No. 87 - Chicken Nuggets

I was watching an episode of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. This is the show where Jamie attempts to change the eating habits of the residents of Huntington, West Virginia, the most unhealthy city in America.

In this episode he showed some kids how chicken nuggets are made. He took a whole chicken and cut off the nice meaty breasts. Then be cut off the thighs, legs and wings. What was left was a chicken carcass. He took a heavy butcher's knife and cut the bony shell into 4 sections and dump them into a food processor along with some chicken skin and ground it all up. He dumped the meat-bone-skin-bits mixture into a strainer to squeeze through the soft stuff catching the hard stuff. The mush that made it through the strainer was then combined with other stuff to add flavor and hold the mush together and then bread crumbs were added. (You can watch this during the first 8 minutes of the episode here.)

Before showing this pretty gross display, Jamie said, "Thankfully chicken nuggets in this country are not made this way."

I wondered how chicken nuggets, or more specifically Chicken McNuggets, are made.

I found this in the wikipedia entry for Chicken McNuggets:

The 2004 documentary Super Size Me states that the McDonald's Chicken McNuggets, originally made from old chickens no longer able to lay eggs, are now made from chickens with unusually large breasts. These chickens are stripped down to the bone, and then "ground up" into a chicken mash then combined with a variety of stabilizers and preservatives, pressed into familiar shapes, breaded and deep fried, freeze dried, and then shipped to a McDonald's near you.

Why does that sound a lot like what Jamie Oliver showed?

Chicken McNuggets were introduced in 1980 in test markets and in 1983 nationwide.