Ancient Web: CoffeeBeer Kept a 1997 Cheeseburger Email Chain

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A story about a student keeping a cheeseburger in a drawer for a year does not sound like the beginning of a cosmological theory. In June 1997, JC Mitchell and a correspondent called Mistah Rick proved otherwise.

Read The Cheeseburger Letters.

The preserved chain starts on June 20, 1997, when Mitchell forwards a short odd-news item about an Australian student's apparently undecayed fast-food purchase. Minutes later his friend is wondering whether such a burger could remain intact for twenty years and whether anyone should build a live webcam of its deterioration.

The jokes gather momentum. They speculate about dropping old burgers from skyscrapers, opening a restaurant that recycles nuclear waste into 'Plutoburgers,' and launching petrified cheeseburgers into the solar system. By June 23 the imagined objects are causing craters on Earth and seeding entire alien civilizations.

A correspondence turned into a webpage

The emails retain their TO, FROM, DATE, and time fields. That structure is the point. A friend responds to another friend's deliberately ludicrous idea; the next message accepts the premise and makes it even less sensible. Readers can see a joke being improvised rather than presented as an already polished essay.

One exchange moves into a 1997 newspaper item about a McDonald's opening in Kyiv, then spins off toward the 'Golden Arches' theory of international conflict and the invention of fictional cheeseburger particles. The letters do not constitute genuine scientific claims or a serious account of food safety.

Mitchell's larger CoffeeBeer homepage links the exchange beside pages about coffee, British pubs, Marmite, whisky, writing, and travel. A Pint Pleasures section advertises monthly pub and beer commentary by a Seattleite living in the UK. The domain is still maintained, so the 1997 email dates should not be mistaken for the exact founding date of today's website.

This little archive illustrates a form of Internet culture that was easy to lose: privately exchanged messages later published as an amusing document, long before every conversation had to begin inside a public platform.

Read the complete dated exchange and explore the surrounding personal homepage.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.