The Happy Meal that didn't Spoil, Would you eat this?

[FourScore]

That's right, it didn't rot, it didn't mold and it still looks pretty good after sitting on this intrepid author's shelf for an entire year. Yes, a year. It just sat there for a year and it didn't decompose or smell or anything natural, organic matter should do.

...The suspicious meal of happy that really makes my stomach turn. And this is what we want our kids to eat? And this is the kind of food we want in the lunch rooms?



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/3/19/848040/-The-Happy-Meal-that-didnt-Spoil,-Would-you-eat-this




Fed Up with School Lunch has these juicy morsels from students about their school lunches:

When I asked the students for their thoughts regarding school lunches, they said things like:

It’s not good, but I eat it.
It is not very nutritious.
It sucks . You cannot hide the truth!
It needs real improvement.
It’s nasty.

I encouraged them to elaborate:

I pay $1.85, and it’s not worth it.
The food tastes old.
We have no willpower. If they put cookies out, we’re going to eat them.
They serve the same thing all the time.
We would love to have healthier options. If they gave us healthier options, we’d eat them.
It’s hard when you’re trying to lose weight. I wish there was something healthy.

http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/



The First Lady is right. We need to eat better foods. We need to feed our children better foods.

[Ken Burch]

1. On the bright side...

At least the fries didn't develop AI and take over the city...yet.

[FourScore]

2. Those in the picture haven't...They're still waiting

to be integrated into the proper system. A digestive system. Like yours perhaps...

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. Maybe the city would be improved if it had!

:scared:

[Drunken Irishman]

4. Probably not. I generally can't reheat fast food burger & fries.

[gateley]

5. Um... are you gonna finish that? nt

[FourScore]

6. DUzy!!!

[meowomon]

7. I prefer the fish sandwich

I think that would spoil and really smell up the office.

[Ken Burch]

48. You're assuming it actually has "fish" in it.

It probably has something called "fysh" instead.

[vixengrl]

8. I remember for a period during junior high, my lunch was

iced tea and corn chips, because I just couldn't or wouldn't see myself eating the other stuff. Soggy heated-up frozen french fries. Salty cheap cardboard pizza. Nasty fried chicken. When the most palatable school lunch option is the tiny, mayo-d out the ying-yang *hoagie*, you just stop spending your lunch money on that crap. And spend it on actual crap, that doesn't taste like crap.

By high school, I was getting by on Diet Coke and vending machine chocolate. I wasn't going to "bring a lunch"--meh. But the caf was a pigsty of bad food--I just chugged some caffeine and hung out in the library during my lunch period. Now, kids sometimes have fast-food crap as their option. It's still unhealthy and not even really good food.

When my cafeteria at college had a salad bar, I started eating lunches sometimes, and actually lost weight in college instead of putting it on. (Although campus also gave me lots of walking opportunity--another plus.) I think something like salad bars would be a great choice for school lunches because it provides lots of variety, vegetables, and is all about people deciding what they want on their plate.

[TheMadMonk]

9. There was the burger that travelled around on the dash of a car for a year or so.

Lab tests deemed it "fit for consumption".

Same vendor btw.

I don't mind the occasional double, but one does have to wonder about a "food" that bugs and bacteria won't touch.

[ddeclue]

10. Bacteria have better taste.. they wouldn't be caught dead on a happy meal.

[JVS]

11. The problem with school lunch is that the students have such different needs.

Some kids come to school having had a good breakfast and will go home to a good dinner. There are other kids for whom this lunch is pretty much all they're going to get for the day. There is no way to make a meal that is healthy for both of those situations.

[wolfgangmo]

26. Um... WHAT?

"There is no way to make a meal that is healthy for both of those situations."

What are you talking about? A healthy meal will be healthy for anyone who consumes it (factoring food allergies (iGg reactions) and intolerances (iGe reactions) aside).

Real food rots. Plastic doesn't.

IF a kids gets a good health meal for breakfast and supper at home and we add a health meal at school, isn't that a good idea? And if a kid only gets a healthy meal at school, isn't it even more important that they get that healthy meal at school?

[Bolo Boffin]

12. Follow the links all the way back and the author is selling something called Baby Bites.

#justsayin

PS: Looking forward to Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution coming up soon.

[FourScore]

13. I clicked all the links and couldn't find Baby Bites anywhere.

:shrug:

[Bolo Boffin]

32. No, you didn't.

The first link in this OP is to Daily Kos.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/3/19/848040/-The-Happy-Meal-that-didnt-Spoil,-Would-you-eat-this

The first link there is for treehugger.com.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/03/mcdonalds-happy-meals-invincible.php

The first link at Treehugger.com is for "author Joann Bruso."

http://www.babybites.info/2010/03/03/1-year-happy-meal/

That page is currently giving a 503 - Service Unavailable error. Last night it would give text but no pictures. And you might be able to get the text off and on.

But as you can see, the website is babybites.info. Joann Bruso is selling something called Baby Bites. It does not seem to be connected to Babybites.com.

So by following the first links in each story all the way back, you can indeed get back to the source and discover (if you can make it through the 503 error) that the author of the original post about the Happy Meal (not the person who posted it here) is trying to sell something instead of Happy Meals. I'm not trying to say kids should eat Happy Meals or that parents shouldn't buy "Nonna Joann's" books. I'm just saying that the person who claims to have a year-old Happy Meal is also selling something related to child nutrition. Buyer beware.

[FourScore]

37. Oh good grief! n/t

[Bolo Boffin]

47. Sorry to bust your little bubble. n/t

[AwakeAtLast]

20. Agree about Jamie Oliver

:thumbsup:

[wolfgangmo]

27. Or....

The author, like many on the web, has google ads on his/her site. In which case they do not control the content of those ads.

[Bolo Boffin]

30. No, the author SELLS Baby Bites.

If you followed the links back, you would see this. That's what I did. They were not Google Ads. The website (babybites.info) is set up to sell Baby Bites.

[cornermouse]

14. Actually, the toy in the picture looks like one they distributed a few month ago.

And trust me, after working in one of those places no one in their right mind would consider eating anything a few hours old, let alone months or a year old.

Personally I'd be more worried about the GMO tomatoes and other veggies in the grocery stores.

[struggle4progress]

15. Eh! Just stick some bolts in its neck and run some electricity through it:

Frankenmeal™ will be as good as new!

[rucky]

16. Could this be the secret to a longer and happier life?

[old mark]

17. My brother once "lost" a loaf of bread and found it many months later,

stuck behind the refrigerator, standard US sliced white bread. It still seemed "fresh". He has not bought any since, thinking there were so many preservatives in it it had to be bad for you.

I am sure he is right.

mark

[here_is_to_hope]

29. I have a loaf of white bread sitting in a hutch, been there

since 1997.
No shit.
You can still squeeze it and its soft.
Might come in handy some day.

[old mark]

42. Might make a good sponge......nt

[AngryAmish]

18. DO you really believe this?

You are being trolled.

[Posteritatis]

33. But it makes claims that support my worldview! That means it must be true! (nt)

[hobbit709]

19. I call BS

Even if it didn't spoil, it would show evidence of dehydration at the very least.

[Robb]

23. The meat does appear marginally smaller.

I'm of two minds on this, I could believe it's real or a hoax.

On the plus side, it doesn't fucking matter one bit. :D

[Hannah Bell]

21. the starting point of this story was a blogger who was a herbalife distributor.

she called herself a "nutritionist."

bullshit then, bullshit now.

[arcadian]

22. Isn't herbalife Scamway related?

[wolfgangmo]

28. so your argument is ...

If I may sum up; that because of what she is/was, that her post has no validity.

Whatever happened to looking at the evidence (yes I know it is anecdotal, but it is still illustrative of what everyone knows - that McCrap is not food, it just plays food on the TV)?

[Hannah Bell]

45. "evidence" = a herbalife distributor posts a picture on the internets.

lol.

do the experiment at home if you want evidence. oh, & be sure it's in a location with enough humidity for bacteria to thrive, as most foods don't mold or rot without moisture. they just dry out.

[HopeHoops]

24. Those start OUT spoiled! You're guilty of child abuse if you feed that shit to a kid.

:puke:

[Rage Inc.]

25. I'm hatin' it!

:puke:

[Catshrink]

31. Twinkies are immortal

They are some experiments on Twinkies from Rice University - they checked the response to gravity, radiation, solubility, etc.

http://www.twinkiesproject.com /

And if that isn't enough, check out the Peeps experiments. Be sure to see the "Medical Miracle" link on the right.

http://www.peepresearch.org /

[4lbs]

41. That reminds me of a scene from a movie where these two guys were talking about Twinkies.

I think they were on a boat or a ferry, or at least a pier. I remember there were ocean waves in the background.

One guy put a twinkie on a rail and said that you could come back 20 years from now, and the railing would be disintegrating from rust and corrosion, but the Twinkie would be still there, almost perfect.

[uppityperson]

34. It would have dehydrated. I guess she had no flies in her house either

Kids need to eat better foods, but reports like this don't help make a rational argument.

Huh, wonder if I'll get jumped on today for asking for rationality rather than going for emotionality. There is enough in reality to get upset at, we don't need manipulative crap trying for more.

[Bolo Boffin]

35. It did. She lives in Arizona. n/t

[uppityperson]

43. And the ants or roachs didn't get it? She was lucky.

[Codeine]

39. We don't do rational here very often.

I'm just waiting for someone to say it was HFCS that kept it in a mummy-like state for so long. :evilgrin:

[ladywnch]

36. true. and hospital/school jello left on the window sill for several days

did NOT melt. didn't even sweat. how do they do that?!

[Codeine]

38. This is nonsense.

Posting obvious bullshit like this should be grounds for the Banhammer.

OTOH, only imbeciles would feed their children junk like that as more than a very-occasional treat anyway. I can count the number of times that we (my sister and I, as children) got McDonald's on my fingers, and still have a few left over.

[4lbs]

40. I once ate a 5 year old Snickers bar that I left in a backback I hadn't used for long while.

When I opened up the backpack some years later to use it again, the bar fell out. Yes the candy was still wrapped, and tasted pretty good. I didn't get sick either.

[Hannah Bell]

46. sugar & salt = preservatives.

[Odin2005]

44. Looks like a hoax to me.