Sir, This Is a Turkey

Arby’s, a restaurant chain whose sole purpose lately is catering to customers whose identities are intrinsically linked to eating meat, is now resorting to trolling the meat replacement brands that have been dominating the fast food conversation. After firmly dismissing rumors of a future collaboration with bleeding plant-based burger maker Impossible Foods, Arby’s is now unveiling an extremely feeble marketing tactic: making vegetables out of meat.

The company’s marketing team is calling the new meat-vegetables “megetables,” and has apparently even filed a trademark on the word. God forbid some other brand steal that beautifully constructed mashup! Setting aside the fact that megetables is the worst possible combination of “meat” and “vegetables” (See: meatables, meagies, vegeats), Arby’s chief marketing officer Jim Taylor revealed to Fast Company that it apparently took him three whole months to come up with this gag — an absurd amount of time to devote to a project that seems to amount to a lame joke and an overhead cooking video demonstrating how to make a carrot out of turkey.

Doubling down on the terrible “megetable” wordplay, the place with “The Meats” is calling this cooking tragedy a “marrot,” which once more ignores superior terms like carreat and tarrot. Secondly, it’s only a slivered and sous vide turkey breast covered in dried carrot powder and topped with parsley, meaning it’s not even a meat-based vegetable — it’s a piece of meat made with vegetables.

Fortunately, the turkey carrot is staying in the test kitchen at Arby’s headquarters for now, though the brand isn’t ruling out selling marrots as a limited-time promotion. If this is really the meat lobby’s best jab at plant-based meat, Impossible Foods has nothing to fear.

• Arby’s Is Making Carrots Out of Meat. Yes, Meat
• Arby’s: ‘We Have The Megetables’ [NRN]
• Arby’s Needs You to Know It Will Never Serve Fake Meat [E]