• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, November 5, 2014

There’s a lot of hoo-haw out there this morning about three new “viral” videos in the “McDonald’s “Our Food. Your Questions” campaign that are explicitly “about the McRib — just as the product is rolling out into about 75% of McDonald's restaurants nationwide,” as Bruce Horovitz reports in USA Today.

Time.Slate. ABC News. Business Insider. Jezebel. Mirror. The list goes on. And we’re talking staff bylines, not a wire service piece picked up and tossed into the clickable vat like so much processed pork.

“Is it pork? Is it made from plastic yoga mats? Former ‘MythBusters’ host Grant Imahara joins a McDonald's skeptic to find out what exactly goes inside a McRib patty,” reads the Cnet subhed atop Bonnie Burton’s story.

The star of the main feature, with a running time of 5:28, is Wes Bellamy, a teacher from Charlottesville, Va., who had (somewhat) famously retweeted a picture of a picture of a frozen McRib patty with the word “Woooowwww!!” to indicate his disgust. He was, he says, “encouraging everyone to never eat anything from McDonald’s again.”

And now, he is at a processing plant in Oklahoma City, where he’d “never been before,” with Imahara and Lopez Food VP Kevin Nanke, Ph.D.

“We are forming McRib in the iconic form,” Nanke tells his visitors from a vantage point high above the factory floor where the McRibs are birthed. “So that it resembles a rack of ribs” interjects a disembodied voice. Holy pig! You can’t make this stuff up except … well, apparently you can.

It is not quite on the level of Coca-Cola revealing its secret formula but the visitors are awed nonetheless. “That’s awesome,” declares Bellamy, “I never knew. I just thought it was a weird shape.”

We then learn that “every piece of meat … is visually inspected by highly trained individuals.” Then, after the eagle-eyed Imahara spots a worker emptying a grocery bag into a sloshing pile of meat on the assembly line, he interrogates Nanke: “What exactly is in there?”

He is reassured that that “the only thing in a McRib patty is pork, water, salt, dextrose, which is a type of sugar, and preservatives, which are BHA, propyl gallate and citric acid,” the last three of which, in response to another probing question, “are used to lock in the flavor all the way until the restaurant.”

“Oh, so that’s how you keep it tasting like my grandmother’s barbecue,” exclaims Bellamy. Imahara is incredulous. “Wes, your grandmother makes a McRib?” You can almost see the script: [Guffaws abound].

There are purportedly a whole lot of other ingredients in the bun and sauce but nobody goes there here.

Anyway, there’s one more step before the McRibs go into their box for shipping — a spritz of mist and a flash freeze “to keep it from dehydrating.” This is the condition that Wes saw the McRib in that provoked his retweet. But having seen the process, guess what? Good enough for Bellamy. But then he and Imahara  — for the first time ever, right there on camera — slurp down some juicy, sauce-slavered McRibs. I won’t give away their verdict but it all ends with more guffaws.

In another 1:20 video, McDonald’s assistant archivist Jessica Farrell, tells the tale of where the McRib came from and where it got its name. Suffice to say that the answer is as processed as the subject.

And then, there are the hard questions like whether McDonald’s only sells the McRib when pork prices are low. In a third spot, Diane Andreoni, McDonald’s senior creative director, puts the kibosh on that conspiracy theory.

“The truth is,” she tells us, “the McRib comes back when it wants to come back.”

Then, Amy LeFon, a specification coordinator for Lopez Foods, waxes eloquent about “when the moon glows a soft barbecue red …,” PR Director Molly McKenna Jandrain reminds us that “as we all know, absence makes the heart grow fonder” and then, before out interest wanes, it’s all over at 0:32.

We’ll say this. McKenna Jandrain may seem a bit stiff on camera. But she sure must have done her job behind the scenes in getting the coverage McDonald’s has garnered for these three videos.