McDonald's Happy Meal Does Not Decompose After SIX Months + A Happy Meal Experiment: Day 1

Here's an interesting story...

According to Sally Davies, a New York city artist and photographer, a McDonald's Happy Meal did not decompose after six months of sitting on her shelf.  She bought the Happy Meal back in April 2010, and has since photographed it each week.

Take a look at what it looked like on Day 1:



Here's what it looked like on Day 180:



Wow.  That looks good enough to eat.

"The fries shrivelled slightly as did the burger patty, but the overall appearance of the food did not change as the weeks turned to months.  The only change that I can see is that it has become hard as a rock," Davies told TheDailyMail.co.uk.

What does McDonald's think of all this?

A McDonald's spokeswoman, Danya Proud, told the DailyMail.co.uk: "This is nothing more than an outlandish claim and is completely false."

Another spokeswoman, Theresa Riley, ridiculed Davies' "completely unsubstantiated" work as something out of "the realm of urban legends."  She goes on to explain:

"McDonald's hamburger patties in the United States are made with 100% USDA-inspected ground beef.  Our hamburgers are cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else -- no preservatives, no fillers. Our hamburger buns are baked locally, are made from North American-grown wheat flour and include common government-approved ingredients designed to assure food quality and safety. ... According to Dr. Michael Doyle, Director, Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, 'From a scientific perspective, I can safely say that the way McDonald's hamburgers are freshly processed, no hamburger would look like this after one year unless it was tampered with or held frozen.'" (TheUpshot, 2010)

So we here at TheFrontloader.com have decided to take on this experiment as well.  What I've done is bought myself a McDonald's Happy Meal (plain hamburger with fries, just like what appears to be in Davies' pictures) and I'm going to see just how long it takes this meal to decompose.

I'm going to take a picture of this once a day and post each picture here, along with any description of changes that occur.  The first goal is to reach the 6-month mark, just like Davies.  While Davies put her Happy Meal on a shelf and had to take it down for each photograph (thus moving the food around and creating controversy on whether the pictures are authentic), I'm going to keep mine right on my kitchen counter and take the picture from the same angle each time... or as close as I can get.

I'm doing this for no other reason than I'm extremely curious.  I'm not doing this to make McDonald's look bad, I'm just curious... I hope the food rots... that would make me feel a LOT better, actually.

So here we go, Day 1:



**** Update ****

I realized that the first picture was pretty far away from the food, so I took one that's a bit closer so you can see more food detail.  I'll do my best to keep this angle/distance for every shot from here on out.




I hope you'll stick around and see how this experiment goes!