Saw a big Brangus Steer standing right over there, so I rustled up a fire, cooked him medium rare. Barbecued his brisket, roasted his rump, fed my dog that ol’ Brangus Steer’s hump. — “Eat Steak,” Reverend Horton Heat (Jim Heath)
Do not read this right now if you’re about to have dinner. Or read it now if you want to go on a diet… for a few weeks.
Fast food has been part of our popular culture at least since 1955, when the first McDonald’s franchises started to appear. Chains such as White Castle, Burger King, and Jack-In-The-Box (what is in that secret sauce?) preceded the franchised golden arches, but it was McDonalds’ advertising and branding that turned fast food into a lifestyle.
I just read a piece about a sandwich they’ve been selling at Arby’s. Yup, I know. Arby’s. I probably lost you. That’s okay, and you’ll see why. I’m guessing you weren’t going to try this anyway.
Evidently, Arby’s has a “secret menu.” If I’m any example, they’ve been quite successful keeping it a secret. Anyway, on this secret menu there is a sandwich called Arby’s Meat Mountain. It contains 1.5 ounces of each of the following: roast turkey, ham, corned beef, brisket, steak, and roast beef, plus both cheddar cheese and Swiss cheese, two chicken tenders, and of course, 1.5 rashers of bacon. Their Mountain is covered by an additional starch vehicle, evidently because they couldn’t come up with an edible handle.
Hey, gotta love that health food, right? According to TheTakeOut.com, the Meat Mountain contains a mere 120 ingredients — all of the above succulent substances of gastronomical trauma plus sodium erythorbate, sodium diacetate, sodium lactate and other sodia (which, I infer, is the plural of sodium) to aggregate of 3,536 milligrams of salt, approximately two and one-half times the recommended daily limit. This is an amount sufficient to make the Morton salt girl lose her shit. I do not know the amount of cholesterol in this delivery system of death, but I suspect the number is in the range of the melting point of aluminum.
The most amazing thing about the Meat Mountain, other than how you actually eat the sucker and what happens a couple hours thereafter, is that this extravaganza is a mere 1,275 calories. That’s about the same as Arby’s King’s Hawaiian Sweet Heat Beef ‘N Brisket Meal… but at least you get a soda with that.
This sucker has been around since 2014 and, according to their website, remains available to this day. Don’t feel left out of the loop if all this comes as news to you: it’s only on their “secret menu.” This is a meal Tony Stark might feed to The Hulk as an act of desperation. At its time of introduction, the Meat Mountain cost ten bucks a pop.
Remember, you will not see this heavenly satellite of gristle and grease on the big-ass menu over their counter. You’ve got to ask for it by name and they’ll (allegedly) create it for you from scratch. That’s how this secret menu thing works.
For better and for worse, we live in the Days of The Internet so secret menu items are hardly a secret — they’re just not on their store menu or their website. I don’t have Arby’s app; it might be there. But if your looking for a bit of variety — assuming the Meat Mountain doesn’t offer enough — check this out. I admit those Onion Tanglers sounds interesting. Then again, do I really want to tangle with an onion?
Lots of chains have their own secret menus. I will never know what’s on the one at Denny’s as I am much more likely to die of starvation with $20.00 bills hanging out of my every pocket, my dead and molting body repurposed as a 200-pound external door stop. And, while I’m on the subject, no, I don’t want to know what’s on Hooter’s secret menu either. Let’s just assume it involves nipple tassels.
Arby’s slogan is “we have the meats.” Yup, and they put them all in their Meat Mountain sandwich. It’s perfect for people who have three hands, a bib, a forest of napkins, a strong colon and, perhaps, one of those bags you might find in an airplane setback pocket.
(A tip of the hat to The Florescent Leech and Eddie who provided this week’s secret message. And to Rev. Heat, because the writer always needs more barbecue.)
I love digging out under-reported facts that go against the grain of common wisdom. It’s the demonstration mode of the old axiom “Live and Learn.”
If you’re from the Midwest or you’ve spent some serious time there, you are about to understand why I am expanding the meaning of the phrase “pop culture.”
I told Uncle Irv I wasn’t very hungry and he suggested I just order a plate of french fries. I didn’t know you could do that, so I was thrilled I didn’t have to waste stomach-space on stuff that inadvertently might be healthy. He then asked me if I ever had a Green River. I didn’t know what that was, so he ordered me a glass. Green River was – and remains – what we in the Midwest call “pop.” Some southerners call it “co-cola” (even if it’s Pepsi), and folks out east call it soda. That annoys me – in my world, “soda” has ice cream in it. Seeing that New Yorkers look down their nose at all things non-New York, I refer to the substance as “soda pop.” They scowl, but they don’t complain. Not if they know me. 
If you need further evidence that the big money people are banking on wide-spread legalization of marijuana, you need not look further than the folks at Mondelēz International, current owners of Nabisco. They manufacture the all-time favorite food of stoners, Oreo cookies. And it seems the folks who make Oreos have a keen eye on the bounding weed market.
