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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Current Events 6: The Truth Behind the Everlasting Happy Meal: Burgers That Size Don't Rot

Recently a big fuss was made of some images released by a person named Sally Davies. She took a Happy Meal, and left it out in the open for 6 months, taking a photo of it every day. She made a video of it, and her experiment showed that the Happy Meal didn't rot at all. However, later research by Kenji Lopez-Alt, a writer for Serious eats, a well known, reliable internet food site, showed something interesting: hamburgers don't rot. Using a good scientific method that Mrs. M would be proud of, Kenji researched whether mold would grow on a McDonalds burger, or a normal home-made burger. You can find his research here. He left a McDonalds burger and a burger he made himself using a store-bought patty and bun. He also tested many other burgers, small ones and big ones like an Angus 1/4 Pounder, which you can read about on my , and source link. He testing found that all of the small burgers, both the McDonalds one and the home-made one didn't rot. However, both of the larger burgers he tested, the Angus 1/4 pounder, and a home-made version of the Angus, did rot. He concluded that the smaller burgers didn't rot because they have a large surface area, and are small, both of which help cause the burgers' inability to hold moisture. Moisture is one of the key factors for creating mold, so without the moisture, the mold couldn't grow. He also stated that another reason that the burgers didn't rot is that they were cooked at a very hot temperature, which could have killed the bacteria on the meat. When he put any of the burgers into a closed environment like a plastic bag where moisture couldn't escape, the mold grew.
I think that this is really interesting because it proves a very shocking piece of information wrong. I don't eat at McDonald's very much, but I don't think that it is fair for people to criticize McDonald's for someting they haven't thoroughly researched ad tested. 
Here is the video of the Happy Meal that started all this fuss:


Sources:
Kyle VanHemeret
Nov. 5, 2010
http://gizmodo.com/5682815/the-truth-behind-the-everlasting-happy-meal-no-burgers-that-size-rot
http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-revisiting-the-myth-of-the-12-year-old-burger-testing-results.html?ref=carousel
If you are interested, here was McDonalds' official response to the non-rotting Happy Meal. It was made before this new research I reported about, but some of the points they made were proved to be valid by the research:
http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company/mcd_faq/spam_recruitment_fraudulent_email_messages.html

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