Monday, March 15, 2010
Bite Your Tongue / Cheap Eats Dorian Gray? Meet McDonald's Happy Meal
Posted by Tracy Moore on Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 10:11 AM
This picture is a photo of a McDonald's Happy Meal taken on the day of its purchase. A writer at blog BabyBites -- a site about transforming picky eaters -- decided to see if the rumor she'd heard that a Happy Meal will last for years was actually true.
So she bought a Happy Meal on March 3, 2009, stuck it on her desk at work, and waited. A whole year. Guess what happened?
Like, practically nothing. Maybe a smidge of withering, but no mold. No decomposition. Not so much a whiff of grody. Yikes! It's the same Happy Meal a year later to the day, and the follow-up blog post can be read here. Screw Botox, age-fearing ladies. Just eat Happy Meals!
Comments (23)
Showing 1-23 of 23
Oh wait -- I thought if you ate MORE preservatives, you'd be MORE preserved inside. Right?
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You know who really makes kids picky eaters? Lousy parents who are too self absorbed and distracted to focus on the 18 year commitment necessary to just raise an idiot kid.
Nicki, what you said in jest is actually pretty disingenuous. Especially for a woman.
I'd explain in greater detail but it involves non-Happy Meal Chemistry terminology that would just bore the short attention span of you all.
Septic with a K, what in the world are you talking about? What does Nicki being a woman have anything to do with her poking fun at the seemingly uneducated masses that consume McDonalds on a daily basis? Also, why do you assume that the readers of this blog have short attention spans? Obviously you are one of those viewers yourself. It seems you're directing your skepticism at the wrong audience.
Eek! reminiscent of the perfectly intact hot dog found years later in a landfill, and yet WORSE.
as a former picky eater, it wasn't that my parents were lousy parents...they were lousy cooks.
Hey Septic -- I'm no lady, and I'm no reader of this blog. I'm the writer of it. If you plan to come here and insult me in my own house, at least get it right.
ok im sorry im going to be the bad person here. i feel that some people are poo pooing on mcdonalds because of a lunch thats a year old. ok lets be real. a LOT of kids like mcdonalds. a LOT of parents like to go there too. mcdonalds is NOT unlike a lot of other places and i dont know why they get picked on so much other than they are just the "go to". kids like it.....if you are a parent dont let your kid eat there five times per week for gods sakes. its not my job or mcdonalds to raise your kids. monitor a balanced diet and mcdonalds can be a part of that. and NO im not affiliated with mcdonalds...im a thin FIT 40 year old professional who has never dieted.
Ok, I already commented once, but I just have to add... I am FLABBERGASTED by some of the comments this post has gotten. SERIOUSLY?!?
uneducated people eat at mcdonalds so.....what group dines at burger king? krystal? are they broken down by minority groups? should they get some stimulus money to redo the menu? or should people choose their families diet in a normal and responsible manner?
@nancy: my mom was an uninspired cook, too, and never cooked enough food -- sort of like the old joke: "The food here is lousy, and the portions are so small." If the lousy cooking at your house made you picky, I've wondered if it had the opposite effect on me -- I eat almost any kind of food, because I had no choice.
Oh there are tons of educated people (pertaining to the nutrition of the foods they are eating) that eat at McDonalds, and every other establishment that loads there food down with chemicals and preservatives, as well. If the food isn't decomposing after a year, what is it doing inside our bodies? Can something that not even flies want to feast on really be good for our digestion? That's all I'm getting at Anonymous.
My year-long Happy Meal observation was uneventful until I posted the birthday tribute. It went viral! Seems many people have an emotional response to fast food.
Picky eaters are made, not born. (Of course there are exceptions with children who are super sensors and have tactile issues.)This is why I wrote "Baby Bites: Transforming a Picky Eater into a Healthy Eater."
The point of keeping my Happy Meal on my shelf was to bring attention to the food we regularly give our children. Our love affair with fast food is killing them. This is the first generation that is NOT expected to live as long as their parents. We need to change our eating habits, for our children’s health.
Glad you found this interesting, s BIG nonna hug, Joann
I'd say people who feed their kids fast food regularly (more than once per week) are not so much uneducated as lazy. I think they know it's bad for them, but they don't want to put out the effort to prepare a meal or spend the time to get a child to eat healthily.
That said, my kid is only 11 weeks old, but I have already had a serious conversation with her father and grandparents about what she is allowed and not allowed to eat. I will raise her to choose responsibly, but at some point, I won't have control. The only time I ate fast food as a kid was on school trips. Teachers/organizers really don't have much of a choice. I hope by the time my kid is of that age, fast food restaurants have better options.
In this post, readers are shocked to find that salted meat left in a dry, arid climate will not "rot" but simply dry out. Luckily, for the sake of the survival of our race, humans discovered this long ago.
Slice up an organic potato and fry it in all-natural oil. Put it in a paper sack, inside a box, and place it on your shelf for a year. The similarities will astound you!
I, of course, understand that you can't pass up a golden opporunity to rail against the Golden Arches, regardless of the unecessary sensationalism.
Jason, I'm more disturbed by the bread. I can't keep bread from geeting moldy for a whole week at home unless i put it in the fridge.
glad our ancestors salted meat to preserve, but a modern day hamburger really doesn't require--and shouldn't have--the same salt content. and, the point isn't just "railing against the Golden Arches," most fast food falls into the same over-salted, preserved state, among their other issues...
Meg: Bread won't mold if it isn't in a plastic bag. It will just get stale & hard. If that burger was wrapped in plastic, it would probably be moldy & gross.
@Meg Agreed. Clearly, even deeming those buns "bread" is stretching the label.
@nancy Well said. Its certainly not advisable, for health reasons, to preserve meat this way unless necessary. But I think it still deserves mentioning that there isn't anything mysterious going on here. Its beef. Its salt. This happens. It wasn't dreamed up by some nefarious corporate executive intent on raiding your wallets and killing your children. Folks reacted like there must be plutonium in the meat and your body couldn't possibly digest it properly if it didn't mold. Hogwash.
