guy called “muscle glasses” shovels it into his mouth with a wooden paddle, slowly going insane, while epic Apollo 13 style music blasts in the background.

Another episode, called the “TurkBacon Thanksgiving special,” features a quail, inside a Cornish hen, inside a chicken, inside a duck, inside a turkey, inside a pig. Then they cover it in bacon strips. The end result is more than 50,000 calories and almost 4,000 grams of fat.

The host, Morenstein, barks orders and deadpans better than Tom Green throughout the entire show. He always has this glazed over, slack jawed look on his face, making me think that maybe the real threat of eating too much meat isn’t cardiac arrest, but turning into a zombie.

At first, I felt superior to “Epic Mealtime.” I considered the creators a bunch of Neanderthals who would never be able to call themselves chefs.

Although none of them have attended culinary school and most of the crew do resemble cavemen, there is something rebellious about “Epic Mealtime” that I’ve come to love.

Behind all the lard, “Epic Mealtime” is valuable commentary on the hypocritical standards society force feeds us vs. the greasy, dyed junk that is actually fed to us. Morenstein doesn’t expect people to start eating Babushka bird pigs. Judging by the crew’s surprisingly slim wasteline, they probably don’t do it very often either.

“Epic Mealtime” gives the middle finger to all those wild salmon, organic food, one-glass-of-wine-a-day Public Service Announcements that make us feel inferior for craving fat, sugar and salt. Of course, eating a pig stuffed with five birds wouldn’t make me feel good, but these guys are badasses for doing it anyways. And you know what? Their asses aren’t even that fat.