14 DAY TRIAL // A Manhattan artist, Sally Davies, set out in April on a journey to discover what happens to junk food in time if kept in inadequate storage conditions. As it turns out the McDonald’s Happy Meal doesn’t go bad – ever.
This experiment is similar to the one conducted by nutritionist Joann Bruso, who kept the burger and fries in a Happy Meal for an entire year to see what happened – and observed with shock that they didn’t decompose.
Davies bought a Happy Meal in April, as also noted above: she placed the burger and fries on a plate and then up on a shelf to see what happened.
She also documented the experience by photographing the food every single day – and thus noted that on day 171 of the “Happy Meal Project” there was almost no change to the burger and fries.
Granted, the junk food was a bit wrinkled and had lost its smell, but what amazed Davies was that it did not gather mould, did not rot and did not even attract flies.
Moreover, even Davies’ dogs stopped paying attention to it the very next day, which is also when its smell disappeared completely.
“I bought the meal on April 10 of this year and brought it home with the express intention of leaving it out to see how it fared,” Davies says for the Daily Mail.
She didn’t set out to ruin McDonald’s reputation on purpose, she says: it just happened to be closest to her home, otherwise she would have chosen any other offering off the menu of a fast food joint around NYC.
“The first thing that struck me on day two of the experiment was that it no longer emitted any smell. And then the second point of note was that on the second day, my dogs stopped circling the shelf it was sitting on trying to see what was up there,” Davies says.
Two weeks into the “Happy Meal Project,” Davies realized that something really bad must be going into the food if it still hadn’t decomposed.
“It was then that I realized that something strange might be going on with this food that I had bought. The fries shriveled slightly as did the burger patty, but the overall appearance of the food did not change as the weeks turned to months,” the artist says.
“And now, at six months old, the food is plastic to the touch and has an acrylic sheen to it. The only change that I can see is that it has become hard as a rock,” Davies adds.
The Project has not come to an end yet and, presumably, Davies will continue with the Happy Meal on the shelf to see how much longer it can stand the test of time without actually decomposing.
Contacted for comment, McDonald’s spokesperson Danya Proud calls the above claims “outlandish and completely false.”