chicken nugget happy meal
An alarming photograph of a McDonald's chicken McNuggets Happy Meal left to sit unrefrigerated and untouched for six years recently went viral on social media.

"It's been 6 years since I bought this 'Happy Meal' at McDonald's," Jennifer Lovdahl posted on Facebook. "It's been sitting in our office this whole time and has not rotted, molded, or decomposed at all!!! It smells only of cardboard."

Lovdahl's two photos show the meal's original box with the receipt attached — which, with its grease marks, appears to be in worse shape than the meal's four-piece chicken nuggets and fries shown in the second photo.

"We did this experiment to show our patients how unhealthy this 'food' is. Especially for our growing children!!" she explained in the post. "There are so many chemicals in this food! Choose real food! Apples, bananas, carrots, celery..... those are the real fast food."

Lovdahl, who owns and operates Balanced Care Chiropractic, hoped her post would open people's eyes; and though it has been shared hundreds of thousands of times, it's questionable whether people will be deterred by what her experiment proves — especially considering how the dirt-cheap prices of such 'food' often drive its sales.


Comment: That's how they getcha: Low cost and convenience. Cheap and easy always comes with a price.


In the meantime, however, McDonald's Japanese operations reported a net loss of ¥34.704 billion — approximately $303 million — after a number of food safety control scandals, as NPR reported.

In fact, the same sort of chicken nuggets featured in Lovdahl's photos had been the subject of video footage from a Chinese supplier in 2014. Footage showed workers mishandling nuggets and using out-of-date meat. Then, in 2015 — after switching from the Chinese supplier to one in Thailand — foreign objects were reportedly discovered inside McDonald's chicken nuggets in Japan on more than one occasion.

McDonald's sales dropped around 15 percent between 2014 and 2015 for its Japanese sector, which as of 2015 was its "largest international affiliate."

These everlasting McNuggets represent the latest fiasco in a long line of PR disasters for the fast food giant, which have included viral stories of inhumanely farmed chickens, breakfast burritos with over 100 ingredients, fries with 19 ingredients, a newly launched "healthy" kale salad that has more calories than a Double Big Mac, and most recently, a lawsuit claiming McDonald's new mozzarella sticks aren't made with real mozzarella.