Big Mac Maniac, World Record Holder, Eats 30,000th Sandwich

FOND DU LAC, WI — Already the Guiness World Record holder for consumption of McDonald’s signature Big Mac sandwich, everything else for Don Gorske is just special sauce. The Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, man on Friday gobbled down his 30,000 Big Mac since he started eating the iconic sandwiches every day 46 years ago.

Gorske, now 64, first sank his teeth into a Big Mac on May 17, 1972. It was a delight, and he proclaimed the all-beef patty, with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame-seed bun “the best thing I ever ate in my life.”

He got into the Guiness Book of World Records in 2001 for “most Big Macs consumed,” and isn’t too worried about someone shattering his record. Tall and lean, his metabolism works in his favor, and the highest his cholesterol has ever been is 160, which is in the healthy range. But, he told Patch in 2016, anyone who wants to squash his record should check first with a physician.

And, he said wryly in the 2016 interview, it will help would-be Big Mac consumption record breakers to have an obsessive compulsive disorder, which he freely acknowledges.

“Even if someone started now, I’ll be dead before they could match it,” he said at the time. “And they’re going to have to be obsessive compulsive if they’re not going to eat anything else for 44 years.”

The McDonald’s restaurant at the Fox Valley shopping center Fond du Lac, where Gorske ate his first Big Mac, commemorated his 30,000th consumption with a ceremony on Friday.

“Don has a passion for Big Macs like no other,” D.W. Rause, the owner of the Fox Valley franchise on Military Road, said during the ceremony, according to an account in the Fond du Lac Reporter.

“He has been an extremely loyal customer at my Military Road McDonald’s for more than 45 years and I am excited to celebrate him and his new record,” Rause said.

Gorske is not just known at Rause’s restaurant, he has his own booth, and the wall beside it is graced with his picture. It’s a spot more special than the sandwich sauce. Before the McDonald’s restaurant was torn down and replaced with a new building, the exact spot where the booth is located was the parking space where he proposed to his wife, Mary, in 1975.

Gorske’s home is a veritable Big Mac museum, and he told the crowd that assembled to watch him eat his 30,00th sandwich that he keeps meticulous records — including the date McDonald’s made the switch to shredded lettuce, Feb. 10, 1999. He has kept receipts, sandwich wrappers and containers, although he lost about 7,000 Styrofoam containers after a tornado blew off the soffits of his home on June 2, 1990.

“People like to see proof,” he said.

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Gorske knows he’s the target of jokes, but doesn’t mind. As long as his doctors go along with his diet — and they have — he will take whatever others have to give him with a smile, he said.

Gorske has gained much celebrity over the years — besides the Guinness record, he has been featured in the documentaries “Super Size Me” (2004) and “Don Gorske: Mac Daddy” (2005), is the author of “22,477 Big Macs” (2008), and has made multiple appearances on late-night and daytime talk shows. In 2003, Ellen DeGeneres required a cholesterol check. It was 140.

Gorske, who is 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs around 200 pounds, said no one has ever suggested in annual wellness checks that he curb his appetite for Big Macs. His blood pressure is perfect, he told the Fond du Lac newspaper.

“I’m a very active person — hyperactive, you might say,” Gorske, a retired prison guard at Wisconsin’s Waupun maximum security prison, told Patch in 2016. “I use a lot of energy every day, so whatever calories I’m taking in, I’m using up. I do enough hard work and consider myself in pretty good shape.”

In 46 years of eating Big Macs, Gorske has only missed eight days. In 1982, he missed getting a Big Mac because a snowstorm, which Gorske drove through, closed the restaurant on Military Road. He also skipped April 27, 1988, the day his mother died, as an homage to her. She had asked that he not eat a Big Mac on the day she died.

A day without a Big Mac isn't something he wants to happen again, so he keeps spare Big Macs in the freezer, then pops them in the microwave

“I love microwaved Big Macs,” he told Patch in 2016. “No one loves microwaved Big Macs like I do.”

The Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t keep track of most microwaved Big Macs consumed, but Gorske would likely claim that one, too.

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File photo courtesy of Don Gorske