JOHNSONVILLE PUT DR PEPPER IN A SAUSAGE AND NOBODY STOPPED THEM

Somewhere inside the Johnsonville corporation, a person stood up in a meeting and said: what if the sausage tasted like Dr Pepper. And instead of everyone in that room quietly leaving through separate exits, they said yes. They said let's do it. They gave that person a budget.

The Johnsonville Dr Pepper Inspired Smoked Sausage is a real product. It is made with 100% premium pork. It is fully cooked. It is available at your local grocery store for $5.99. It has 23 flavors in it, because Dr Pepper has 23 flavors, and the marketing team decided this was a selling point for a smoked sausage.

"Dr Pepper Inspired Smoked Sausage." The word 'inspired' is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence.

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FOOD

The soda-meat collab has been a genre for some time now. Mountain Dew chicken. Pepsi-brined turkey. Coca-Cola ribs have been a cookout staple since the 80s, which is technically the origin point for all of this and therefore Coca-Cola is responsible for Johnsonville Dr Pepper Sausage and the causal chain is direct.

The thing is — it will probably taste fine. That's the worst part. The soda provides sweetness and acidity, the pork provides fat and protein, the smoke provides smoke. The abomination is not that it's bad. The abomination is that it exists at all, and that at no point in its creation did anyone pause and reconsider.

Daily Abomination rating: 4/5. CRIME AGAINST FOOD. Not because it won't taste fine. Because fourteen people approved this and we all just kept living our lives.