In 2009, McDonald's closed all three of their restaurants in Iceland. One of the last customers, Hjörtur Smárason, purchased a Big Mac and fries. He had heard that the food never decomposes so he put it on a shelf in his garage as an experiment, and eventually forgot about it. Ten years ago, he found the bag with the food inside. Now it's an historical artifact of the country's fast food past. From Atlas Obscura:
Smárason says that he was reluctant to open the bag at the time, remembering the decomposed sandwich that once spent an entire summer at the bottom of his child's school backpack. But upon opening the sack, "it looked like I bought it just 15 minutes earlier," he says. "And the same with the fries, it all looked almost new. Just turned cold on the way home."
It wasn't long before Smárason realized what a treasure he had. "This was now like a historical artifact that belonged to Iceland," proclaims Smárason. "The last McDonald's burger in Iceland. And what do you do with a historical artifact? You put it in a museum." The meal spent a year at the National Museum of Iceland before the institution worried that it would decompose under their care. (In 2020, McDonald's put out a statement claiming that their burgers don't seem to decompose due to a lack of moisture, instead of some nefarious preservative.) Smárason then gave it to the Bus Hostel Reykjavik, where the meal spent years on display. Now, it resides at another hostel, the Snotra House, in southern Iceland.
Unfortunately, the livestream of the Big Mac is currently down.
