A story has been making its way around the Web the past couple of weeks regarding a nondecomposing McDonald’s Happy Meal.
Sally Davies, a New York-based photographer, and artist, bought a Happy Meal back in April 2010 and left it out on a plate in her kitchen ever since to see what would happen.
The upshot of this homegrown experiment?  Other than an acrylic sheen, plastic-like texture and becoming hard as a rock, no other discernible changes have occurred!
Davies’ science project has been photographed weekly and the results posted on Flickr for all to see and wonder about.   Should children really be given food that doesn’t decompose?
If bugs, mold, and bacteria don’t want this stuff, how could this be counted as any sort of nourishment for children other than just empty calories and toxic chemicals?
What may be even more surprising, however, is that the lack of decomposition of McDonald’s fast food is not unique in the processed foods industry.
Oh no, not by a long shot. Hold onto your hats, everyone!
How about adding supermarket cupcakes (and other baked goods) to the list of foods that neither bugs nor bacteria want anything to do with!
You know what I’m talking about – the supermarket birthday cake that is served at just about every kids’ birthday party you’ve ever attended.   How about that cake you ate at your cousin’s wedding last summer?   Yes, even those delightfully decorated Halloween cupcakes you saw the other day in the supermarket bakery that seemed just perfect for the Trick or Treat get together this coming weekend!
Yes, all of it.
This stuff doesn’t decompose either!  It doesn’t even get moldy!
Best of all, I’ve got pictures!!
You see, many years back when I first began eating real food, I met Dennis Stoltzfoos, a local grass-based farmer who had a curious box of cupcakes sitting in his kitchen.
He explained that these cupcakes were from a party back in December 1995.
The box with the 3 remaining cupcakes never got thrown out, so it just kind of stayed in his kitchen for weeks, then months, now over TWENTY YEARS later.
After seeing this story about the nondecomposing Happy Meal, I emailed Dennis and his wife Alicia to see if they still had this box of supermarket cupcakes. Â Â They did, and Alicia snapped these photos taken only last week of the now 20+ YEAR OLD cupcakes that now practically have artifact status!
Check it out!Â
In this photo, you can still just make out the “1996” on the cupcake box label which indicated the expiration date for the cupcakes (it originally said “January 1996”). The cupcakes were purchased in December 1995.
Kash n’ Karry, the supermarket where these cupcakes were purchased, no longer exists. Kash n’ Karry supermarkets are now called Sweetbay Supermarkets. Update: Sweetbay is now gone too! They were bought by Winn Dixie.
Alicia Stoltzfoos told me that the sticky, sweet, artificial smell of the cupcakes was still very much evident when she opened the box to take this picture!
My hope is that parents who see this blog are motivated to never again buy supermarket bakery goods and to take the time to make a wholesome, homemade birthday cake/cupcakes with REAL ingredients for their children.
If it’s not good enough for bugs, mold, and bacteria, it’s most certainly not good enough for your children!
Source
Many thanks to Dennis and Alicia Stoltzfoos of Full Circle Farm for the pictures and story behind this blog.  Dennis, Alicia, and their four healthy, beautiful children own a leading-edge, grass-based dairy farm in Live Oak, FL.  To contact them to find out more about nutrient-dense, healing foods, email them at [email protected].
I heard about the McDonald’s meal not decomposing, but 15 year old cupcakes! That speaks volumes about the foods people are eating. I’ve been on a journey of better eating and I’ll never go back to eating processed foods again. I never really was a big fan of processed foods anyway, but I would buy them sometimes, but I’ll stick to eating real foods. This is just ridiculous to think how many people are eating these foods and poisioning their bodies.
That will surely remove any temptation to eat from a bakery. I quit eating hot dogs 30 years ago when I found out they had a half life of 750 years. I wonder what they half life of those cup cakes are?
Barbara
Wow. If that doesn’t motivate people to stay away from processed foods I don’t know what will.
What’s the red stuff on top of the cupcakes? Do I want to know?
I have heard about the McDonald’s happy meal that didn’t mold but that is just fowl. I never even bought that crap much before I started eating Real Food all the time because it just tasted gross to me. So fake tasting. Now I know why. I mean when you think about it, it’s bleached flour, bleached sugar, and artificial flavorings. But are there no eggs in it? Or dairy? You would think that would go bad. They must have used powdered eggs (eww) and dairy. SO GROSS!
I eat Real Food and don’t support fast food companies or food manufacturers, and I’m put off by the anti-science attitude in response to comments by Anonymous, Hubert and others that made some good points. Food that dries out is not going to go moldy. That’s why, for instance, you dehydrate crispy nuts, so they will not go moldy. Remember the little wizened apple faces you make with apples you set on your kitchen window sill until they dry out? It seems to be something everyone does in elementary school. No scary chemicals to blame, just dehydration.
I’m sure preservatives do make a difference with baked goods — that is their purpose, after all — but that doesn’t explain why McDonald’s hamburgers would fail to go moldy when left sitting out in a centrally heated or air-conditioned home, for instance. The same thing would happen to any meat that dries out, all else being equal. (We call that “jerky” when we do it on purpose, right?) To draw accurate conclusions, one would have to test various foods, both homemade and store-bought versions, under controlled conditions. And I agree, why bother? Because I wouldn’t eat the junk food anyway, whether or not it can get moldy.
“Common sense” is very often wrong. There are still plenty of reasons to avoid junk food and highly manufactured “edible food-like substances,” to borrow a phrase from Michael Pollan, even though this little experiment is essentially meaningless.
I wanted to say something, but couldn’t have worded it better myself.
Ditto Jeanmarie and Casey. How something decomposes depends on a number of factors. Depending on the weather and/or season in my area, for example, a (homemade, etc etc) baked good left out on my counter will either a) get moldy or b) dry out, and not get moldy. Heck, leave a dead animal/person out in the right conditions, they won’t get moldy either – they’ll dehydrate and mummify. Doesn’t mean they are toxic or not good enough for bugs, etc.
pelicano is right: this is pseudoscience. It’s pseudoscience to derive causation from correlation without any good reason to do so. Just because some processed cupcakes don’t decompose doesn’t necessarily mean they’re full of toxins or so otherwise nasty that they’re “not good enough for bugs and bacteria”. The most likely reason for the nondecomposition is simply that the cupcakes do not contain any water. Nothing can grow without water, regardless of the level of nutrition.
I imagine this is a very similar situation to the more infamous McDonalds burgers. Those examples of nondecomposition have been rather convincingly demonstrated to be nothing more than a case of dehydration, rather than high levels of toxins or anything else. See here for the best example of such science that I could find: http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-revisiting-the-myth-of-the-12-year-old-burger-testing-results.html
This isn’t to say, of course, that processed foods are healthy. Far from it! Just that spouting pseudoscience does nothing to further the respectability of your blog. My mother today sent me a link to one of the articles here, which I rather enjoyed, but your attitude toward skeptics in the comments here did not incline me to trust the content of other articles. If you can’t seriously entertain the suggestion that a conclusion of yours might be in error, how would you ever know if you are wrong?
Hi Hubert, I don’t need science to glean the obvious! I find it downright laughable that science is invoked in a situation like this. Where or where has common sense gone?
Well, I actually bothered to read all the comments and it amazes me that people would actually defend the junkfood companies at all. Well, preservatives may keep your food from getting moldy and in turn keep you from getting sick. But I would think even the most witless wonder could tell whether or not food is going bad and wouldn’t eat it. I guess all those non-decomposing hamburgers and junk cakes are clogging up their thinking abilities. Because that worthless junk stays in your body and causes a multitude of health problems. I would actually rather become sick off of moldy food than eat chemical junk. Heck, I rather eat catfood before I ate McJunk poor excuse for food.
Looks like one of the pathological skeptics have invaded the comments, too. They always throw up their version of “science” as a shield, but in reality its pure paradigm dogma. Where is their controls?
Its okay Sarah, you don’t need to get upset over them. We don’t need to waste time and energy fighting the enemies of abundance.
Hey Anonymous, seems like you could use an IV of butter! And, who needs to brush off their manners? At least I put my name on my comments! LOL