The McDonald’s McRib is back. It was born thanks to the shortage of McNuggets.

“The McNuggets were so well received that every franchise wanted them. There was no system to provide enough chicken,” said Arend, who invented the McRib and McNuggets. Wisdom – a saying In 2009. “We had to come up with something to give other franchises a new product. So the McRib came about because of the chicken shortage.

The decision put the McRib on the map, making the sandwich — which features restructured pork into a miniature rack of ribs, barbecue sauce, onions and pickles on a house roll — a culinary curiosity that has cemented itself as one of Limited’s biggest hits. Time Attractions in Fast Food History The McRib has been celebrated as a cultural phenomenon by fans and panned by critics as an abomination. He’s been parodied by shows like “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy,” all while the McRib has been killed off and brought back more times than Michael Myers in “Halloween.”

“I’m sure he will be thrilled that a part of his and his kitchen team’s creativity and ingenuity is still there through the sale of the McRib,” said Lucy Habeck, Arend’s daughter. Arend said that she died in August 2016 at the age of 88.

Nearly a year after the sandwich’s final “farewell tour,” McDonald’s announced Wednesday that — spoiler alert — the McRib is back. The company announced that the McRib will be available in limited markets starting in November. It’s unclear where exactly the McRib will be available.

“It turns out that not everyone was ready to say goodbye to the McRib,” the company said in a press release.

The McRib is a toxic friend, and we need to stop holding back

Although the McRib has a dedicated fan base, including an online tracker to help locate the elusive sandwich, fast food consumers haven’t always craved the pork product. The National Pork Producers Council wanted to change that. She approached Roger Mandigo, an animal science professor at the University of Nebraska in the 1970s, about creating a product containing pork trimmings that could be sold to fast food companies. The lobby group had one specific company in mind.

“Pork producers wanted to see more pork on the menu, and they were targeting McDonald’s,” Mandigo said. NPR In 2011.

This demand has transformed Mandigo into a leader in restructured meat products, which are typically made using low-value meat trimmings that have been reduced in size by crushing, such as peeling, slicing or slicing. As Mandigo explained with his colleagues at A 1995 paper The university published a mixture of crumbled meat that is mixed with salt and water to extract salt-soluble proteins, which in turn produce a “glue” that binds pieces of meat muscle to each other. The muscle pieces can then be reshaped to produce “meat logs” of a certain shape or form and can be cut into steaks or chops that can look similar in appearance and texture to their intact muscle counterparts when cooked.

“Most people would feel very unhappy if they were served with the heart or the tongue on a plate,” Mandigo said in his book.Food chains: from farm to cart“, a 2008 book by Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz. “But when it turns into a restructured product it loses its identity. Products such as tripe, heart and seared stomach are high in protein, completely edible, healthy and nutritious, and most of them are already used in sausages without objection.

With the technology in place, the inspiration for the McRib came from Arend, then a 31-year-old chef who was cooking in luxury hotels in the US and Europe, serving the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Cary Grant. Arend was tempted away from gourmet parties because of the stability, salary and benefits McDonald’s could offer — and the challenge of elevating the chain’s menu options.

“They asked me several times to come to McDonald’s. “I said, ‘I’m a chef, and I don’t believe in hamburgers,’” Arend recalled. New York times In 1981. “But when I came, I wanted to do for the people on the street what I did for the rich.”

“One of the things that brought him the most joy was preparing food for the masses, and his position at McDonald’s gave him the opportunity to do that,” Habeck said of her father.

He said in 2009 that the idea for the McRib came after the chef enjoyed some Southern barbecue.

“I just got back from Charleston, South Carolina, where I had sandwiches made with pulled pork,” Arend told Maxim. “I thought to myself, ‘Something with this flavor should really end.'”

But Arend didn’t want to make a pulled pork sandwich. Instead, he wanted a boneless pork sandwich that could fool people into thinking they were eating a piece of rib.

“Some have asked: Why don’t we just make it round?” “It would have been easier,” Arend told the magazine. “But I wanted it to look like a slab of ribs.”

The creation of the McRib was necessary after McNuggets exceeded all expectations and turned McDonald’s into one of the largest chicken retailers in the world. The company did the same for pork. Mandigo told the Associated Press in 1982 that McDonald’s was buying up to 1.5 million pounds of pork shoulder weekly from a national supply of 2.4 million to 4 million pounds.

“This appears to be the most successful new product McDonald’s has had since the Big Mac,” William Trainer, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, told the AP at the time. McDonald’s played a role in the uniqueness of the sandwich, running ads promoting “a new kind of que.”

Despite its initial success when it was introduced on Kansas City-area menus in 1981, its sales declined to the point that the company indicated the McRib would never return.

“Ribs have not met our expectations as a sandwich, and McDonald’s is exploring other options for ways to make them successful,” Stephanie Scordi, a McDonald’s spokeswoman, told the Toronto Star in 1983. “We are trying…to decide whether to discontinue the product.”

This was one of the many times the company said the sandwich would go away, then come back. A continued success in Germany and Luxembourg, the McRib has returned to U.S. stores as a special attraction. The sandwich got a surprise advertising hit in the summer of 1994 while promoting the theatrical release of “The Flintstones.”

Since then, McDonald’s has made at least four “farewell tours” for the sandwich, in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2022.

While some have tried to give Mandigo credit for inventing the McRib, the meat world has insisted that it was Arendt and McDonald’s that created the sandwich. It just gave them the technology to do it amid the Chicken McNugget crisis.

“We played an important role in the technology of attaching pieces of meat to each other,” he said. Lincoln Journal Star In 2010. “I didn’t invent the McRib sandwich. McDonald’s did.”

Habeck said her father “would be thrilled that his grandchildren, Ryan and Sarah, will be able to enjoy his creations.”

“He truly shined as he saw generations of children enjoying McNuggets and McRibs, and it would be his fondest wish that children everywhere and their parents continue to enjoy McDonald’s favorite foods,” she said.