I just saw on Facebook another round of the “McDonalds food doesn’t rot- if bugs don’t eat it, people certainly shouldn’t” myth. Rather than going “Chortle! Chortle! Stupid fast food” like a lot of people do, I actually took three minutes out of my life to do a bit of research. Maybe more people should, you know, use their brains instead of accepting every Facebook meme as gospel truth.

It turns out that many people have done all sorts of experiments aimed at finding out if it is true, and it it is why.

Here is one such experiment. Spoiler alert- it’s all aobut moisture content and how fast they dry out.

The Burger Lab: Revisiting the Myth of The 12-Year Old McDonald’s Burger That Just Won’t Rot (Testing Results!)

Nov 5, 2010 9:00AM

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

More tests, more results! Follow The Food Lab on Facebook or Twitter.

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

A few weeks back, I started an experiment designed to prove or disprove whether or not the magic, non-decomposing McDonald’s hamburgers that have been making their way around the internet are indeed worthy of disgust or even interest.

By way of introduction, allow myself to quote myself. This is from myprevious article:

Back in 2008, Karen Hanrahan, of the blogBest of Mother Earthposted apicture of a hamburgerthat she uses as a prop for a class she teaches on how to help parents keep their children away from junk food… The hamburger she’s been using as a prop is the same plain McDonald’s hamburger she’s been using for what’s now going on 14 years. It looks pretty much identical to how it did the day she bought it, and she’s not had to use any means of preservation. The burger travels with her, and sits at room temperature.

Now Karen is neither the first nor last to document this very same phenomenon. Artist Sally Davies photographs her 137 day-old hamburger every day for herHappy Meal Art Project. Nonna Joann has chosen tostore her happy meal for a yearon her blog rather than feed it to her kids. Dozens of other examples exist, and most of them come to the same conclusion: McDonald’s hamburgers don’t rot.

The problem with coming to that conclusion, of course, is that if you are a believer in science (and I certainly hope you are!), in order to make a conclusion, you must first start with a few observable premises as a starting point with which you form a theorem, followed by a reasonably rigorous experiment with controls built in place to verify the validity of that theorem.

Thus far, I haven’t located a single source that treats this McDonald’s hamburger phenomenon in this fashion. Instead, most rely on speculation, specious reasoning, and downright obtuseness to arrive at the conclusion that a McDonald’s burger “is a chemical food[, with] absolutely no nutrition.”

As I said before, that kind of conclusion is both sensationalistic and specious, and has no place in any of the respectable academic circles which A Hamburger Today would like to consider itself an upstanding member of.