Agreed, it's complete nonsense. Specifically McDonalds is world renowned for having the saltiest fries on the planet, and salt is one of the worlds best preservatives. Frying a food also creates a barrier, the core is heated well beyond the point any microbe is capable of surviving and the natural porosity of the potato is sealed with oil that itself doesn't decompose.

Essentially a McDonalds fry is sanitized on the inside, sealed and coated with enough salt that microbes won't develop on the surface. Salt is used in antimicrobial rinses for mouth infections and is regularly recommended by dentists and doctors for oral issues, so somehow a food preservative known and used for as long as human civilization appears to remember is now synonymous with inediblity?

The burger again is made with highly salted meat and is fried not grilled, which has the same effect as with the fries. Not to mention protein and fat has a much longer decomposition cycle than carbohydrates.

Simply put it isn't anything to do with the edibility of McDonalds foods its a testament to the preservatives used in their main consumables.

I'm sorry, there's hardtack in museum pieces that have been fully unpreserved and stored to the open environment for going on a century that would still be edible and fully digestible - and it's mostly carbohydrates!

The McDonalds food would not still be suitable for human consumption, if it was the author should have eaten it. The bread doesn't look dehydrated it looks like its probably saturated with penicillium, which likely aided in the preservation of the meat it encases. Again the meat is highly discoloured compared to the original photo (golden brown originally to a near black) and has also shrunk considerably (in the original it is to the edges of the bun, in the new photograph it is considerably smaller than a shrunken bun). The fries also are considerably dehydrated, which again only has a preservative effect.

Exceptional use of a combination of preservatives does not mean a food is inedible or non-nutritious.

As for their assertion that flies wouldn't touch it, that is likely a combination of two reasons. The first they attest that it had no odor, which is a key navigation system for flies to reach food (like flies to cow shit isn't a saying because cow shit is odorless, you can smell most from half a field away). The second reason is that insects, especially their larvae, are relatively unprotected against the environment and any becoming in contact with the salt would rapidly have succumbed to salt poisoning.

If they wanted to argue that nothing other than humans are foolish enough to eat these products then they obviously have never left a city. When virtually every city in England has signs posted everywhere against not feeding the pigeons/seagulls isn't because people are feeding them bread or a nice piece of sirloin steak, no they're being fed fries. Go to any coastal city in England and you'll see entire flocks of seagulls fighting over leftover fries from fish and chip shops. These animals wouldn't be thriving to the order of thousands over inedible and indigestible foods.

The author obviously wants to sell a book about nutrition for infants and is trying to do so by arguing that feeding your child a Happy Meal is bad for the health. However a Happy Meal isn't bad for your babies health, it isn't poisonous and it isn't going to kill them, perhaps its not nutritionally the best you can supply for your child but then neither is Kraft Dinner, hot dogs, bacon or any other of a long list of foods that children are routinely given that aren't nutritionally ideal.

Excessive quantities of anything is harmful, including supposedly healthy foods. Polyunsaturated fats whilst apparently heart and brain healthy have been linked with marked increases in skin cancer when not consumed in proper quantities (IE when not from eating actual fish). The holy grail like treatment of polyunsaturated fats led directly to a monumental increase in trans fats when it began being used and advertised as a healthier baking/frying medium when the healthiest is actually saturated fat as it is heat stable. Companies are now returning to saturated fats to remove the trans fats that the misguided health Nazis introduced into our diets as being HEALTHY for us. They swapped a fat with a minor link to heart disease with a fat with a major link with heart disease.

Simply put: Eat the burger or don't fucking buy it.