Now this is what I call food that stand the test of time...

[Xavier]

Photo: Sally Davies

Source: The News Chronicle
Sally Davies, 54, a New York artist, decided to embark on the idea of photographing food everyday for a couple of months. Her idea was brought about by what she read concerning a teacher using a hamburger that hadn’t decayed as a sample to her students in one of the lessons she was teaching. By the time Davies read this article the hamburger was already 12 years old.

With McDonald’s being the closest fast food chain she bought a Happy Meal of hamburger and french fries, put it on her living room table and set about in photographing it everyday for 180 days to record the expected changes.

So far, no change happened. No molds just the shriveling of the fries and burger patty.

As with McDonald’s comment the company is saying their food is 100% biodegradable and the probability of tampering with the photography might have happened.

Davies counters this saying she’s not in the publication of the pictures for money.

<span style="font-style: italic">The rest of the story at The News Chronicle </span>

[Skelly]

Re: Now this is what I call food that stand the test of time...

Maybe I should send in a photo of some fries that I found in my vehicle that must have been back there for months!

[Emperah]

Re: Now this is what I call food that stand the test of time...

So, mcdonalds food is so nassy an unhealthy dat not even de nassy fly dem want it

[blugiant]

Re: Now this is what I call food that stand the test of time

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is a fascinating book that details the changing eating habits of Americans. I can't recommend it highly enough. It explains how, over the last 30 years, we have become a nation that eats vast quantities of corn much more so than Mexicans, the original &quot;corn people.&quot;

Most folks assume that a chicken nugget is just a piece of fried chicken, right? Wrong! Did you know, for example, that a McDonald's Chicken McNugget is 56% corn?

What else is in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget? Besides corn, and to a lesser extent, chicken, The Omnivore's Dilemma describes all of the thirty-eight ingredients that make up a McNugget one of which I'll bet you'll never guess. During this part of the book, the author has just ordered a meal from McDonald's with his family and taken one of the flyers available at McDonald's called &quot;A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts: Choose the Best Meal for You.&quot;

These two paragraphs are taken directly from The Omnivore's Dilemma:

&quot;The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There's some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on the market price and availability.

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the &quot;leavening agents&quot;: sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are &quot;anti-foaming agents&quot; like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable.

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to &quot;help preserve freshness.&quot; According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause &quot;nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.&quot; Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.&quot;

Bet you never thought that was in your chicken McNuggets!

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