Here's What Epic Meal Time Does With The Food After Filming
If you're looking to feast your eyes on a majestic spectacle of greasy meat, poetic testosterone, and unapologetic excess slathered in a saucy attitude, Epic Meal Time will satisfy your eyes' hunger and then some. Co-founded in 2010 by Montreal native and former substitute history teacher Harley Morenstein, via GQ, the YouTube series features cooking and eating challenges that make the average supersized meal look like small potatoes in a world of goliath spuds.
Whether Morenstein and his fellow chefs cook up a 50-pound Sloppy Big Ben Roethlisberger, a million-calorie lasagna, or a 100-pound Big Mac, every episode of EMT also brings "emergency medical technicians" to mind because you expect an epic heart attack to strike at any moment. Yet all that artery-clogging goodness looks so irresistibly tasty, you might imagine that after every episode, Morenstein and company would gladly start the cardiac arrest themselves as long as they get to gorge on every last gargantuan ounce of meaty, cheesy lunacy. But not every installment of EMT ends with an epic meal for the gang.
The fate of epic leftovers
Food Republic looked into the post-episode eating habits of the Epic Meal Time crew, and as Harley Morenstein explained, the outcome depends on a few factors. Chief among them is whether the food is safe for consumption: "If you're a production company, you feed people and someone gets sick, you don't have insurance for that and you're screwed." So if the food is borderline expired or fell short of the USDA-recommended temperature during baking, the risk posed by eating it is bigger than the meal itself and not worth taking.
Assuming the food is safe for consumption, then the crew lives up to the show's name and has an epic mealtime. This typically involves at least a dozen hungry people, according to Morenstein. However, sometimes there's too much food for too few mouths. In that case, those prodigious leftovers go to local soup kitchens. Epic Meal Time has even teamed up with FeedingAmerica.org to ensure their sumptuous bounty finds a home in someone's stomach. Morenstein remarked that soup kitchen volunteers told him they intended to use the leftovers from six whole pigs to make enough "soup for a year."