How long does a hamburger last?
On June 3, 2007 I went through a drive-through in a McDonald’s restaurant and ordered a Cheeseburger Happy Meal. I was in Macon, GA following a triathlon and trust me, I was a little glad I wasn’t closer to home as I didn’t want anyone to see me, in my car, ordering from there. After all, I encourage people to stay away from fast food, and here I was sitting in the drive through of the local McDonald’s. No, I wasn’t ordering the burger to eat, I was ordering it as a little experiment. I had heard that the burger wouldn’t go bad, so I decided to buy it and check it out.
I brought the Happy Meal to the office (full with a pickle, ketchup & cheese on it), along with french fries. We kept it in the baggie on our counter, and after a few days, it started to look bad … but it never really smelled. After about two weeks, it hadn’t changed much in looks, and the biggest surprise was that there was NO mold on it. So we kept the burger just to see what would happen to it. Fast forward a few years (yes years) and the burger was still in the bag, being stored in our office basement (as a reminder, we have a large half finished basement in our office, so there is plenty of room for storage, including an old cheeseburger and fries).
Eventually this burger started to smell bad, but it still never got moldy and certainly didn’t attract any kind of bugs. We put it in a plastic jar to hide the smell, as the stench was pretty bad. Every year in June, we would bring up the burger and show it to people, so they could see it hadn’t changed. One year we bought some fruit and vegetables for comparison, and within a week the cucumber & strawberries became soggy and moldy. Another year I purchased a grass fed burger, and also within a week, it started to get moldy and go bad. So the whole point of our little experiment, was to show that if a Happy Meal burger doesn’t attract mold (or bugs) and does not get old, what kind of nutritional value would it have? Why would someone eat it if it couldn’t go bad? Would you be better off eating cardboard? The best thing is to eat real food — fruits, veggies (ideally organic) and grassfed beef, chicken, fish. Food that is processed and packaged has less nutritional value (in some cases zero nutrition), so you are better off eating food to fuel your body, not to harm it.
Just a few weeks ago, in June 2017, we brought up the Happy Meal again, this time it was 10 years old. I took a photo of it, as I often do, and put it on our office Facebook page. At the current time of this writing, the post has over 540 shares and 127,000 views. I’m not sure how much more it will be shared or viewed, but I guess you could say it has gone viral. I kind of wish a post about the benefits of chiropractic had gone viral though, as I’d much rather be spreading the word about the benefits of chiropractic care instead of the dangers of fast food. Regardless, people are seeing it and hopefully are making better eating choice in the future.
This is not a personal attack on McDonald’s, as Burger King, Wendy’s, Jack in The Box …. they are all about the same. They are fast food options with limited to no nutritional value. Yes fast food is necessary at times. But really not more than once a month, if that. If you don’t have time to plan out your meals, even buying food (meals) at the grocery store is a better option. A banana at Quick Trip costs 50-cents. Eating healthy doesn’t have to be expensive, it just takes planning and commitment. It’s not always that hard.
If you are interested in that Facebook post, click here to see it and share it if you want!
