Did the Army invent the McRib?

Now that I’ve learned they essentially did, it does make a lot of sense. Only the US Army could conjure up some unholy concoction of offal and gelatin pressed into a vaguely familiar shape and slathered with BBQ sauce to feed the salivating masses.

From Sandboxx.us;

Each year, the fast-food chain McDonald’s re-introduces its highly popular McRib sandwich for a short period of time, spurring a flurry of social media engagement and stories in the press about the barbecue-sauce-laden delicacy… But did you know that the McRib’s roots might actually trace back to the U.S. Army’s efforts to feed its troops in the field?

You might be surprised to learn that, despite being invented in the 1970s, there’s still a fair bit of debate about who’s really responsible for the McRib — which really speaks to how we’ve managed to lose so many interesting facts about our own history to time. The McRib might only be as old as the Star Wars franchise, but like Stonehenge, it seems to be the result of efforts from more than one group over an undetermined span of time… This makes it hard to say for sure who the primary craftsman was.

Yeah, that’s right, I just compared the McRib to Stonehenge. I stand by that.

There’s a solid argument to be made that Dr. Roger Mandigo, an animal science professor from the University of Nebraska concocted the BBQ sandwich for the National Pork Producers Council, as a part of the council’s efforts to pitch another pork-product to McDonald’s. However, Mandigo himself shies away from the honor, highlighting that he really just used existing technology to mush meat together into the shape of a Porkchop, and McDonald’s changed things up from there. Where did he get the idea, you ask? Well, according to him, “the military allowed us to use the processes they [had] developed.”

That’s right, if you really want to give credit for the McRib to the right person, the story goes back just a bit further… to a 1960s effort at the Natick Soldier Center for Research and Development to make a more appealing meal for troops in the field out of inexpensive (in other words, pretty gross) meat products.

Read the rest of the story at the link.

Category: Army, Historical