Chicken nuggets were invented in a laboratory at Cornell University in New York by food scientist Robert C. Baker in the 1960s. In 2018, Americans reportedly ate 2.3 billion of them, while one in three British people eat them regularly. They have been promoted as a good source of protein for kids who are picky eaters. But they have also been seen as the archetypal cheap processed food, and have been dogged by the question of what actually goes into them.
ARE CHICKEN NUGGETS REAL CHICKEN?
There isn’t a straightforward answer to this question. Chicken nuggets are, of course, not just meat, since they also have breading and other ingredients added for flavour and texture. But the amount of chicken in them varies depending on which company made them, and they may not contain the parts of the chicken you would expect — more on that below.
WHAT’S IN CHICKEN NUGGETS?
Some nuggets barely use any chicken meat at all. A study titled “Autopsy of Chicken Nuggets Reads ‘Chicken Little’” published in 2013 analysed the makeup of chicken nuggets from two American fast food outlets and found that they contained fat, bone, nerve, and connective tissue. “Chicken nuggets are mostly fat,” the researchers concluded, “and their name is a misnomer.”
