After spending over a year in Iceland’s National Museum, the last McDonalds meal sold in the country will now be going on display at the Bus Hostel in Reykjavik. The world-famous fast food chain shut down its Iceland locations in 2009, and even after all this time the last meal sold in the country has still not become rotten or moldy. After the economic collapse, McDonalds failed to keep customers coming back in Iceland, and the company was forced to close their doors in the country. The final day, that McDonalds was open in Iceland, was October 31, 2009, and on that day a man named Hjortur Smarason purchased a meal as a souvenir. Smarason had no intention on actually eating it but wanted to hang onto it out of curiosity, and because he saw it as a piece of history. At its new home at the Bus Hostel in Reykjavik, the burger and fries sit on display in front of a webcam, where people all over the world can watch its extremely slow decomposition.
One of the things I learned while living overseas is that most people outside or our little America-centric bubble actually think about their food. Americans rarely put a lot of thought into what goes into their bodies, but those outside the U.S. on average give far more thought to the quality of what they’re eating. It’s one of the biggest reasons our collective health is so precarious; by and large we eat without consideration- for our health, for where the food came from, for what went into producing the food, for what chemicals may have been added.
Not that the rest of the world has a monopoly on haute cuisine, of course; unhealthy food is hardly an American monopoly. My time in Eastern Europe amply demonstrated that, but American multinationals do have a wonderful way of foisting the absolute worst examples of Frankenfood on the rest of the world.
Hjortur Smarason’s experiment is hardly the first example of the amazing longevity of American fast food, but no matter how often I see similar things, it never becomes less disturbing. No food should remain largely intact after six years. No sane person would attempt to eat the last McDonalds meal in Iceland, of course, but anything that’s avoided normal decomposition after six years is less food than a miracle of modern food science. The sad thing about this is that Americans put this and things just like it into their bodies EVERY SINGLE DAY without so much as a second thought.
Some think me a snob for my refusal to go to McDonalds for anything more than to use the restroom. I recognized long ago that life is too short to eat food that’s little more than a tribute to the genius of modern food science. They can create a Happy Meal that lasts for six years…and counting…but no one knows (or seems to want to know) what the chemicals required to stave off normal organic decomposition will do to a human being. It’s difficult to imagine how regular consumption of such chemicals over the long term can be anything but deleterious to one’s health.
Of course, then there’s the fact that not only doesn’t anyone really know what goes into McDonalds’ food (check out the legendary video about the making of Chicken McNuggets), we don’t know what the long-term effect of regular fast food consumption is.
Erin and I are hoping to go to Iceland on our honeymoon this summer, and, knowing me, I suspect I’ll want to check out the last McDonalds meal in Iceland. It will probably look much the same as it does today…and I’ll be happy to be in a country without a McDonalds franchise anywhere. Sounds like Paradise, doesn’t it?
