New cheeseburger urban myth?

Factual Questions
1

I put the question mark in the title because although I suspect that something is not on the up-and-up, I don’t yet have anything to point at and go “well that’s not right”.

This “experiment” has been making the rounds on the internet, and I just can’t believe this is real, or that the person who posted it could be so stupid as to say that

In all the pics, it does seem to be the same cheeseburger (note the folds on the top bun), but we have to take Snack Girl at her word about the time passed between pics.

Tomorrow I plan on purchasing a McDonald’s cheeseburger and putting it in a ziploc bag. I’ll take pics every day, and I suspect that after 11 days it’s gonna look pretty gnarly, let alone after 28 days.

I think that Snopes will eventually have an article on this, but can Dopers discern anything weird here? Or is this one gonna be on Snopes with a tagline of “true”?

ETA: as a vegetarian, I haven’t purchased anything at McDonald’s since the whole beef-powder-on-fries thing came to light back in the early 1990s, so I don’t have an ounce of interest in defending Mickey D’s. I’m just curious to know if the whole “experiment” was a sham of some kind.

2

Go watch Supersize Me and report back.

3

I remember seeing some commentary on this.

Here is a site that claims a 12 year old McDonald’s hamburger.

4

Sure it will. The one in the linked blog didn’t decay because it was (as far as I can tell) left unwrapped on a shelf - it just dried out before anything else could happen.

If we accept that ‘it isn’t food’ on this basis, we must also conclude that beef jerky, salami, serrano ham, biltong, etc are also ‘not food’.

5

The key difference in the comparisons appears to be the bread. The moldy “cheeseburgers” appear to have regular slices of bread, which have a tendency to get moldy really easily. Moldy bread = moldy everything else in the sandwich. I’m sure that the McDonald’s burger buns (and other ingredients) have plenty of preservatives, so no mold grows.

6

They also have a smooth crust, which is probably mechanically resistant to the growth of mould - at least for long enough to allow the bun underneath to dessicate completely.

Plus McD’s bread is really fluffy and insubstantial white bread - I bet it dried to a rusk in less than 48 hours.

7

The site specifically claims that the cheeseburger was in a ziploc baggie.

The website doesn’t specify, but I will be generous and assume the bag was closed.

8

Something seems wrong with that claim. If it was in a sealed ziploc, how did it dry out? Where did the moisture go?

9

Just re-reading the blog - the first one she did wasn’t sealed in a bag - the second one (with the ‘control’) is - but the last post is only 11 days into the experiment. I’ll be interested to see if the results are different, but I still think people are jumping to wildly inaccurate conclusions over it.

10

Snack Girl lists the McD’s ingredients, saying they are taken from the McD’s website.

[url=]Here are the ingredients in Wonder Bread:

Not much different from the McD’s bun, and I know that Wonder Bread will mold over in a short time, depending on locale (in Florida bread can grow mold in hours; out here in the desert it can take days or weeks).

11

Thanks for pointing this out. I admit I missed that there were 2 different experiments; I was initially linked to the “Day 11” page, which was from Exp #2. Exp #1 featured the dried out burger.

Good catch, Mangetout.

12

Maybe the burger in the second experiment will also turn out to be unreasonably durable - but even if it does, the whole ‘not food’ thing can’t be right - If McD’s food is not digestible, people who eat there habitually should be losing weight. I’m at least reasonably certain that isn’t happening.

13

Nah, you’re taking the ‘not food’ comment too literally - the claim is not that McDonalds is not food in a nutritional sense, but that it’s made out of chemicals, when everyone knows ‘real food’ is made out of sunshine and happiness. Chemicals are bad, man, baaaaaad.

Not that I’m cynical or anything.

14

It’s FRANKENFOOD, man!

15

Maybe - on re-reading it, (thispost), it’s pretty clear she just doesn’t have a very firm grasp of the processes of human digestion, in comparison to natural decay of things exposed to a bit of air.

16

So the exposition is that McDs put a crapload of preservatives in their food which results in the food maintaining appearance for extended periods of time.

Tomorrow let’s investigate rumours that McDs adds sweetener to softdrinks.
:rolleyes:

17

Snack Girl is actually 2 people (or one family):

DISCLAIMER: I was linked to this site by the same person who thought she was doing me a big favor by referring me to the “work” of Dr. Weston A. Price. I find his claims and the claims of his supporters to be dubious at best, and I found this on the Snack Girl site:

So I note that SG has an admitted bias and agenda, and that is prolly what is driving my suspicion that things here are not all above board.

18

#1 - from the list of ingredients, it doesn’t look like McD’s adds preservatives to their food, at least not any more so than other food manufacturers.

#2 - McD’s doesn’t add sweetener to soft drinks; they come that way from Coca-Cola. If McD’s were adding sweetener to already-sweetened soft drinks, that would indeed be a scandal.

19

But what if you come from a long line of cheeseburger lovers?

20

…when the average life expectancy was half what it is today, presumably? All this “everyone was so much healthier in the old days when everything was natural” bullshit really annoys me. People in the “old days” suffered from numerous vitamin deficiencies, often had stunted growth and led fairly miserable and short lives.

People nowadays, assuming they have a modicum of self-control and can avoid stuffing fast food into their mouths 24-7 and consequently resembling human cattle, have never had it so good.