Iceland honors a 12-year-old Big Mac as the important historical artifact it so clearly is
A look at how one forgotten Big Mac became a treasured piece of Icelandic history
Most Big Macs are disposable things, eaten late at night in an attempt to soak up the liquor sloshing around in someone’s stomach or scarfed thoughtlessly in a car’s driver seat. One Big Mac in Iceland, though, is different. This Big Mac Of Big Macs is revered for its age and wisdom, honored as an artifact of a bygone time.
Atlas Obscura tells the story of a 12-year-old Big Mac in Iceland that belonged to a man named Hjörtur Smárason before traveling the country as a piece of history. He had bought the sandwich in 2009 on the day before McDonald’s trio of Icelandic restaurants closed for good due to the 2008 financial crisis and the increased price of ingredient imports. After putting his order, which included the Big Mac and fries, in a bag and forgetting about it, Smárason rediscovered the food while moving houses in 2012.
He expected to find something horrible in the McDonald’s bag but when he opened it he discovered that “it looked like I bought it just 15 minutes earlier. And the same with the fries, it all looked almost new.” (It’s helpful, at this point in the story, not to think too much about what it is about McDonald’s food that makes this possible. The official story is that the fries and burger just never became moist enough to begin decomposing.)
Since McDonald’s was now gone from his country, Smárason understood that he possessed “a historical artifact that belonged to Iceland.”