Reminds me of the guy who bought the last ever Big Mac in Iceland, and put it on display and it didn't go mouldy.
Don't know how true that is but it's a good story!
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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There was a book by Morgan Spurlock that told how a man put an extra cheeseburger in his winter coat, only to forget it, and found it in the same condition the following year. My stepkids didn’t believe me, so I put one on the mantel where it sat for months… unchanged. No smell. After about six months they believed me and begged me to throw it out. They refused to eat McDonalds after that.
I used to work next to small commercial bakery, and they would give us stuff from time to time if it was near the sell-by date and they hadn't scheduled a shipment.
One day they gave us some of those tiny vending packs of muffins, the ones with two little colorful things in plastic. They were awful. So bad we bet that even the ants wouldn't touch them if we left it out.
It's been three years now and that muffin is still there, identical to the day we set it down (not counting the dust).
Ew. 🤮
I did this in my car by accident multiple times way back in the day (like 2004). Stop for food after work, eat the fries and forget about the burger, which gets buried under stuff (I keep my car generally cleaner these days; I was a teen). It dries out completely with no actual change in appearance, smell, nothing but turning rock hard. Gross.
Needless to say, I haven’t eaten there in almost 20 years, other than an occasional fries on a road trip when that’s all there is.
The burger turned ten years old back in 2019. Sadly, it looks like the live stream is no more, and perhaps neither is the hostel that was the burgers home.
That is literally mentioned in the article, if you'd have read anything beyond the title.
I don't know if it would work with a Big Mac but I'm curious to know. I imagine the lettuce would have to mold, but McDonald's shreds their lettuce so maybe it would have time to dry out ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I know it's been done with a McDonald's burger and fries before though, and I think it looked the same after a decade or more.
...wut
They are reposted from reddit TIL, so there is definitely some guerilla marketing going on over there.
Speaking of. On an off chance, I went to BK a few days ago and got a Whopper. Like $12 for the meal, and just like the other fast food chains, the patty was so thin I couldn’t taste anything besides the bun, ketchup and mayo.
Pretty much cured me of any further fast food spending. What a scam!
I don't think their patties have changed size any, though I wouldn't swear to that. Also, at least in my area, BK regularly sends out pages of coupons in the mail. I think with the coupon you can still get a large sized Whopper meal for around $7. Without a coupon (again, in my area, maybe not all) you can get a Whopper Jr., 4 pc nuggies, small fry and small drink for $5.
I don't eat fast food much but I am a bit of a BK Stan. So much better tasting food than the clown house.
Must vary regionally. I used to work at BK in the 90s, got the free meal regularly, and I won't touch any BK here anymore because the quality of everything is far below even McD standards (which is a 50/50 gamble itself).
A shame because the original Whopper was a great product.
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I mean... I ain't never seen a McDonald's burger get moldy. And I've seen one that was left forgotten under a bed for over a decade.
But which one tastes better after a decade?
That's just because it's dried out. Keep it wet and there's gonna be mold and decomposition. The main preservative at play here is salt. Also used to work at McDonald's. There was a burger inside of a bag that fell behind the safe that looked pretty normal even though when I found it it was like 10 years old. Was still crazy but I wasn't surprised though for this reason
Back as a teenager, I worked at several fast food joints. Out of them all, BK was the least bullshitty behind the scenes. Everything cooked right, strict keep times, and reliable cleaning schedules. Some of that is franchise dependent, but corporate BK at the time pushed hard on that stuff.
Never worked McDonald's, I had beef (pun intended) with the manager of the only one close enough to have worked at.
Wendy's, I didn't stay long because I had my certification as a nurse's assistant and bailed immediately for the first job offer doing that.
Hardee's was decent in the back. Not as intensely pushed for cleaning schedules for damn sure, and the hold times for food were longer, but the food quality compared to most places was high in terms of making sure things were the way they are supposed to be. The fried chicken was timed right, the biscuits very precisely timed for the right doneness, that kind of thing.
With Hardee's more than any of the others, when you came in determined how good the food would be. You want good biscuits, you damn well better be there within an hour of opening. Chicken was reliable until an hour before closing, after that you were rolling dice. But the more typical fast food was usually fine all day.
All of which is tangential, but I figured you might get a kick out of it, Don.
In Germany, we have a guy Wallraff, who gets a job at Burger King with a fake identity every few years, just to uncover hygiene scandals every time... Reminds me of that... Nowadays, no one seems to care anymore...
The German franchise license holders for Burgerking seem to be some of the worst around..
And 5 years earlier Burger King sold a burger with so many synthetic dyes that it turned people’s poop neon green.
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I really don't understand the people who fearmonger about preservatives. Do you want food to go bad? Preserving things in salt and other methods are as old as cooking itself and are responsible for feeding people around the world in horrible famine times.
Not all preservatives are “salt” and not all of them are good.
For example, trans fats.
Sure, there's plenty of preservatives we don't use anymore because there are way healthier alternatives. But there's also plenty of anti-science people who fearmonger about any and every preservative despite knowing nothing about its chemistry or even any claims of harm.
Fair point.
Trans fats aren't preservatives are they? I thought they were for texture / taste.
Fat itself is a preservative, regardless of being saturated, cis or trans, since it helps to isolate food from humidity and air. That's how comfit works, for example.
I thought they were for texture / taste.
Yes, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
Trans fats are mostly the result of partial hydrogenation of unsaturated acids; basically you pump some hydrogen into fat, in the presence of catalysts, and it'll convert some triple bonds into double and some double bonds into single. That makes the fat firmer, because it increases its melting point, so yes, it changes the texture.
However, if the result is a double bond, you can generate two types of molecules, "cis" or "trans", depending on the positions of the carbons around the double bond. Like this (check the last two molecules):
Most natural processes generate cis fatty acids. Hydrogenation generates trans fatty acids.
This wouldn't be a problem if the fat was hydrogenated all the way, because then the double bond gets replaced with a single bond (where this issue doesn't pop up - see the first molecule). However that is more expensive than simply doing it halfway, and generating all those trans acids.
^Best answer. I majored very well in chemistry, a tiny bit less well in career, but this is the "cis" vs. "trans" explanation I was hoping to see.
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They technically have preservative properties because of the hydrogenation, but they really aren't used for that purpose. You don't fry things to necessarily preserve them better. It's for taste/texture, like you said.
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The biggest issue is, if it can’t mold, then there’s no way to know if you’re eating a fresh burger or one that was left out for a week. The reason it doesn’t mold is because they dehydrate the food so mold can’t grow without moisture. That also degrades a lot of proteins that would be good to consume. Dehydrated not molding food is good for ration food, not for comfort food.
That's partially true. They use dehydrated onions but their buns and meat are never dehydrated. So that leaves a lot to be explained. The "meat" is heavily salted and frozen, as well as having a lot of cellulose ("wood pulp") in it. The waxy paper wrapping also has a lot to do with it not degrading, as it makes it harder for bugs to get to. If you left a McDonald's burger outside without the wrapper, better believe it'll be mostly gone within a day or two.
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When I was in grade school, a motivational speaker showed everyone a McDonald's burger that he had purchased an obscenely long time ago. He had it in a plastic bag and it still looked brand new.
I still ate McDonald's though. Lol. Well, up until the last few years when fast food suddenly became an exclusive luxury for the 1%.
Holy shit I thought only my school had motovation speakers...I swear had to go to assembly every two or three months to hear some bullshit they were peddling.
We had a bunch of them when I was growing up. Some of them were cool, and were just talking about pursuing the arts and stuff. Some were annoying propagandists, trying to convince children that war is dope and that they should enlist. But some of the anti-drug ones were fucked up.
I distinctly remember this one speaker who told us this long, depressing story about how addiction caused him to become so poor that he had to steal food and toilet paper for his family, that he had to break into people's homes to steal their valuables to buy more drugs, that he spent 20 years in the prison system before finally getting out and getting sober and making something of his life... Then after like 30 minutes of this story, he says "None of that actually happened, but it COULD have, if I gave in to the temptations of marijuana."
And I was only like 9 or 10 at the time, but even then I was old enough to recognize when my intelligence had been insulted. This man sat there and pulled at our heartstrings for a full half hour, literally making some of the kids cry because of how sad and traumatic his story is, only to reveal that he was lying straight to our faces. But, we should totally trust him that drugs are bad, even though the only thing we know about this man is a lie.
On the bright side, I came out of that experience as a better critical-thinker, and with a fresh sense of skepticism that I've carried with me through life. But I still like drugs, sooo...
The anti-Marijuana lies told to schoolchildren are, in my opinion, directly responsible for many of those kids falling to meth and heroin addiction. "Well, if they obviously lied about weed, they probably lied about how bad all the other ones are too".
I thought they were common, though I am old AF, so maybe it doesn't happen as much anymore. Was pretty common from grade school all the way through high school.
Felt like the same for me: every 2-3 months, there was a big assembly in the gym and we got to skip out on class for an hour or two while someone talked at us kids. I don't know how much info I've actually retained from those assemblies. I remember McDonald's burger guy, one time someone brought in a giant harmless snake and we all got to touch it, and one time there was a former pro wrestler who ripped a phone book in half lol.
I remember one that came to my elementary school was a yoyo professional or something. Got the entire school hooked on yoyos haha. This would’ve been mid 2000’s.
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That would be soo disgusting to see if you're hungry, but I can say, not having seen it before, it will certainly have a lasting impression on me.
Now I just need to know if Burger King has actually rid their products of artificial stuff.
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