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McDonald's burgers built to last

Categories: Eating & nutrition, Weird but true, Mealtime

Karen Hanrahan is a wellness educator who teaches a workshop titled Healthy Choices for Children. Her class is for parents and is intended to teach them about healthy alternatives to the processed food products so widely available today. To illustrate just how unhealthy some of our diet staples are, she carries with her a rather unusual prop: a 12-year-old McDonald's hamburger.

Before you start cringing in disgust, go have a look at her blog and the burger in question. The plain hamburger Hanrahan says she purchased back in 1996 looks exactly like one you would purchase today. It's not moldy, maggoty or otherwise decomposed. Hanrahan claims to have done nothing at all to preserve the burger other than to store it in a plastic sandwich container. She says that the burger's unchanging appearance over the years illustrates her point: McDonald's hamburgers are not real food.

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She writes: "Ladies, Gentleman, and children alike - this is a chemical food. Not one ounce of food value. Or at least value for why we are eating in the first place."

Of course, Hanrahan gets beat up in the comments to her post, but most seem to accept her claim that the burger has survived basically unchanged for over a decade. We aren't big McDonald's eaters around here, but I know plenty of families who are. I wonder if this 12-year-old burger might impact the way they feel about their favorite fast-food stop. Does it give you pause?

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