Every so often, an unlucky customer will head to a fast food restaurant or a grocery store and find something in their food that shouldn’t be there.
But while such incidents are unfortunate, they’re pretty rare. Indeed, our fast and busy lives have a way of making it more common for us to start off with something that’s perfectly fine but gets much more disgusting the longer we forget about it.
And sure, we’re repulsed when this happens but we also know it’s our fault so we clean it up and put it out of our minds. But what if we leave some food in the same place for years only to find that it looks almost as good as when we put it there?
That’s the situation one woman recently uncovered and it’s left her with some questions about her McDonald’s order.
On November 5, 2017, Megan Condry of Washington D.C. pulled into a McDonald’s drive-thru and bought two cheeseburgers and some fries.
As she told the New York Post , she wasn’t hungry enough for one of these cheeseburgers at the time, so she left it in the bag in the back of her car with the intention of eating it later.
But as she stated in a Facebook post , she would forget about this burger for about five days. And when she found it, she noticed that no mold had formed on it, nor did it look or smell any differently than when she bought it.
This discovery made Condry curious, so she decided to try a little experiment.
After seeing an old burger put on display in her doctor’s office, she wanted to see what the cheeseburger would look like after she left it in the back of her wardrobe for years at a time.
So as we can see, she marked the date she bought it on the bag it came in. And once she found the bag while putting away her Christmas decorations last month, she decided to open it up and see what had changed in the five years since leaving it there.
Although there was a major way in which that burger had changed, you wouldn’t necessarily know that by looking at it.
In Condry’s words, “There was no smell whatsoever and it looks the same as the day I bought it.”
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What had changed, however, is that the burger became much drier and harder. Condry compared it to a hockey puck and figured she could break a window with the mummified burger.
Although she would have loved to take it apart and see how much the patty had changed, it seems unlikely that she could do so without breaking the whole burger as it’s essentially a solid mass now.
Condry thought that this lack of decomposition was due to preservatives in the burger, but McDonald’s has since argued that its dryness is the real clue to why it looks like this.
In a response from the company’s official blog , a representative wrote, “Without sufficient moisture – either in the food itself or the environment – bacteria and mold may not grow and therefore, decomposition is unlikely.”
They also said that McDonald’s products are capable of decomposing if left in the right environment and claimed that it looks as dehydrated as it is and thus not “the same as the day they were purchased.”
In the representative’s words, “There are no preservatives or fillers in our patties and the only thing ever added is a touch of salt and pepper on the grill.”
h/t: New York Post