The Big Mac is a type of hamburger sold since 1958 by the McDonald's chain of fast food restaurants. It was apparently inspired by a similar doubledecker hamburger sold by the Big Boy chain since 1936.

According to a famous advertising jingle, it consists of "two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun." However, the most distinctive feature is a middle layer of bread that is used to stablize the contents of the hamburger to prevent spillage.

The Big Mac is known worldwide. The Economist has used it, only half jokingly, as a reference point to determine the cost of living in different countries — the Big Mac index — as it is so widely available and the product largely comparable across markets.

In 2005 McDonald's began offering rewards to hip-hop artists who namechecked the Big Mac in their music, giving $5 US to the artist for every time a song mentioning the hamburger was played on the radio. [1]

In addition to being the name of a burger, Big Mac is also the name of a McDonaldland character. Dressed as a constable and sporting a large Big Mac as a head, he was the main source of law and order in McDonaldland, spending most of his time chasing the Hamburglar.

Having consumed 20,000 Big Macs, Don Gorske is possibly the world's top Big Mac eater.

See also

• McDonald's TV campaigns and slogans

External links

• Official product information
• The Big Mac Index

Disambiguation

• The Big Mac is a supercomputer created in 2003 by Virginia Tech. See Big Mac (supercomputer).
• The term Big Mac was used as an internal codename of the early Apple Macintosh computer with 512K of RAM, as opposed to the original model's 128K.
• The term Big Mac is a name given to an ethernet adapter used in Sun Microsystems machines. The interface name is shown as be when one views the interfaces via the ifconfig command. See also Happy Meal.