The Bizarre White Castle Experiment That Involved One Person And A 13-Week Burger Marathon

If someone challenged you to subsist only on White Castle for some period of time, how long do you think you'd last? Some of us, we're sure, wouldn't even be able to make it a whole day. Even those of us who like White Castle, with its assortment of steamed sliders and crinkle-cut fries, would get pretty sick of it after a few days. Well, be grateful that you're not Bernard Flesche, a University of Minnesota medical school student who, as part of an experiment conducted by the founders of White Castle back in the 1930s, subsisted on nothing but White Castle hamburgers (and water) for 13 weeks.

Why on earth did this experiment happen? Mostly to prove a point about ground beef. You see, when White Castle first opened in the 1920s, ground beef had a bad reputation — it was seen as the ground-up remnants of the least appetizing parts of the steer, and the horrifying conditions of meatpacking plants exposed by Upton Sinclair in "The Jungle" (leading to the founding of the FDA) didn't help its image, either. This experiment, then, was a sort of reverse "Super Size Me": It sought to prove that you could eat as many hamburgers as you like without it doing you a bit of harm. (Aside from the dangers to your cardiovascular health posed by red meat, but doctors wouldn't figure that out for another few decades.)

White Castle founders J. Walter Anderson and Billy Ingram looked for a suitable institution to conduct their experiment, and landed on the University of Minnesota, where renowned biochemist Jesse McClendon agreed to help them out. Soon enough, they found their test subject, the aforementioned Bernard Flesche, who they put on a strict diet of White Castle hamburgers and nothing else in an attempt to convince skeptical mothers that their children could eat their wares.

As you can imagine, this quickly stopped being fun. Most of us will get sick of even our favorite foods if we eat them too regularly, and that's with a whole day's worth of other meals. Flesche, on the other hand, could only eat slider after slider, day after day, for over three months. Admirably, he stuck to his mission, even though his sister tried to sneak him some vegetables. (Man, imagine having vegetables be your cheat food.) White Castle got what they wanted out of the experiment: Flesche suffered no ill effects from his diet, and White Castle would go on to become the quintessential American fast food restaurant before McDonald's. Flesche, for his part, went on to practice medicine until his death in his late 50s, and thoroughly lost his appetite for hamburgers.