By now many of you will have read about Dan Gorske from Fond du Lac in Wisconsin. He recently ate his 25,000th Big Mac. Hmmmmm….. only in America as they say. He apparently finishes each one in just sixteen nibbles and retains receipts for many of those Big Macs. Why would you keep receipts? Surely he’s not intending to return them is he? That really would be a shitty thing to do wouldn’t it? Anyway he is 57 and had his first Big Mac 39 years ago. But all this is not stuff I’ve learnt, just stuff I’ve read.
What I have learnt this time around are some of the amazing facts about this eating feat that were printed in the Guardian today. Which I have copied here with some of my own comments added. (click here to read the whole article on the Guardian website)
Bloody hell it's Liam Gallagher, errrr Beady Mac anyone?
•Gorske has consumed 13,500,000 million in US Big Mac calories, compared to 12,250,000 if he’d eaten them all in a UK McDonalds, where the Big Mac comes in at 50 calories lighter. Clearly we’re more aware of a healthy diet in the UK then!
•He has consumed 725,000 grams of fat, or the weight in grease of a large polar bear” No wonder Polar Bears are dying out……they’re used to make burgers!
•At 1135 kilos of beef, Gorske has eaten the equivalent of two and a quarter cows, nose to tail. Yeah right, pull the udder one!
•He’s gulped down 400,000 Big Mac mouthfuls (by his own estimate of 16 bites per burger) Did he chew each mouthful the dietary recommended 30 chews for good digestion? That would make 12,000,000 chews. That as they say is an awful lot of mastication. Is a wonder he hasn’t gone blind, oh no that’s another ‘mas’ word isn’t it!
•It would have taken Sonya Thomas, the International Federation of Competitive Eating‘s record holder (Hamburger category), just three weeks to eat as many burgers. Why does a federation like that actually exist, I feel like I am in a parallel universe
• When he chomped into his first Big Mac in 1972, Americans spent around $3bn a year on fast food. Today that figure is more than $110bn. I presume that is what all Americans spend rather than what each American spends
•He would have to walk more than 90,000 miles to burn off all his Big Macs, the equivalent of more than 10 return trips from his Wisconsin home to the world’s most remote McDonalds in Invercargill, New Zealand. I’d like to see him try and walk from the US to New Zealand!
•His thirty-nine year burger marathon has yielded him just 100 grams of iron – the same as found in 1000 olives. That would have been much cheaper, but then maybe that’s why the Greek economy went down the toilet
•He’s chewed through 6,250 grams of calcium, equivalent to that found in 521 teeth. Presumably not Polar Bear teeth
•His Big Mac intake averages out at 1.76 a day, every day for 14,235 days, meaning he would have hit the 12,848 mark around the time Pittsburgh was temporarily renamed Big Mac, USA for McDonalds’ the 25th in 1992. It is kind of worrying that a town would be prepared to name itself after a burger even for just a day isn’t it?
Do they ever really look like that?
With Just A Hint Of Learning 