“♫Ba da ba da daaa, send it to hell♫”

~Rejected Mcdonald’s Slogan

It’s easy to make fun of McDonald’s, and in fact many most people who get mad when we make fun of their country (so pretty much every non-American) points out McDonald’s and its fast food brethren as some sort of dark stain on our American legacy.

“Don’t tell us our terrifying eel pies are gross when you all get fat on your Big Macs,” angry British people say because they lack the proper brain function to realize that the British dish in question is what a fucking nightmare looks like.

And sure, McDonald’s is not exactly “healthy” or “something you want to eat every day if you want to live very long,” but it also just hits the fucking spot sometimes, and there’s a reason why McDonald’s is popular enough to thrive in over 100 countries.

So yes, McDonald’s is good, don’t @ us. But McDonald’s also is constantly changing its menu, and change is not always good. So instead of writing an article about the best food items you can get at McDonald’s, which would mostly be our editor-in-chief trying to defend his Actually Bad belief that the Filet-o-Fish is their best sandwich, we’re going to talk about the times where McDonald’s really fucked up.

Because we find those funny, and also because thank God we don’t have to eat them.  So here’s a list of food items that would totally justify every angry Latvian’s criticism of our culture.

The Worst Crimes Against Food McDonald’s Has Ever Committed

Onion Nuggets

In 1980, McDonald’s decided to sell a “Chopped Beefsteak Sandwich” as part of a “Dinner Menu” that was only available “after 4PM” and “sorry we’ll cut it out with the air quotes.”

They felt that the best dish to sell as a side with this new (probably bad) sandwich was onion rings, but apparently something got smudged on the memo sent to the R&D people because instead of rings, a delicious and appetizing sounding food, we got fried onion…hunks.

Just, wedges of onion, fried, for someone that likes fried onions, but also wants the middle of the impossibly large wedge that, again, is pure onion, to be basically raw. This is the fast food equivalent of biting into an onion like an apple, and we do not endorse that kind of lunacy.

So for everyone that says “hey, onion rings are good, these are just like different onion rings,” stop lying to yourself. Look at those raw hunks of onion in that picture. That looks like a goddamn haunting.

McCrab

When we went to marketing school, they didn’t explicitly say “please try to avoid giving your product a name that sounds like it could be an STD” in any of our classes, but we just were operating under the assumption that the professors felt we already knew that?

Maybe not, because when McDonald’s tried to replicate their Lobster Roll on the East Coast (yes some McDonald’s make a lobster roll) with a crab cake sandwich, they gave it a name that sounds like it’s something you have to tell your date in California you have if you don’t want to get charged for a crime after sex.

And sorry, at the end of the day, we’re just not willing to trust McDonald’s with making a crab cake for us.  We’re pretty sure that’s how Mama Cass died, no thank you.

Fish McBites

Even if you fuck with the Filet-O-Fish (which statistically you probably don’t) it feels like you’re crossing a bridge too far to resign yourself to fish nuggets. We’ve been conditioned to accept and embrace chicken nuggets, but fish nuggets, we don’t know, there just seems something off about it.

It feels like when you take a normal thing, such as a chicken nugget, but you change one small but crucial element and it suddenly turns sinister and depressing, like watching a woman walking down the street pushing an empty stroller. Do you understand what we’re trying to say? It’s just not natural, is all.

But speaking of not natural…

Hulaburger

Back in 1963, McDonald’s started realizing that Catholics couldn’t eat meat during Fridays on Lent, so a competition was devised to see what beef-less sandwich could be created. A Ohio franchiser devised the Filet-O-Fish.  Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, took it upon himself to invent…a fucking pineapple hamburger. What the actual shit.

Yeah, just, you know, bread, cheese, fucking ketchup oh God, all surrounding a big old hunk of pineapple. We’re pretty sure this counts as a hate crime against Catholics.

Naturally, the Filet-O-Fish won, because you’ve heard of the Filet-O-Fish, and the mere thought of a McDonald’s pineapple hamburger just made you throw up a little in your mouth.  Gross.

McSpaghetti

♫Look.

If you had.

One shot.

Or one opportunity.

To get some Italian pasta from McDonald’s.

Would you order it?

It looks like shit…

Yo

Your palms are sweaty

Knees weak

Arms are heavy

You really don’t want to eat this

McSpaghetti♫

Anyway, yeah, McDonald’s tried to get into the pasta game in the 1970s. It, uh, did not go well.

And that brings us to our final item, which thankfully was never sold, just invented as a way to show that if God is real, he’s not paying close attention down here. And that would be…

Bubble Gum Broccoli

*takes a deep breath*

Okay.  It’s okay.  It’ll be okay.

But yes. This is a thing that really happened. McDonald’s was trying to find a way to get kids to eat healthier, which is a noble pursuit we guess. And so they got their scientists to use…uh, science to actually make broccoli that tastes exactly like bubble gum.

Which, um. Like, who thought of that? Rather, how high was the person who thought of that?  That’s the most stoned idea in the history of Corporate America, and that includes the core idea behind the Double Down from KFC.

Thankfully this didn’t make it past the testing stage because, shockingly, when you give a kid a piece of broccoli, and they put it in their mouth and it tastes like bubble gum, they don’t go “ooo, yummy,” they go, “WHAT IS HAPPENING MY BRAIN IS CRYING.”

Don’t worry though, they probably spent more on making bubble gum flavored broccoli that would never be sold than you paid for your house. So…that’s something at least, right?

…Right?