Here's What A Year-Old McDonald's Meal Really Tastes Like

Yes, we've seen stomach-turning McDonald's challenges before. Who can forget Morgan Spurlock's commitment to eating meals solely from the fast-food giant over 30 days for his 2004 documentary Super Size Me? More recently, McDonald's made headlines again after a man in Utah produced a 20-year-old burger that, he claimed, hadn't decomposed, prompting a response from a McDonald's rep, who said, "...in order to decompose, you need certain conditions — specifically, moisture" (via Fox News). 

Well, one brave lad, Matt Nadin from Barnsley, England, learned that truth firsthand when he recently dug up a Big Mac meal that had been buried in his friend Andy Thompson's backyard for 14 months to complete what he called the McDonald's 365 Challenge (via The Sun).

Nadin and Thompson host the Finders Beepers History Seekers channel on YouTube, where they occasionally explore old haunts with metal detectors. This time, they dug up a different "treasure" for their sister channel, Beeper Beef, taping the process of picking up a McDonald's meal (a Big Mac, fries, and chocolate milkshake) in November 2018, then burying the meal in a segmented plastic container and digging it out of the garden on January 29, 2020, for a recent video. The video shows rain coming down on the meal before it got laid to rest — no doubt contributing to the moldy mess that emerged, which the duo brought back down to the McDonald's where it was purchased for queasy consumption.

Upon unearthing the way-past-its-prime McDonald's meal, Nadin observed the fries had "gone green" and the chocolate milkshake looked "like dirt." On top of that, he bristled at the lettuce's wilted, browning condition: "The salad don't look great." 

Back at Mickey D's, he struggled to eat the "freezing cold" burger and the "disgusting" chips, noting about the Big Mac, "There's a funny taste to it. The meat no longer feels like meat in my mouth. [It's] harder. The buns are soft. The lettuce tastes like gone-off lettuce." Moving on to the fries, he said, "I can't compare it to anything," but actions spoke louder than words as he gagged on their bone-dry texture, adding, "I can't get enough moisture in my mouth to get it down." 

Finally, who knows what underground science happened to the milkshake over a year-plus, but after gulping some down, he simply said, "It's fizzy. Never had a fizzy milkshake before!" 

Still, put next to a new order for comparison, he noted that the two burgers barely looked any different — not sure if that's an insult to the freshly cooked version, or a compliment to the lasting power of the original.