This is what a McDonald’s hamburger, bought in 1999, looks like after 14 years!
Ashley Lutz reports for Business Insider, Apr. 23, 2013, that in an appearance on the television show The Doctors, David Whipple of Utah said he bought a McDonald’s hamburger in 1999 and decided to do an at-home experiment.
He saved the burger for two weeks to show his friends, but then completely forgot about it.
Two years later, he found the burger in a coat pocket, along with the original receipt. Despite two years spent in a closet, the sandwich showed no signs of rotting or mold.
So Whipple decided to keep the burger to see how long it would take for it to disintegrate.
Another 12 years passed. The hamburger looks exactly the same; only the pickle has disappeared.
Whipple told The Doctors that he uses the burger to encourage his grandchildren to eat healthy: “It’s great for my grandkids to see. To see what happens with fast food.”
The durability of its burgers is not new, and McDonald’s has explained this phenomenon before on its website. The fast food chain asked Dr. Keith Warriner, the program director at the University of Guelph’s Department of Food Science and Quality Assurance. Warriner explained that the burgers and buns don’t rot because they become very dry in the cooking and toasting process:
“In the example of a McDonald’s hamburger, the patty loses water in the form of steam during the cooking process. The bun, of course, is made out of bread. Toasting it reduces the amount of moisture. This means that after preparation, the hamburger is fairly dry. When left out open in the room, there is further water loss as the humidity within most buildings is around 40%. So in the absence of moisture or high humidity, the hamburger simply dries out, rather than rot. [...] the microbes that cause rotting are a lot like ourselves, in that they need water, nutrients, warmth and time to grow. If we take one or more of these elements away, then microbes cannot grow or spoil food.”
For that matter, the phenomenon of undecayed hamburgers isn’t unique to McDonald’s. Food blog A Hamburger Today did some rigorous experiments a while back confirming this:
“Turns out that not only did the regular McDonald’s burgers not rot, but the home-ground burgers did not rot either. Samples one through five had shrunk a bit (especially the beef patties), but they showed no signs of decomposition.”
To which, my response is “Eww” and “Yikes!”
H/t FOTM’s Igor
~Eowyn
