A popular urban legend has it that McDonald’s burgers don’t rot.
Burger King opted for a particularly gross ad campaign in 2020 taking aim at the claim. The ads showed a heavily rotted Whopper, with the message being that its burgers rot because they’re full of natural ingredients and minimal preservatives.
Of course, McDonald’s also uses fresh ingredients in its burgers, by and large, so is there any truth to the idea that its burgers don’t rot?
Well, surprisingly, yes.
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One burger, purchased 30 years ago in Australia, still looks relatively similar to the day it was bought.
Dubbed ‘the oldest burger on planet Earth’, the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder was purchased in 1995 by then-14-year-olds Eduard Nitz and Cacey Dean.
The pair, appearing on Australia’s Channel 9 Today Show, said a mutual friend had ordered too much food on that fateful evening and asked Nitz to ‘look after’ it.
Nitz, being the evidently great friend that he is, has continued to look after it for almost three full decades.
“He said to me: ‘Eduard, hold on to this burger until the next time I come and visit’. And he hasn’t been to visit,” Nitz said on the show.
The burger has survived much of the past three decades either on Nitz’s desk or in a box that’s survived several house moves.
While the burger hasn’t got any obvious mould, you wouldn’t want to eat it. By the friends’ accounts, it’s rock solid. Dean even bounced it on its box to prove it.
“We get a lot of questions and one of them is ‘Did you do anything to it?’,” said Dean. “We didn’t touch it. We did nothing.”
The burger first came to public attention when it was a spy 20 years old, appearing on a Facebook page titled: ‘Can this 20-year-old burger get more likes than Kanye West?’
“Then, of course, it exploded, and we ended up all over everything,” said Dean. “We get sent fan art so we got right into it.”
Along with a burger-themed album from the pair due sometime soon on Spotify, they said they’re working on an AI chatbot that will allow fans to speak to the burger.
“One of my neighbours, turns out he’s right into AI so we’re actually coding him up a personality so you’ll be able to talk to the burger as a therapist,” Dean continued.
“The whole this is pretty crazy, but it’s a legitimately old burger, so why not?”
As to why the burger has stood the test of time, Tim Crowe, a nutrition scientist and accredited practising dietitian, told ABC that the salt content is likely the reason behind its longevity.
“There is nothing insidious about the content of McDonald's food here,” he said.
"There are many better food choices for their nutrition than fast-food burgers and fries, but there is nothing to be alarmed about such food standing the test of time and staying well-preserved.”
Rachael Davis