The Truth About the Chicken Nugget

Have you ever met anyone that hasn’t tried a chicken nugget? Probably not, unless you have traveled to a remote part of this planet where the chicken nugget does not exist. The fact is that most humans ate the chicken nugget, but they don’t have the slightest clue of who created the concept. That “prototype of the nugget”, as stated in “The Father of the Chicken Nugget,” was created by Robert C. Baker. This article was written by Maryn McKenna, “a senior fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.” She explains that “Baker was a professor of poultry science, and a chicken savant.” The foods he and his graduate students created are now known today as “further processed poultry.” The reasoning behind this was completely unselfish, since he never patented any of the poultry recipes. He simply did it to aid poultry farmers in dire need of help. The market for chicken drastically dropped right after World War II and it was a pain to prepare whole chicken meals for housewives because it took too long to cook; they realized it was very inconvenient. Baker developed efficient methods to prepare alternative chicken meals, like “chicken hot dogs, chicken cold cuts, chicken meatballs, and of course, chicken nuggets.”

Nowadays, most people believe that McDonald’s invented the chicken nugget, which was released in 1980. McDonald’s had its own reasons for producing the chicken nugget. “The federal government’s first-ever dietary guidelines urged Americans to eat less fat, and especially less red meat.” After the hamburger sales have plummeted through the roof, McDonald’s decided to conjure a chicken entrée. Through trial and error, they realized that they needed a poultry entree that was not “too labor-intensive to make on an industrial scale.” So they hired “Keystone Foods to mechanize chicken-chopping and fish-stick popularizer Gorton’s to perfect a coating that would cling.” Soon after they developed the Chicken McNuggets, it debuted nationwide and the rest is history, even though Baker came up with the prototype of chicken nuggets first about eighteen years earlier for innovative reasons, along with many other “further processed” poultry. During World War II, “The need to feed troops” had created a demand for more chicken and so poultry farmers then bred massive amounts of chicken. After the war, the demand to produce chicken obviously dropped, meanwhile the ability to produce it stayed consistently high.

Homeowners found it to be “time-consuming or messy, and a bad fit for the schedules of women moving into postwar jobs.” Ultimately, the price for poultry became so low that there was simply no money to be made by poultry farmers at the time. Baker came to the rescue by inventing at least fifty different ways to process chicken into a meal any household can easily prepare. He wrote detailed guidelines for his poultry inventions and submitted them into the “Cornell publication Agricultural Economics Research in April 1963. They were mailed to about 500 companies.” One of inventions was the successful prototype of a chicken nugget that Baker and his student Joseph Marshall had engineered. The tricky dilemma was for the nugget to withstand the blazing heat of the frying oil without falling apart. They realized that by “grinding raw chicken with salt and vinegar to draw out moisture, and then adding a binder of powdered milk and pulverized grains.” They concocted a batter by first “shaping the chicken sticks, freezing them, coating them in an eggy batter and cornflake crumbs, and then freezing them a second time to -10 degrees.”

They finally succeeded in keeping the nugget intact, and decided to sell the nuggets packaged in boxes to multiple supermarkets close by. Other than the small amount of money he made from the supermarkets, he really made nothing else. McDonald’s made billions of dollars with his concept, yet no profits went to Baker. This noble man gave out his poultry ideas liberally, because he was educating, and others took his ideas and patented them. He passed away in 2006 and his family will always remember him as “someone who did his job thoughtfully and with pride, and who could not have predicted the consequences.” The author Maryn McKenna’s persona was slightly biased, and she stayed relatively calm without trying too hard to convince the reader to choose a certain side. She had a slight condescending tone, having nothing pleasant to say about McDonald’s while she was writing the few paragraphs their concept of creating the Chicken McNugget, surely also implying through the whole passage that they didn’t deserve credit for the chicken nugget.

For example, in the third paragraph “Credit, or blame, usually goes to McDonald’s” for “sparking an epidemic of obesity”, the key word is “usually,” it is phrased is sarcastically because we all know McDonald’s takes all the credit for the chicken nugget. Her purpose towards the subject is to give credit where credit is due. She wanted to make the general public aware of Robert C. Baker, “the chicken savant.” That has led me to believe that she respects Baker for his achievements in the development of foods, but also dislikes major fast food corporations for taking full credit for all the hard work Baker has done. You can also see that she does not believe that the chicken nugget is healthy, because from the statement before, “Credit, or blame,” the word “blame” depicts this. She was targeting mostly people who have eaten a chicken nugget and thought “Hey, this is really good. I wonder who created this,” and also pretty much anyone in the world who has tried a chicken nugget. Maryn uses all three of Aristotle’s appeals, which are ethical, logical, and pathetic.

Stated in http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/author/maryn/, “Maryn McKenna is a journalist and author who writes about public health, global health, medicine, and food policy. She is the author of SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010), an investigation of the global epidemic of drug-resistant staph, which received the 2011 Science in Society Award.” This proves she is an authoritative figure in the food and health industry, and with ample research, presents to the audience ethical appeal. Logical appeal is utilized because she uses plenty of sources and citations to back up her story on this subject matter of chicken nuggets.

She uses traces of pathetic appeal often comparing Baker to some sort of savior to the poultry farmers, which could in turn affect the audience emotionally. Also, she mentions that he made zero money from fast food chains selling his concept to trigger an emotion of sympathy. Near the end she even quotes what the family said about him to, once again, stirs the audience’s emotions. Basically, she did an excellent job by not being too condescending towards the larger corporations, but her persona rang clear that Robert C. Baker was a noble and unselfish man who achieved great accomplishments of “further processed poultry” innovation. As a food and health savant herself, she couldn’t help but side with Baker by titling him “The Father of the Chicken Nugget.”

Source:

Maryn McKenna (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/author/maryn/), (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2012/12/robert_c_baker_the_man_who_invented_chicken_nuggets.html), 2012