By now, you’ve probably seen one of the new Arby’s commercials for its brisket sandwiches. In case you haven’t, the company’s new spokesman, a loud gentleman from New Jersey or New York, travels to a BBQ festival and tells people about how the new Arby’s brisket sandwich is basically better than their brisket, because Arby’s smokes its meat for 13 hours. Of course the BBQ experts are shocked and in awe of how amazing the Arby’s beef is, and Trevor Q. Arby’s goes on to accept all of the awards from the BBQ oracles atop Mt. Brisketus, or something along those lines.
You might find this hard to believe, but there are skeptics out there who have questioned Arby’s claim that its meat is smoked for 13 hours before being packaged, frozen, transported, unfrozen, recooked, set under a heat lamp and then sold to customers. So Arby’s responded with a world record 13-hour commercial that aired in Duluth, Minnesota on May 24, and it simply showed a brisket cooking for 13 hours, and nothing else. Now, that same commercial is airing “live” on YouTube, and there have been more than 17,000 people* watching for the past several hours. That’s right, people are spending their free time on a Wednesday watching meat cook.
*That was at the time that I first saw the video, but by the time I wrote about my astonishment in seeing so many people watching a slab of meat cooking, the number had reduced to: