Happy Birthday Big Mac

Aug. 24, 2007 — -- For Don Gotske, Friday is a very special day.

It is, after all, the 40th birthday of his favorite food: McDonald's Big Mac.

Gotske, who said he ate his first Big Mac on May 17, 1972, in Fond Du Lac, Wis., said that he still eats two Big Macs every day.

Today he will eat his 21,292nd Big Mac.

"Every Big Mac I eat is like the first one I ever ate," Gotske told ABCNEWS.com.

And Gotske certainly isn't the only one who adores Big Macs. Cities across the country are trying to ban unhealthy foods. It's all rather fine when you're talking about trans fats or pesticide-laden vegetables, but don't even try going near the Big Mac. The burger is sold in more the 13,700 McDonald's restaurants in the United States and in more than 100 countries worldwide. In the United States alone, 560 million Big Macs are sold each year, said Danya Proud, a McDonald's spokeswoman.

The Big Mac was first introduced in 1972, when a McDonald's franchise owner in Pennsylvania recommended that the company develop a burger with two beef patties, instead of just one, and overeating became a lot easier.

The double-decker caught on quickly, but not without the help of a clever marketing slogan that is still recited by consumers more than four decades later.

"Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun," reads the jingle, which premiered in a 1975 McDonald's commercial where average people were asked to recite the tongue-twisting slogan as quickly as possible.

In Morgan Spurlock's 2004 documentary "Super Size Me," which chronicled what it was like to exist solely on food from McDonald's for 30 days, Spurlock asked women to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

While the women were unable to remember the words of the pledge, they had no trouble reciting the Big Mac jingle.

Forty years later, very little about the Big Mac itself has changed -- other than the packaging, and the massive portions consumed alongside the famous sandwich.