14-year-old ‘zombie’ McDonald’s hamburger still looks good enough to eat

The closest documented proof we have to the existence of zombies on earth may lie underneath a pair of golden arches.

We can thank David Whipple for this discovery. The Utah man purchased a pair of McDonald’s burgers in 1999 and, as an experiment in biological decay, decided to keep one of the burgers out for 30 days.

Fourteen years later it remains in the exact same condition, a meat-and-bun version of the living dead. McZombie’s.

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“"I was showing some people how enzymes work and I thought a hamburger would be a good idea,” he said on a recent episode of The Doctors (via Daily Mail). “And I used it for a month and then I forgot about it. It ended up in a paper sack with the receipt in my coat pocket tossed in the back of my truck and it sat there for, I don't know, two or three months."

“My wife didn’t discover it until at least a year or two after that. And we pulled it out and said ‘oh my gosh. I can’t believe it looks the same way,’” he added.

Take a moment to gird your intestines before you continue reading.

Good? OK.

By now you’ve likely processed that food is supposed to decompose. Quickly if it’s actually made of food. A lot more slowly if it’s made of chemicals and a hint of real food, as per our heavily processed North American diet.

But food that doesn’t decompose at all? That’s cult horror movie status.

A doctor on the show’s panel revealed that the decade-and-a-half-old slab of meat showed no signs of mould, fungus or decay. Not even a whiff of foul odour that one would expect from meat left out of the fridge for more than 24 hours, let alone many years.

It looked, and probably tasted, like it did on the day it was wrapped – although no one, not even a royal food taster, has actually volunteered to test that theory. And survived.

The burger’s original pickle, on the other hand, had long since disintegrated.

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Whipple has taken his zombie burger out on the media circuit to much fanfare. After McDonald’s extensive campaign to re-launch itself as a healthier fast food option, this can’t be helping corporate sleep at night.

Perhaps they’re barking up the wrong money tree. Adjust their entire campaign to attract the Shaun of the Dead demographic and they wouldn’t even have to change a thing.