McDonald’s has been taking a fresh beating in the media lately — and for good reason.

Hey guys, crazy news: McDonald’s probably isn’t the most natural or healthy thing to be putting in your body.

Despite this, there’s been a recent media flurry over the company and their food, most notably over how uncooked chicken nuggets look frighteningly like cotton candy and about the resurrection of the almighty McRib, or something.

Having never seen a McRib in the flesh I know little else about it outside of the bare facts: It’s shaped with a mold, it comes with its nutritional information stamped on its side, and it has a cult following. What a bizarre list of qualities.

The newest installment in the recent obsession/revulsion with fast food is the “Happy Meal Project.” A New York photographer, Sally Davies, set an uncovered McDonald’s Happy Meal burger and fries on a shelf in her apartment for six months. Although you may be picturing maggots and mealworms, the reality is far worse. Did the burger ooze toxic mold? Sprout little meat mushrooms? Reanimate, zombie-style? Even more chilling than any of these gross-out scenarios is this: Nothing happened.

The time-lapse tells the story: The food remains completely intact and unchanged, albeit getting a little hard, with no indication of any kind of decomposition, which is probably more or less exactly the same process it goes through in your stomach. This is just one of many reports of food from McDonald’s lasting far longer than it should: This nutritionist has kept a burger since 1996 that, when compared to a burger from 2008, looks more or less identical to its younger sibling.

McDonald’s released a statement in response to the frenzy of news stations, opinion sections, and, of course, websites that picked up the story. It essentially says that their burgers are all-natural honest-to-goodness real food, we promise. Um, sure. The point of the response is to assert that their food can grow mold, making this perhaps the strangest PR moment of all time.

It might seem a little redundant to read criticism of fast food these days. The media has been saying for decades that it has little to no nutritional value, is bad for the environment, and targets children. You would think that the topic would be exhausted by now, right? Unfortunately, in the wake of this breed of new and vile discoveries, it seems there will always be more left to say.