What's Really Going On With That Mummified McDonald's Happy Meal
Another day, another assault on the beleaguered Happy Meal. In a homegrown experiment, New York City photographer and vegan Sally Davies decided to see how long a Happy Meal would last. After six months, her meal is looking pretty good with no mold, bacteria or others signs of decomposition, leading many to conclude that McDonald's (MCD) is pumping their burgers full of weird chemicals and fillers.
Well, they're not. Yes, it really is just ground beef.
The fact that a McDonald's burger will live longer than Bob Barker has to do with the strict procedures the company follows to ensure that its food doesn't make anyone sick from things like salmonella or E. coli. At its stores, McDonald's employees cook the burgers in something more akin to a locked vise grip than a grill. It sizzles the meat to an internal temperature of 155F, refusing to release the patties until the cooking is done.
This type of direct heat is much more intense than the cooking your burgers undergo at home. The effect is to kill off dangerous bacteria, and it's worked like a charm. When was the last time McDonald's was associated with an outbreak? McDonald's feels that it has to do this to ensure the safety of the millions of burgers it serves each day.
Unfortunately, the scalding heat also kills or deactivates good bacteria, enzymes and micronutrients in the beef, leaving mold and bacteria with nothing to feast on. Whether this also makes the food less healthy or less like real food is something we don't know since no one has bothered to study it. The same principle applies to ultra pasteurized milk, which heats milk to 275 degrees instead of the normal pasteurization temperature of 161, allowing you to buy a gallon before you leave on a month's vacation and then pour it over your cereal when you come home.
So for McDonald's customers, the Faustian choice is either E. coli or food that doesn't decompose, and I'm guessing most would choose the latter.
It should be noted that McDonald's does use some percentage of ammonia-treated beef in its burgers. This unappealing product, sold by Beef Products Inc. and the subject of a NYT story by Michael Moss, is sometimes referred to as pink slime, but hey -- it's still just beef.
As for the rest of the Happy Meal, Salon.com points out that the fries are well preserved because they are quite low in moisture, which serves to inhibit bacterial growth. Unlike the burgers, though they contain preservatives, both in the fries and the oil used to fry them.
And McDonald's buns are similar to a lot of bread products these days. They're filled with a dozen chemical additives to make the bread softer, give it an appealing color of white, and rise faster. These additives include Plaster of Paris (seriously), also known calcium sulfate. Then there's chemicals to help these ingredients, as well as several preservatives and things to make the bread absorb more water, which is cheaper than flour.
Davies isn't the first person to put McDonald's burgers to the test of time, but she's certainly attracted more attention than anyone else. So much so that McDonald's felt compelled it issue a statement defending its food by painting its products as wholesome, natural and all-American.
Our hamburger buns are made from North American-grown wheat flour. Our world-famous French fries are made from potatoes and cooked in a canola-oil blend. These are the same foods that consumers buy every day in their local grocery stores - bread, meat and potatoes.From this, you'd think Big Macs came from a farmer's market. While it's true that the chain's bread isn't much different from bread you get at Safeway, the beef is just beef (chicken's another story) and the fries started off as potatoes, a quick glance at the ingredient list tells you that's not quite the whole story.
Image by Flckr user Naystin
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