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On 3 February 2016, Facebook user Jennifer Lovdahl published the above-reproduced status update, to which were appended were two images of an otherwise unremarkable McDonald's Happy Meal along with the following comment: A receipt was attached to the Happy Meal box, indicating that it had been purchased over six years earlier, on 8 January 2010: Although Lovdahl's assertions about the supposedly non-decomposing quality of face food weren't novel, the images piqued viewers enough to garner hundreds of thousands of shares on Facebook. Claims maintaining that McDonald's food doesn't rot have been circulating online for a decade or more. For examples, a September 2008 post held that a McDonald's cheeseburger purchased in 1996 showed few signs of decomposition twelve years on. The phenomenon was also examined by BuzzFeed in a 2014 video comparing seven separate fast-food burgers that had each been stored in glass jars for 30 days: On 15 October 2010 (the same year Lovdahl reportedly purchased the Happy Meal in question), the food blog Serious Eats published an article about The Myth of The 12-Year-Old McDonald's Hamburger. The site took a more in-depth look at whether claims about McDonald's held up in more detailed testing conditions. Most claims about McDonald's food failing to decompose were presented in the context of individuals' having purchased food items specifically to evidence the phenomenon, but rarely (if ever) did such claims provide much information about the conditions under which the experiments were conducted. Moreover, ever fewer of them included one or more control samples of items purchased at other outlets or made at home to rule out factors such as environmental or storage conditions as factors. Since most experiments involved significant passages of time and lacked control specimens, their probative value was significantly diminished. Serious Eats foregrounded their experiment by explaining that: Serious Eats writer J. Kenji Lopez-Alt surmised that [t]he problem with all of these tests is that there is but a single data point, and a single data point is about as useless as a one armed man in a clapping contest; he then set out to design and carry out the first well-documented, scientific experiment to shed some light on whether or not there is something truly evil lurking between the buns. After pointing out the extensive number of factors involved, he listed the items with which he would attempt to replicate the results: On 5 November 2010, Lopez-Alt published a follow-up, in which he noted of his testing conditions: Lopez-Alt first presented his findings visually, producing an image of four virtually identical samples: He then described the status of all the hamburgers he tested at the conclusion of the experiment: Finally, Lopez-Alt pointed out that two burgers (one purchased from McDonald's and the other a homemade facsimile) that were stored in sealed Ziploc-style bags behaved identically as well. He attributed the lack of decomposition to rapid dehydration, conditions under which mold and bacteria growth are rapidly inhibited: So ubiquitous were the claims and online examples of well-preserved McDonald's food items that the fast food chain addressed such questions on their web site. On a FAQ page titled Why doesn't your food rot? the company stated that their food offerings can and do rot, except in conditions wherein they rapidly dry out (which is not unique to McDonald's food or attributable to any unusual ingredients): Examples of McDonald's food items purportedly failing to decompose proved popular on social media when they intermittently appeared, but the big reveal is typically less compelling when contrasted with homemade burgers behaving in approximately the same fashion. No specific ingredient or other factor is usually singled out as a potential factor in such ad hoc experiments (other than the ambiguous chemicals presumed to permeate convenience food), and most serious analyses of the phenomenon cite dehydration as a primary cause. The outcome isn't exclusive to fast food items (or even food in general): on occasion, human bodies have been discovered mummified in houses, cars, and apartments. In those instances, failure to decompose is similarly attributable to rapid dehydration, environmental conditions, and other factors not always present when organic matter is allowed to break down naturally.
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