You can’t actually say anything about the quantity of preservatives from the ingredient list. All you know is that both the McD’s buns and Wonderbread both use propionate as a preservative (either as a sodium or calcium salt, but the difference is trivial). However, you don’t know how much was used in either – all you know is “less than 2%”. So, for one extreme possibility, the McD’s bun could have 2% propionate, while wonder bread could have orders of magnitude less. Or the converse could be true.
And in the experiment linked above, the “control” burger used homemade bread, presumably without any preservatives at all! No wonder it has more mold growth.
Another possible explanation for the mold differences might be in how well the two different breads were handled before the experiment. McD will probably keep their restaurants cleaner than your average kitchen, so there will be fewer mold spores around. And the average fast food worker will probably be cleaner than somebody tooling around their kitchen at home – at the very least the fast food slave will be wearing gloves. And that hamburger bun probably was pulled straight out of a clean, recently-opened package. That homemade bread, however, was almost certainly made in a dirtier environment. It could be a week old, perhaps several days ago it was cut with a less-than-sterile knife. So, at the start of the experiment, the white bread could have had a lot more mold spores already on it, with a good long head start in starting their growth.
Basically, this is a pretty bogus comparison without better controls. If this were an elementary school science fair project, I’d give it good marks. But the experimenter has a PhD in biology! She should know better. Without better controls, you can’t conclude anything. You can tentatively say that “bread with mold inhibitors shows less mold growth”.
Well, duh.
ETA: I like homemade food just fine, and rarely eat fast food. I’d much rather eat a good homemade burger. Hell, I could claim the “foodier-than-thou” card on all of the burgers I’ve made recently, and I’m completely in agreement that lots of fast food is a bad idea.
I agree with this. A Micky D cheeseburger has two things going for it: It’s thoroughly cooked, and it’s thin. In open air, it will dry out before it gets much of a chance to decompose, and fully cooked meat will not go bad nearly as fast as raw meat. If you did the same experiment with a patty before cooking you might have to burn the house down to get rid of the smell.
(On the topic of food longevity, Peter “Madcat” Ruth used to do a little bit of patter about finding a tuna fish sandwich in the vending machine at a Greyhound station. To make a long story short, he didn’t know how long it had been sitting in that machine; he figured the Wonder Bread would last forever, but he “wasn’t so sure about the tuna fish.”)
And because this has really struck a nerve, I can’t let this go:
Because the mold’s growth is being inhibited by propionate! Human growth is not inhibited by propionate! You wouldn’t see visible bacterial growth on a dry piece of bread anyway!
Some of the comments on that blog are hilarious. They talk about how “gross” and “disgusting” the LACK of mold is. I suppose the mold is attractive and appetizing?
Sure, it’s possible that preservatives are not good for you, but aesthetically, I’d prefer a dry clean looking burger over a rotting moldy one!
Anecdotal point (that might be slightly germane) - I use old crusts of bread in my brown sugar container to keep the sugar soft. I leave them in there for months in the cupboard, and they don’t mold.
That’s the sugar; in high concentrations it retards microbial growth. Honey’s the classic example; with a few exceptions like botulism, it can remain unspoiled for decades.
And typically with the botulin spores, those probably got in there during production, and due to their thick outer coating they remain OK and dormant until a human or animal consumes the honey. Even then, it’s really not a problem unless the consumer has a suppressed immune system, which is one reason why there is a caution against giving honey to very young children until they reach a particular age (2?). So that’s not really even a spoilage issue but just a problem unique to botulin.
In this one, she concludes that the McDonalds burger didn’t rot because there weren’t enough bacteria in it in the first place, and that that is a Bad Thing.
I am going along with the drying hypothesis. I’ve made croutons out of homemade bread with zero preservatives, and they don’t get moldy. I’ve left my own homemade pizza out for a few days and it simply gets dry and rock hard, it doesn’t rot.
Sadly, the sort of poor science and wild conclusions drawn by these people are much more interesting and memorable than the actual science, so I suspect we will get “McDonald’s burgers can survive a nuclear war”, just like Twinkies.
The fries in “Supersize Me” I spotted the trick right away - the small-restaurant fries are about twice the thickness of the McFries, and visibly soggier. The McFries are cooked to the point where they have almost no water left, while the other fries were mushy - they had enough water to grow mold, while McD’s were dried out. You can’t tell me a guy who was smart enough to creat and market a video blog as an award-winning theatrical documentary did not know exactly what he was doing.
The burgers from McD’s - I’ll go along with the “dried out” theory. The buns are toasted; the patty has a decent amount of salt, and unlike some corner shop, is cooked definitely past the point of having any live bateria left in it. If the bun dries out enough before the bag is sealed, it could help prevent mold for a long time. Still, I would not eat anything that’s been sitting unrefrigerated for a long time, even if tehre is no evidence of mold.
All you have to do is look at portion size to figure out what’s happened. The McDonald’s hamburger was a normal meal in the 50’s. By the 70’s, we had the quarter pounder. Now they are fighting to see who can have the bigger angus burger. Add mayo, add bacon (fat!!) and add miscellaneous special sauces at a hundred calories a spoonful… The classic greenish coke bottle was 8 oz. up to the 1950’s. then 10oz became normal; then 12; now 16oz is a normal drink. McDonalds even recently phased out the 8oz coffee cup. Go over to Europe and the drink sizes are tiny - a “large” McD soda in europe is the medium here. Nobody sells “big gulp” 32-ouncers (sorry, 1-litre…) We’ve gone from drinking 8 oz of sugar syprup to 32oz - any surprise about the size of north americans?
Same in regular restaurants. 6 or 8 oz. used to be a normal steak portion; nowadays, 12oz is normal, and many sell he-man-sized steaks(??? Just the opposite, I would think?) of 16oz or even 24oz. Most meals are priced, for example, so the 12oz steak is $20 and the 16oz is $24 to squeeze that extra few bucks out of you, just like “supersize for $1 more” is designed to.
