Bacon EPIC TIME

How we conspired to ruin a perfect culinary indulgence Claudia McNeilly

In a warehouse on the outskirts of Toronto, a YouTube star is shouting an expletive at the top of his lungs. The piercing sound ricochets through the building, over the cameras and the Teflon frying pans that have been arranged around the set kitchen.

I gasp at the sound of it, immediately scanning the room to see what’s wrong. But the men who are part of the YouTube channel’s crew sip Red Bulls nonchalantly without looking up from their phones and the cameramen hardly flinch. The swearing isn’t news to them. This is how Harley Morenstein gets into character.

“Aaaaand,” drawls a man over the scream, motioning like a conductor in front of an orchestra that the YouTube live stream is about to start. “Three, two,” he declares, pointing his index finger to the ceiling while mouthing the word “one.” Suddenly, Morenstein’s expression fades into the menacing smirk that has become his signature. It is the same disposition he has combined with bacon strips and obscenities to earn his YouTube channel Epic Meal Time over seven million subscribers since debuting in 2010.

While a lot has changed in the seven years since Epic Meal Time began infiltrating YouTube’s airwaves with expletives and cured strips of pork, the show has not. Certainly, there’s something comforting about a template that continues to work, but the dishes that helped propel the channel to internet superstardom haven’t aged well. Instead of serving as a fun reminder of how far internet cooking has come, Epic Meal Time’s classic videos have since been swallowed up in the hum of viral internet foods they helped create. Recipes for a TurBaconEpic, which involves five types of poultry in a pig wrapped in bacon and assembled with something called “meat glue” and garnished with Baconators, or a 71,000 calorie Fast Food Lasagna wrapped in bacon strips and smeared in a gallon of Big Mac Sauce, have become somewhat commonplace in the culinary world of extremes. Just as people use the brand name “Kleenex” to refer to all tissues, bacon-lovers flock to the countless bacon-laden spoofs that Epic Meal Time inspired without bothering to think about the company that created the trend.

More than any other cooking show, Epic Meal Time introduced the idea that the gluttonous consumption of bacon can be used as a personality trait. Shortly after the show found mainstream success, fans of the YouTube channel began sporting T-shirts emblazoned with “BaconStrips&” in five separate rows of font. Seeking to capitalize on bacon’s sudden viral popularity, chefs around the world started adding bacon to everything. Entire restaurants, like Epic Bacon Nation in Toronto, were erected in the name of shoving bacon into a food’s every possible orifice. And Vancouver and Ottawa both hosted bacon food festivals exclusively dedicated to the serving of the cured meat.

In Epic Meal Time’s heyday, it wasn’t hard to convince people that bacon was worthy of culinary cult status. Not only is the trifecta of salt, fat and crunch found in each