Last McDonald’s Burger Sold In Iceland Unchanged After 6 Years

[Botany]

TThe last cheeseburger sold in Iceland in 2009 remains unchanged after 6 years, reports MBL.is. The only notable difference seems to be that the meat patty is a slightly lighter colour than before.

A year after the economic meltdown in Iceland, McDonald’s announced it would be closing up shop and on the last day it was open Icelander Hjör­tur Smára­son bought the last Mc­Don­ald’s cheeseburger in the coun­try.

Deciding he would preserve it, Hjörtur kept the burger and fries in a plas­tic bag for 3 years dur­ing which time it remained un­touched by time or decay.

“I had heard some­thing about Mc­Don­ald’s never de­cay­ing so I just wanted to find out for my­self whether this was true or not,” ex­plains Hjörtur who initially donated the ham­burger to the Na­tional Mu­seum of Ice­land after realising nothing had happened to the burger in the first 3 years it was in his possession.

http://grapevine.is/news/2015/01/26/last-mcdonalds-burger-sold-in-iceland-unchanged-after-6-years/

http://bushostelreykjavik.com/last-mcdonalds-in-iceland live stream of "the burger."

[TheCowsCameHome]

1. It probably tastes the same as one made today.

[underpants]

2. Kids know this. They think McD's is "gross"

We wanted to get a burger after seeing Spongebob yesterday - not one person mentioned McD's

[marym625]

3. "Chances are that this is the most boring, uneventful web cam on the planet."

[Paulie]

41. Not even close

http://smp.uq.edu.au/content/pitch-drop-experiment

[marym625]

42. Yeah, that's pretty boring

What an incredibly time consuming experiment.


But I think the burger is more so.

I was quoting the linked article.

However, I think we should all bet on when the 10th drop comes down.

[H. Cromwell]

4. Mcdonalds burger and home made burger are equal...

The link below pretty much dis proves there is anything different between a McDonalds burger and an identical one made from proven 100% real beef. WHEN put in Identical Controlled environments; running a somewhat real experimental protocol, the results are interestingly similar.

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-revisiting-the-myth-of-the-12-year-old-burger-testing-results.html

[leveymg]

15. You don't cook much, do you? Ever heard of offal? Would you eat it if it

weren't ground into a paste? Here are some offal things you'll find in the Big Mac protein slurry that doesn't come in most supermarket or restaurant ground beef:

[Major Nikon]

18. Someone wrote that on the interwebs so it must be twue!

[Treant]

26. I'm of German ancestry

If we can't take cheap meat, grind it up to hide what it was, put it in an animal intestine, then cook and eat it...we aren't happy.

To me, that looks like good sausage makin's.

[enki23]

28. No, they don't contain organ meat.

The problem with McDonalds isn't that they make food that is uniquely bad for people, or that the food is especially low quality. The problem with McDonalds is that they make it extremely convenient for people to get large doses of exactly what we crave: sugar, salt and fat. That's it.

[leveymg]

32. I agree. Offal is a lot of stuff in the carcass that isn't usually part of hamburger,

not just organs. Lips, tongues, gut lining, veins . . . lots of veins and arteries, you can actually see the little grey tubes in a Big Mac. But, even offal has food value, according to USDA, so it's permitted:



Thanks for pointing out all the extra salt, and sugar, preservatives and other chemicals. Call them industrial waste. The whole product is pretty much processed industrial waste.

[progressoid]

29. Yes.

[zeemike]

35. Ooh dogies, I want me some of that offal stuff

That's lip smacking good right there...where can I get me some pink slime?

[leveymg]

36. And, while you're under the Golden Arches, try

to figure out what they make these things are made out of:

[zeemike]

38. Well what ever it is I am sure it is as good as offal.

Only from chicken instead of beef.
Someday perhaps they will have Solent Green nuggets...then we will know we are in paradise.

[leveymg]

40. You're gonna be Lovin' It >

[H. Cromwell]

39. How?

do you know how much I cook from my post showing that a McDonald's burger and a proven 100% beef burger perform similarly under the same conditions ie. spoilage wise.
BTW, I am a very good cook.

[leveymg]

5. In 1946, they realized there was no other way to deal with industrial waste. McDonald's arrived.

Practically saved America from an environmental crisis. Just like carbon recapture, the pollutants are pumped somewhere they are never seen again.

[Octafish]

12. Laid to their eternal rest at someone else's expense.

Great plan for ridding the nation of pollution, that burying reality.

[leveymg]

13. In the belly of the beast, billions served.

[Octafish]

17. What a little birdie told me...

A little owl that scares male souls stiff. May they stand by the side of the river watching the bodies float by when their boat shoves off without them aboard for the other side.

What you wrote reminded me of something I wrote as a college guy way back when there was no Internet, an experience I brought up on DU2: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8411973

Leave No Machine Behind

While difficult to see now, the disaster in the Gulf may lead to the kind of change you describe and our world needs. We can not survive, as a planet, species and civilization, continuing on the path we are on. We need an enlightened society and an enlightened approach to the future.

For a creative writing class in my college decade, I wrote a short story about the future of Detroit, one where the Machine got rid of its toxic waste by putting the chemicals into fast foods. People loved them because they were co-addictive (Barkobars made people thirsty for Sluggweiser. Sluggweiser made people crave Barkobars.) The story had a bunch of other elements of brainwashing, programming, and societal control that today we can see are commonplace, if not accepted, parts of the times we live in.

"Brilliant way to get rid of it." I stopped writing SF after that. The Machine doesn't need any ideas.

PS: Thanks for caring, leveymg --on this, on your chum at Rockefeller Center, and all the rest going back over the years.

[leveymg]

21. I also wrote some SciFi a while back.

It even got published as a 1982 ten-part series in the local weekly paper. It was set in a small northern California town 20 years in the future. The first installment was "Santa Cruz in the Year 2002." In that, I wrote about what would happen when the tech industry centered in San Jose gets wiped out in a stock market crash in 2000. What happens next is the US goes to war in the Mid-east that got triggered when a suicide attack by US-made aircraft killed several thousand Americans. A later episode mentioned universal computer entertainment/surveillance, privatized law enforcement and education, and the spreading use of torture tables and robot drones.

I was in a blue funk when I wrote this over a few months after a house fire burned up my only copy of a dissertation in progress, along with everything else I owned.

Sometimes, I hate it when I'm right. Anyway, most of the installments are posted online here:

http://s327.photobucket.com/user/leveymg/library/?sort=3&page=1

Enjoy. We do think alike, in some ways.

[Jackpine Radical]

33. OMG, talk about traumatic memories.

The pre-word processor dissertation. And yours burned?

Did you manage to reconstruct it?

[leveymg]

34. No, but my university library billed me $8,000 for the lost books.

That sorta complicated things when I went to reenroll. No need to reconstruct it.

Trauma kinda puts things into perspective, though.

[icymist]

6. The character Famine in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens invented the fast food burger.

Famine (Good Omens)
A rider of the Apocalypse in Good Omens. He took the form of a thin businessman man with black hair named Raven Sable. He created nouvelle (which consisted of a string bean, a couple of peas and a paper-thin slice of chicken), D-Plan dieting and various foods that contained no actual nutrition whatsoever. He enjoys the paradox permitted by modern food technology: that people can eat "foodstuffs" which look, smell, and taste like food, yet contain precisely zero on any scale of nutritive value. Obesity entertains him: the concept that people can eat far too much and yet still die of food-related disorders. For the same reasons, wafer-thin professional anorexics (who our society dignifies with the title supermodels) are always a welcome sight to him. If you pointed out the existence of starving children in Africa, he'd be professionally flattered that you'd noticed. He has a major controlling interest in a fast-food superchain spanning the globe. In fact, he invented fast food burgers.

http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Famine_%28Good_Omens%29

[Thav]

19. Read this book if you haven't.

It's wonderful, and hilarious.

[LongTomH]

25. Also from the great philosopher, Sir Terry Pratchett:

"There are platonic burgers made of beef instead of cow lips and hooves. There are fish 'n' chips where the fish is more than just a white goo lurking at the bottom of a batter casing and you can't use the chips to shave with. There are hot dog fillings which have more in common with meat than mere pinkness, whose lucky consumers don't apply mustard because that would spoil the taste. It's just that people can be trained to prefer the other sort and seek it out. It's as if Machiavelli had written a cookery book." -- The Last Continent

[Cali_Democrat]

7. LOL

They're live streaming the burger?

Hahahaha

[Botany]

8. I am willing to bet that "the Hostel that Hosts the burger," is about to get a big check from McD's

..... to buy that burger.

Once this story goes viral on the internet McD's will be 100% into damage control.
I have no doubt that execs @ McD's already have had a meeting about this story.


Cali_Dem

[cherokeeprogressive]

20. My guess is that McD's is paying this no attention at all. This has been done hundreds of times...

In fact, there are almost 12,000 YouTube videos about it.

It pops up every now and then... just like certain topics always do at DU.

[Botany]

23. you might be right but if McD's thinks this story has "legs" and hurts their bottom line ....

... they might try to buy the burger and make the story go away but that too
might might have a downside in negative pub for the company.

BTW I would go maybe 2 or three times a year to a local burger king when
I was really hungry but when one of their burgers made my black lab
throw up that was enough for me.

[cherokeeprogressive]

37. But you see, it doesn't HAVE legs. Not only that, it's like the 10,000th time this has come up.

In the end, it's always the same... this gets debunked by private citizens who make their own burgers and let them sit; they don't rot either. Once the burger dries out, there can be no mold or rot.

Want to see it rot? put it in a sealed plastic bag so it can't dry out. Do the same with a homemade burger. They'll rot at the same pace.

Want to see it not rot? Put both on plates and let them dry out over a matter of time. Neither will rot. This experiment has been dozens, HUNDREDS of times and always comes out the same.

Here's my prediction... this post will sink, but it will be resurrected again in the same fashion, with the same recs by the same DUers, and sink once more. Then it will happen again, and again, and again. DUers love the chance to bash "fast food" and will pile on every time.

[hunter]

9. When I was a kid McDonalds was maybe a twice a year treat.

My dad hates big pig corporate fast food, big pig corporate anything.

And now that I recall, it was always when my mom didn't come home at the expected hour without calling. And my mom hates corporate big pig fast food much more than my dad does.

Things that make me, as an adult, go "hmmmmmm...."



My mom and dad are still happily married, and the occasional stick-it-in-your-eye fast food treats when I was a kid didn't kill me or any of my siblings, or my parents' relationship.

[madfloridian]

10. Ha. Loved watching the live feed.

[greytdemocrat]

11. Too funny!!!

[drm604]

14. I'm skeptical that it's unchanged.

I challenge anyone who believes that it's unchanged to eat it.

[lpbk2713]

16. It would have to be organic matter in order for it to go bad.

But it is the product of a corporate chemistry set.

So it keeps going ... and going ... and going ...

?w=595

[jmowreader]

22. You ever notice no one does this with a Quarter Pounder?

Could there be a reason for that...like "a regular McD's cheeseburger is heavily salted and dried out when you get it"?

Gee, I wonder where all the JerkyCams are?

Come on guys...McDonald's food is bland and boring, but it's no worse for you than any of the other shit sold at restaurants. If you don't like McDonald's, just admit it's because they make food you don't like the taste of.

[Botany]

24. it is the exact same type of meat in both sandwiches and the bun is the same too ....

..... I might make a cheese burger and toast a bun and put it under glass
to see what happens. Then again I might not.

[jmowreader]

27. Quarter Pounders are juicier and have more toppings

If you tried this "experiment" with one it would get moldy quickly.

[HERVEPA]

30. And the real story about rotting.

Food blog A Hamburger Today did some rigorous experiments a while back which confirm that the phenomenon of undecayed burgers isn't unique to McDonald's. From AHT:

"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."

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-revisiting-the-myth-of-the-12-year-old-burger-testing-results.html

[progressoid]

31. FYI, most hamburgers will be unchanged. This isn't unique to McDonalds.

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-revisiting-the-myth-of-the-12-year-old-burger-testing-results.html

The Burger Lab: Revisiting the Myth of The 12-Year Old McDonald's Burger That Just Won't Rot (Testing Results!)




Well, well, well. 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.

...

The Conclusion

So there we have it! Pretty strong evidence in favor of Theory 3: the burger doesn't rot because it's small size and relatively large surface area help it to lose moisture very fast. Without moisture, there's no mold or bacterial growth. Of course, that the meat is pretty much sterile to begin with due to the high cooking temperature helps things along as well. It's not really surprising. Humans have known about this phenomenon for thousands of years. After all, how do you think beef jerky is made?

Now don't get me wrong—I don't have a dog in this fight either way. I really couldn't care less whether or not the McDonald's burger rotted or didn't. I don't often eat their burgers, and will continue to not often eat their burgers. My problem is not with McDonald's. My problem is with bad science.

For all of you McDonald's haters out there: Don't worry. There are still plenty of reasons to dislike the company! But for now, I hope you'll have it my way and put aside your beef with their beef.