There is nothing new being made here. Just the lingering dreams of 90s and 2000s free-wheeling optimism now rotting from the inside.
As it stands, I have only managed to create one film list on my Letterboxd account: “Movies About the 2008 Financial Crisis.” While Letterboxd only allows me to log films and TV shows (such as Magic Mike, The Big Short, and Nomadland), this canon of recession media would be incomplete without the inclusion of the once-tremendously-successful and now-faded-into-oblivion YouTube channel Epic Meal Time. Formed around the concept of “some guys making an obscenely large version of a foodstuff using fast food, meat, Jack Daniels, and strictly no vegetables, then eating it,” Epic Meal Time is a perfect distillation of early-2010s cultural values: recession-fueled dreams of gluttony, a profound and widespread obsession with bacon, a rapidly entrenching meat-oriented masculinity, the word “epic,” and a deep and residing emptiness. Epic Meal Time is a bridge between worlds, a portal into a bygone era whose values have nonetheless shaped those of the present.
In the dark space of my brain that recalls being a teenager, Epic Meal Time occupies the same territory as vlogs from the Smosh boys, Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt wishing us happy new year with a ukulele, Panasonic headphone unboxing videos, and numerous gamers who have since been accused of sexual assault. This world of content marks the transition away from the emergent period of unique Youtube-based internet culture, in all its naïve techno-optimism and fledgling creativity, to the abundant slop of marketization and self-promotion which engulfs the platform’s present. To put it differently, in the early 2010s, Web 2.0 was dying, and Web 3.0 was hungrily being born, consuming all in its path. It feels fitting, then, that one of the brief yet notorious chapters in this transitory process towards the monetization of existence itself comes in the form of Epic Meal Time and its unique brand of “frat bro food porn.” But what was Epic Meal Time, and perhaps more importantly, what happened to it and the particular brand of meaty millennial excess that it represented? What can looking back at Epic Meal Time tell us about capitalism, desire, masculinity, and how their intersections illuminate our morbid fascinations with both food and the bodies that eat it?
Upon revisiting Epic Meal Time‘s first video (“Fast Food Pizza,” posted on October 18, 2010), I am struck by how little the show’s format changed during its lifetime. Our primary cast of characters are already here: founder, main host, and former substitute history teacher Harley Morenstein, alongside his childhood friend Alex Perrault who will become the recurring character “Muscles Glasses” (the ultimate silent and buff consumer). We begin, as would become usual for the channel, by visiting a series of fast food chains to gather our “ingredients”: various restaurants’ signature burgers, fried chicken, and fries. Morenstein already embodies his domineering lead character role (albeit more toned down than later on), who is so awkwardly rude, it almost veers into camp kinkiness (“It’s me. I want the baconator again”). The graphics are bad, the cinematography is overexposed, the boys are muscular in their ill-fitting t-shirts.
When stacking up the various constituent parts into the aforementioned “Fast Food Pizza,” we have a “fat counter” in the bottom right of the video, which tolls up the calories and grams of fat. The fat counter functions as both a source of gluttonous pride and a means of mocking the viewer: “look what I can eat and still look like this.” (Notably missing is a cash counter for how much all of this costs.) Morenstein and Perrault then try to convert their motley collection of fast food chain signature items into a new meal; pizza stacked with fries, nuggets and whole burgers and smothered in cheese. The resulting concoction is then consumed ravenously, Perrault in his signature aviators and Morenstein in a Terminator t-shirt.
“Fast Food Pizza” has a meagre 5.9 million views, as opposed to “Fast Food Lasagna”’s 34 million. A comment reading “Who’s here in 2025?” has one thumbs up. Shamefully, I also give it a like.
In the introduction to their book Feasts, Michael Dietler and Brian Hayden note that throughout history, feasts “help to create the experience of ‘condensed meaning’” making them “ideal stages for other important social transactions, such as presentations of valuables, making alliances, and… the construction of value.” In just a few minutes per video, Epic Meal Time adeptly functions as a synecdoche for the recession-infused cultural crisis of the early 2010s. Many Americans had lost their homes and livelihoods—all so the banks could keep evading responsibility and the Obama administration could bomb Syria a few more times. WikiLeaks exposed the senseless and murderous nature of the U.S. imperialism as the Supreme Court blocked a ban on corporate political funding. The last hurrah of the American dream revealed nothing more than the horizon of empire. As these cultural crises came to a head, in October 2011, thousands poured into Zucotti Park in New York’s financial district demanding an end to corporate greed (leading to over 700 arrests), and Epic Meal Time celebrated its one-year anniversary with “Fast Food Pizza Cake,” featuring a special guest appearance from Tony Hawk.
Revisiting Epic Meal Time from the vantage point of the present (who’s here in 2025?) reveals how the absurdity and horror of the financial crash provoked some to Occupy Wall Street, and others to try to lose themselves in voyeuristic consumption of the absurd decadence of others—and of the hope that they themselves could one day achieve such decadence too. The promise of decadence offered by Epic Meal Time is not the middle-upper-class gastronomy we’ve been microdosing on TikTok since the coronavirus pandemic, one suffused with organic and healthy “good” ingredients, freshly baked sourdough, tinned fish, stainless steel pans, and fancy olive oil. Rather, the early-2010s milieu that Epic Meal Time occupies is the age of Pitbull and Ne-Yo’s “Time of Our Lives,” Lady Gaga’s meat dress, and The Hurt Locker winning Best Picture. Between the “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” of the 90s and 00s and the Ozempic-fueled neo-fascism of our current age, Epic Meal Time offers the opportunity for partial escapism into the world of almost-accessible gluttony, constructed from the “relatable” fast-food cuisine of the “everyday man.”
And “man” truly is the operative term here. One of Epic Meal Time’s most striking gestures is Morenstein’s affect when interacting with fast-food workers as he orders the “ingredients” for his concoctions. In his curt sentences and demeaning tone–such as quipping “you call this fast food?” to the camera before shouting “15 Big Macs please!” to the server, or cutting off another server by pointing and saying “you see your cup? Big Mac sauce”—he enacts a preemptively incel-like form of rudeness and disregard for other human beings (these are often women and/or workers).
The format is intended to shock. As staff place orders at the drive-thru, bemused at the amounts of food that Morenstein demands, he drives to another chain to replicate the formula while the viewer eagerly awaits another round of disbelief (“white guy stuns by speaking in fluent burger”).
As Dietler and Hayden remind us, “feasting practices almost always act to mark and naturalize gender categories.” In this case, it is not just the invisibilization of low-paid, precarious labor (often done by migrant women), but also the transmogrification of their labor products into a different, bizarre, useless commodity. We see Morenstein order food but never see its preparation. We never see the sweat and the fried smell trapped in the hair buns of the blurred out workers’ faces. Small burgers are churned up and made into an even bigger burger. Cooking dishes and cups are fashioned out of bacon lattices. Jean Baudrillard would have a field day. There is nothing new being made here. Just the lingering dreams of 90s and 2000s free-wheeling optimism now rotting from the inside.
As you might imagine, ‘sex’ (sexuality and its economy of signification) plays a key role here. Epic Meal Time is deeply “American” (read: United States) in its execution, which is to say: sincere arousal and sexuality play second fiddle to the commodification of shock. This is not to say there is nothing sexual at all here; Epic Meal Time draws heavily on the visual language of porn. There are endless close up shots of mouths encircling meaty masses, hands squeezing them so the juicy contents ooze out. A raw, whole pig is slapped before being spit roasted. As Derek Mitchell puts it, “the unique viewing format of meticulously assembling each outrageous meal over the course of the video and slowly teasing the final calorie-laden, gag-inducing product reveal also compelled viewers to dutifully watch each episode until the very end climactic ‘food porn’ money shot.” But all of this language feels less horny or tantalizing than registering a form of spectacle, a construction of a particular form of masculine domination.
This is a pre-#MeToo world, and therefore pre-its violent backlash. And yet, its emergent elements are present in Epic Meal Time’s braggadocious nonchalance. Responding to the question of how he kept his weight down despite eating so much during a Reddit AMA from 2012, Morenstein replied: “copious sexual activity.” Epic Meal Time exists in an alternative or subsequent libidinal economy—one in process of becoming the world where “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.”
As I returned to Epic Meal Time, I wondered at first if we might understand regular features on the show (like Muscles Glasses and his silent, juicy ingestion) as their own forms of sexualized labour. But this obfuscates the real object of desire in each video. Putting aside the episode which essentially takes the form of a food-oriented homage to Bang Bros, Epic Meal Time’s chiefest fixation is not really the ripped, muscular body in the tight tee, but rather its ability to achieve the feat of consumption while staying thin and being able to afford it all.
It almost belongs to the same forms of labor as elite athletes, contortionists, and method actors: an extreme display (or illusion) of bodily ability made possible by the presence of a gawking spectator. In Epic Meal Time, boys eat a lot in a powerfully anti-homoerotic fashion; mouths too full, T-shirts too tight and too long. Indeed, there is not even the joy in the chase of competitive eating. As the show progresses and we no longer see the results (the empty plate) but just the process of eating, the program’s engine becomes not just about bodily capacity but financial capacity—the ability to not finish and not really care. At the end of it all, Epic Meal Time is excess without want or shame, hunger without need or desire.
Epic Meal Time, in its original conception, was a brief flash in the pan. After just a year of immense success, Morenstein was sued by co-creator Sterling Toth in 2011 after attempting to lock Toth out of the company. In 2013, Perrault (our friend Muscles Glasses) left the show, saying he was being exploited by Morgenstein, since he had no ownership stake in the show that he was such a signature part of. Tyler Lemco (fellow eater) also left in the same year, saying “business got in the way of it being fun.” After the final death of the Epic Meal Time empire in 2022, for the past few years, Morgenstein has been running a podcast called Binge Eater on his own.
Epic Meal Time’s rapid yet protracted fragmentation parallels the descent throughout the 2010s into further neoliberal isolation, into a greater emphasis on individual consumption (of food, of commodities) leading to the most violent iterations of “isolated men.” It’s telling of this shift to culinary individualism that while Epic Meal Time faded into oblivion, the “Mukbang” trend—where an individual films themselves eating and commenting on large quantities and varieties of food originating in South Korea—became a signature form of food-oriented online content throughout the decade.
And yet, for all its intense masculine energy, on the surface Epic Meal Time is not very interested in encouraging a specific political mindset. The boys are still actually “doing” something when putting their meals together in the kitchen, even if the ingredients are themselves prefabricated. These meat-crazed men are not quite the liver king, muscly retvrn boys or male fitness influencers who break things unnecessarily only to film as their faceless girlfriend/house worker cleans it up. But isn’t this illusion (of labour, of ability, of control) the signature move of the Epic Meal Time era’s politics?
Underneath Epic Meal Time’s jokey DIY surface lies a profound hatred—for women and poor people in particular. The mocking calorie counters and bulging muscles, the shiver-inducing derision Morenstein levels against the fast food workers upon which his whole project depends. Epic Meal Time‘s disgusting meals betray the disgust of their creators for the kinds of people who consume or produce their constituent parts.
Now our timelines are full of meatfluencer carnivores, the keto diet, and “hot chef guys” who finger their food. As I eat dinner accompanied by a fork in one hand, TikTok in the other, and my laptop emitting the phrase “finger those chicks” being used to describe whisking eggs by hand in “84 Egg Sandwich,” I can’t help but think: Epic Meal Time may have lost the battle, but it certainly won the war.
Ruari Paterson-Achenbach is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, currently a PhD student in Music at the University of Cambridge. They’re into creative anarchism, putting stickers around town, and pretending to know what bird or flower that is. They love to find joy and beauty in the everyday.
Article illustrations by Carolyn Jao for Mid Theory Collective.
What Was is a recurring column that explores residual and/or forgotten concepts, objects, or events.