Pop quiz. Which one of these Happy Meals is six years old?
If you guessed the one on the right, you're correct. Those french fries and Chicken McNuggets were reportedly purchased back in 2009 by Jennifer Lovdahl at a McDonald's in Anchorage, Alaska, who keeps it on display at her chiropractic office to show clients "how unhealthy" McDonald's food is.
After all these years, the food still looks almost exactly like it did when it was purchased.
She shared photos of the 6-year-old meal on Facebook on February 3. In under a week, over 200,000 people have shared them, with many people commenting in complete horror.
"It's been sitting at our office this whole time and has not rotted, molded, or decomposed at all!!!," Lovdahl explained in the caption. "It smells only of cardboard."
McDonald's offers this explanation on its website for why its food does not rot:
Food needs moisture in the air for mold to form. Without it, food will simply dry out – sort of like bread left out on a counter overnight to make croutons for stuffing.
You might have seen experiments which seem to show no decomposition in our food. Most likely, this is because the food has dehydrated before any visible deterioration could occur.
Still, Lovdahl says her happy meal has "been sitting," and she makes no mention of dehydrating the Happy Meal to preserve it in advance.
Lovdahl isn't the first person to save a McDonald's meal as an experiment.
Back in 2014, Business Insider reported on this man from Indiana who photographed a McDonald's hamburger after it sat in his desk for five years. And a hostel in Iceland has had a burger on display for 7 years.
Even though they look fairly edible, we don't recommend eating the aged food. As Tech Insider has previously noted, any food that has moisture and isn't frozen (this includes Happy Meals) can grow microbes that spoil food. Some of those microbes can even turn into spores that survive for years which can grow once they're wet again and potentially make you sick, so it's probably best that Lovdahl's Happy Meal remain a display instead of a dinner.
