What Was Epic Meal Time?

Eater

12 hours ago

Squint and the flesh is almost beautiful, an ombre splattered on the counter. Pale peach bleeds into a deeper brick red, crossed with bands of pink and champagne. I didn't know body parts could come in such an array. I feel ill and awed at once as each muscle is sewn together. When Julia Child did it to a goose, it felt elegant, but here there is no covering up the maniacal mashing together of dead bodies like Barbie dolls. It's so wet. And through it all, a dark chanting: 'Bacon strips. Bacon strips. Bacon strips.'
Uploaded to YouTube in 2010, 'TurBaconEpic Thanksgiving' was Epic Meal Time's fourth video, garnering more than 19 million views since. In two and a half minutes, the team of bros, led by host Harley Morenstein, stuffs a quail, a Cornish hen, a duck, and a chicken into a turkey, then stuffs that into a pig, layers it all with bacon, and then smokes the whole thing. They calculate it's 79,046 calories worth of food. I have no idea how to fact check them.
In the early 2010s, this was food culture. It doesn't matter if you've never seen an Epic Meal Time video in your life; this group of Canadian boys, cooking like they were single-handedly trying to cause an international bacon shortage, was both the ultimate distillation of a moment in cooking and a riotous inspiration for everything that was to come. This was food as entertainment, just as everyone was beginning to realize entertainment could be born or grossly manufactured online.
'We were basically the Jackass of food.'
The concept was stupidly simple. In each episode, Morenstein (who did not respond to interview requests) and his band of friends — co-creator and cameraman Sterling Toth, Josh Elkin, Alex Perrault, Dave Heuff, Ameer Atari, and others, whose appearances fluctuated over time — would attempt to make the most outlandish, meat-laden dishes possible. Sometimes this was accomplished by layering Big Macs into a lasagna; other times, by making chili with Four Loko and pouring the whole thing into a bacon trough. Every recipe included bacon, and most involved Jack Daniel's. Yes, they'd eat it, but that wasn't really the point. It was the mounting tension of seeing whether their unholy ideas — a candy pizza, an 84-egg sandwich, a 'meat car' — could be realized. Even the name was a joke, a leetspeak-adjacent brand at home on an internet full of lolcats and pwnage.
'We were basically the Jackass of food,' says Elkin, a member of Epic Meal Time from 2010 to 2015. Following the rampant success of the documentary Super Size Me, the prevalence of weight-loss reality-competition shows like The Biggest Loser, and the publication of rehashed dieting guides like Eat This Not That!, who wouldn't welcome a half-hour reprieve of the most ridiculous guys you 'know' intentionally bucking the obsessive dieting that defined the '90s and 2000s, going so far as to note even the projected calorie count of each dish? Finally, cooking content that valued punchlines and antics over tracking trans fats.
Just as any strip of glossy, crispy-topped pork belly has to come from a less-than-glamorous processing facility somewhere, Epic Meal Time, too, was a product of the larger pork industry's influence. In the early 2000s, the National Pork Board had instigated a specific mission to move its reserves of pork belly, after the anti-fat diets of the '90s had made fattier cuts all but unsellable. 'A few Pork Board marketers … came up with a plan to reposition bacon as a 'flavor enhancer' to the restaurant industry, because there was a greater chance of diners accepting bacon when they ate out,' wrote David Sax in 2014. They lobbied restaurants to add bacon to their menus and switched their motto from 'The Other White Meat' to 'Bacon Makes It Better.' It worked — 'pork bellies, long dormant, began moving up in price, from under 30¢ per pound in 1989 to almost a dollar in 2006.'
The sudden omnipresence of bacon on fast food and restaurant menus (hello, Wendy's Baconator), paired with the Great Recession, the birth of the social internet, and a backlash to the flavorless Snackwells every 20-year-old had been raised on, kick-started a craze for all foods, cheap and indulgent. In 2008, Corey James launched bacontoday.com, a shrine to all things edible and swine-centric. And Dave Heuff, another former member of Epic Meal Time, says the inspiration for the group's first video came from browsing thisiswhyyourefat.com, a single-serving blog launched in 2009 that chronicled outlandish menu offerings like deep-fried s'mores and hot dog pie. 'I just turned the computer around to the group, and they're like, 'Oh, man, we should get a pizza and put burgers on and fries and like, wouldn't that just be hilarious?'' he says. That's exactly what they did. To millions of fans, it was.
For a time, it seemed like there was no limit to the absurdity of Epic Meal Time's creations, and with Elkin as the de facto chef (around Episode 4, they start filming in his apartment), they got slightly more complicated than just throwing burgers on a pizza. There was a Cerberus of lambs' heads and burgers, or fresh pasta stuffed with Chef Boyardee. There was also the truly horrendous Turbaconepicentipede, inspired by the gross-out horror flick The Human Centipede, which involved sewing 10 pigs, ass-to-mouth, down the dining table, each of course stuffed with turkey. And the more these creators leaned into the sheer madness of their creations, the more it worked. Elkin recalls making a 'meat salad,' essentially a bowl of various meats. 'We thought, This is the end of us. This is the stupidest thing ever. And it became so popular. There were so many memes,' he says.
Morenstein's threatening deadpan delivery was rife with the comically self-serious intensity of a man cursed to communicate only via wrestling promos.
'We're catering to an Internet, ADD generation that's into cooking shows that are fast and in your face,' Morenstein said in 2011. But Epic Meal Time wasn't really a cooking show as much as a parody of one, which could only exist if food entertainment was prevalent enough to be fully mainstream. Which, by 2010, it was: Top Chef had been running for four years, Guy Fieri was eating every big sandwich in his way, and contestants had just started having to cook through mystery boxes on Chopped. 'The whole concept of Epic Meal Time was we don't know anything about cooking,' says Elkin, 'but we're making the most popular cooking videos in the world.'
Like Jackass, Epic Meal Time was more complicated than it appeared. 'There were skits and scripts behind how we were presenting things,' Heuff says. 'It was very music-driven in how we edited things. It made it feel like you were watching a story.' Those hypermasculine characters and personae all hinged on Morenstein's threatening deadpan delivery, rife with the comically self-serious intensity of a man cursed to communicate only via wrestling promos. But under the bravado and copiously layered and stuffed proteins was a group of guys just kind of bro-ing out at no one's expense but their own. Like any good reality TV, it felt somehow more honest, even if there was a script. 'Part of the secret sauce at the beginning was [that] it was a bunch of bros that loved each other,' Elkin says.
There's an XKCD comic published in 2006 that became the blueprint for how every millennial viewed adulthood. A stick figure explains to another that their house is filled with playpen balls 'because we're grown-ups now, and it's our turn to decide what that means.' The two tumble into the ball pit together, completely in love with the idea that adulthood could just mean the ability to lean into one's silliest compulsions.
As millennials came of age, the idea that we shouldn't adhere to the expectations of adulthood was prevalent, especially if we'd reap none of the rewards. There was no reason to abandon childish joys for responsibility if the Great Recession meant no one could get a job or buy a house anyway. Epic Meal Time was a conduit for that unfettered millennial id, this idea that you can and should retain the tastes and humor of a (white, male) teen because, fuck it, why not? This was not aspirational in that you wanted to cook what they were making (though some certainly tried), but the aspiration that getting drunk and refusing to eat vegetables in your mid-20s could be some sort of viable career.
And for a moment, it was! Suddenly, you could monetize dicking around with your friends. 'It was a pivotal moment in food, but it was a pivotal moment in YouTube, as well,' says Heuff. Within a few months of launching, Epic Meal Time was approved for YouTube monetization, a significantly rare occurrence in 2010. They were raking in 'millions,' says Elkin, from Adsense and brand sponsorships (in 2014, Hormel signed on to be the official bacon supplier for a year), and according to Mashed, the brand earned $5 million in its first year. 'We were, I think, one of the first YouTubers to have merch,' Heuff says. They weren't the only ones out there trying to monetize the bros, but 'I think we really paved the way for a lot of bigger YouTubers afterwards.'
As millennials came of age, the idea that we shouldn't adhere to the expectations of adulthood was prevalent, especially if we'd reap none of the rewards.
But if they were pioneers of YouTube's riches, then they too were the earliest examples of the social video app's most iconic draws: the content creator breakup. Perhaps it's best not to mix friendship and business. In 2011, Sterling Toth filed a lawsuit against Morenstein and says he was subsequently pushed out of the company. Other featured players — like Alex Perrault, aka 'Muscles Glasses' — trickled out. Elkin and Heuff both left in 2015. 'I kind of saw the writing on the wall,' says Elkin. 'There was just no future in Epic Meal Time. The views were decreasing, the attention to detail was decreasing, and the love for it was just not there anymore. The creativity was completely shot in the ass.'
Aside from the interpersonal disputes, Epic Meal Time's decline is a tale as old as the media industry — underdog gets a hit, and a big dog comes in and strips it for all it's worth before the trend goes stale. In 2024, Morenstein explained to Joblo that the team 'couldn't keep up with these mega [corporate] companies that were literally banging out 50 food videos a week, some of which were ideas that we'd already done before, but they were getting 10 times more views as they had insight into the algorithm.' Companies like Buzzfeed or Vice could flood the zone with outlandish food content. And mostly, the joke got old. There's only so many times you can watch a group of drunk guys wrap bacon around some other cholesterol-laden food, and once you know what's going to happen, why bother? These days on Epic Meal Time's YouTube, Morenstein occasionally creates a monstrosity like a 25-pound caffeinated doughnut, but he has mostly pivoted to food challenges and, ultimately, a podcast.
According to Heuff, who now helps YouTube creators grow their audiences, the greatest legacy of Epic Meal Time is that it proved that 'average dudes could just start something. You have an idea, and you put it out there, and it could be the thing that carries you.' What sounds like an excerpt from The Secret is ultimately the lesson of the whole internet, with a little Ratatouille thrown in: You didn't have to be a professional or know anything at all about a subject, frankly, to make a career out of it. Liking bacon was enough to become a star. Because the stars, they're just like us.
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein
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