When most people feel the sensation of hunger brewing deep inside their stomachs, people’s minds drift to thoughts of burgers, pizzas, sandwiches or any other typical lunchtime selections.
However, when the guys at Epic Mealtime think about food, their thoughts alone are enough to make your food cower with fear. Picture that phatburger you can barely finish and multiply its size by 100, and then add ten pounds of bacon to it and you have a dish fit for kings, a.k.a. the guys behind the hugely popular YouTube channel Epic Meal Time.
Epic Mealtime is a YouTube channel run by a group of guys stationed in Montreal, Canada that focuses around the creation of super-sized, unnecessarily fatty delicacies containing enough ingredients to feed a herd of starving Siberian tigers, and enough calories and grams of fat to make any nutritionist combust at the thought.
Hosted by Harley Morenstein and his two friends Evan Rimmer and Sterling Toth. Epic meal Time has already gained immense popularity since its debut in October 2010. The show is the fifth most subscribed of any Canadian-originated YouTube channel ever created and just broke the top 100 most subscribed channels of all time, all under seven months.
“We have a video on the internet that’s so old. It’s me, I’m eating a really huge hamburger with like six patties, 18 strips of bacon, and there’s epic music playing. I like to think of it as the birth of Epic Mealtime,” Morenstein explained in an interview with Eater Online.
The crew consists of “…myself, Harley, I’m the guy with the beard that’s always yelling about cooking…Sterling Toth, he’s the man behind the camera…You’ve got Muscles Glasses [Alex Perrault], who’s the douchebag in the aviators. We’ve got a bunch of goons…and we’ve got some cute girls as well…”
Epic Meal Time posts a new video every Tuesday, with every subsequent episode arguably becoming greasier and more calorie filled as the viewer demand grows. The first official Epic Mealtime video, “The Worst Pizza Ever,” is described by Morenstein as “Ronald McDonald, Wendy, A&W beer, Taco Bell Dog and Colonel Sanders have a wild orgy covered in tomato sauce on some dough under cheese. This pizza is their baby…and we eat babies…”
Since this video was released, Epic Mealtime has been challenged by the viewers and themselves to create an even fattier, vegan-destroying dish of manliness unfathomable to our inferior culinary minds. Every episode released has certainly challenged the previous one, with platters such as “The Turbacon Epic,” “Breakfast of Booze,” “Chili Four Loko,” “Slaughterhouse Christmas Special,” and “The Sloppy Roethlisburger, “whose names don’t even do the dishes justice. These oversized ideas for meals are pretty far fetched, and take master planning to finalize.
“We’ll sit down there and maybe I’ll pick up some sort of idea, like maybe hey Thanksgiving’s coming up! Let’s do a turducken! And people are like yeah, a turducken’s great, but let’s use lots of bacon. And then it’s like yeah, we’ve got lots of bacon, but let’s use more birds. So then we’ve got lots of birds in there and it’s yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s put all of that inside a pig. Yeah, yeah, and let’s garnish it with baconators because we’re not chefs, we’re just a bunch of dudes.”
Each brilliant dish they create averages 37,794 calories and 2,716.2 grams of fat, approximately fifteen times higher than the recommended daily intake for people between the ages of 19 and 31. However, only one dish is created and eaten every week, and all of them are shared by more than one person. The dishes are usually eaten on Sundays and the participants tend to enter into a food coma that doesn’t dissipate until mid- day Tuesday.
Despite all of this, the ever present question that lingers over the dudes at Epic Mealtime is: What’s next? What happens when bacon becomes boring? However, what information they have released doesn’t give that much away. “I don’t think the public is ready yet. We have ideas for about two years…we haven’t even hit seafood yet. Somebody is going to die.”
The dishes created by Epic Mealtime redefine culinary art and bring a level of manliness never before witnessed in the practice of cooking. With more meat and greasy deliciousness being added every episode, prepare to be amazed by the meals yet to come. To pique your interest, let me reiterate, “Somebody is going to die.”
Written by Benjy Elkind. This article originally appeared in the April 2011 issue.