Where's the Chicken in My Nuggets?
67Nugget Buddy
Where's the Chicken?
I have two children, a six year old boy and a two year old boy. Whenever we go out to eat, I ask them where they would like to go. There is always an overwhelming and unison response of "donalds" from my backseat. I was exactly the same as a kid, having heard stories from my grandparents at my inane ability to pick out golden arches from miles away. I usually give in, because at least I know they will eat something.
On a recent trip, we all got chicken nuggets with a lovely variety of dipping sauces. We took them home and we all had our dinner. I sat at the table after eating a few thinking, "these taste absolutely nothing like chicken, or anything appetizing". I then happened to glance at the bag, and it had one of their oh-so-popular marketing campaigns all over it. This one said in large bold letters, "Our Secret." Well, I certainly would like to know the secret about these "chicken" nuggets. So I read on, to discover that they use "only farm fresh produce, 100% beef... blah, blah, blah."
I thought that there is no way. I mean aren't all vegetables grown in a "farm" of some sort? 100% beef in comparison to what, exactly? So I decided to do some research. What I found was startling, and because of the results I will never eat at McDonalds again, no matter how much my boys beg.
Chicken nuggets are comprised of the following ingredients (taken from the McDonalds website):
White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning (autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (botanical source), safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid, rosemary), sodium phosphates, seasoning (canola oil, mono- and diglycerides, extractives of rosemary). Battered and breaded with: water, enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, food starch-modified, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, whey, corn starch. Prepared in vegetable oil ((may contain one of the following: Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness), dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent).
So, there IS chicken in them. Weird. I did research the ingredients themselves, and found that most were modified natural foods, kind of a relief. However, a lot of the ingredients are startling. Two are appalling.
For one, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen. It's suspected to cause cancer. That's bad. It's a powder that they add to the fryers as an anti-foaming ingredient. I know this because I used to work there a long time ago. The most significantly problematic of all these ingredients is TBHQ or teritrary butylhydroquinone. A mouth full, I'm sure you'll agree. This is an antioxidant derived from petroleum, the same petroleum that we fuel our cars with. It's also a close relative in molecular composition to butane, better known as light fluid. Never ate the stuff myself, but it smells pretty bad. It seems the FDA allows no more than 0.02% of the TBHQ oil in a food. What a relief! Right. The side effects of ingesting even that much is nausea and vomiting, tinitis (ringing of the ears), delirium, a sense of suffocation and collapse. Ingesting 5g of this material is deadly.
So, just skip the chicken nuggets, right? Wrong. TBHQ is also something that is added to the fryers, so anything that they fry also contains the stuff. French fries, almost all chicken products, fish, hash browns... all contaminated with this sludge derived antioxidant.
Another horrifying fact, Happy Meals were created in 1979, also the year I was born. Chicken nuggets were created in 1983, when I was four. So essentially, I've been ingesting this crap for, literally, my whole life.
I don't know about you, but my children nor I will never eat at McDonalds again. But it makes you wonder what's in all the rest of the stuff they make. I swear there has to be crack in their sweet tea, because I just can't get enough, but I digress...
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Zach Oaster says:
4 months ago
It is most certainly difficult these days for normal people living on a normal budget to eat food that is both health conscious and creation conscious.
I was at Horrocks Saturday doing my usual farm produce shopping and noticed that the grass-fed free-range organic whole chickens were in the neighborhood of $15/each. Of course I was like "OMG that is expensive!"... but then I caught myself and realized, "Oh yeah, that is probably what it REALLY COSTS to pay for a chicken that wasn't commercially farmed in a sustainable way."
Makes you wonder how they cut costs to make it possible to sell a whole chicken for $3-$4 at the supermarket... until you go to YouTube and see the videos of these super-commercial farms grinding up 50% of the chicks... yes, grinding them alive... because the males don't grow fast enough to be "profitable." ...or the egg chickens locked in cages mangy as hell (the dead ones only cleaned out once or twice a week), but producing eggs at pennies a dozen!
We're so disconnected from our food as a civilization, that many of us are not even aware on the most basic level what is in our food, or how it was grown, killed, or prepared.
On the other hand, the ability to buy produce and meat that was grown on a family farm using sustainable practices is still only the territory of the upper middle class or the wealthy. Poor, working poor families, and normal middle-class families couldn't possibly (more than) double their grocery bill to afford the good stuff... so instead they are forced to serve their kids food that might be covertly harming them... or at the least, harming animals and the land in the name of cheap meat and veg.
It is exactly the same problem our society faces in respect to clothing. Normal middle-class families on down to the poor cannot afford to buy hand-made american-made garments... just too expensive... so we're "forced" to go to places like Wal*Mart and Target to buy our clothes. Of course, those companies sell cheap stuff because their producers used child (slave) labor in countries like China. In that case, we're not even talking about animals... this time it is people!
...but I would surely lose my job if I only wore 2 or 3 hand-made looking outfits over and over... and so would most of us... because that is all I would be able to afford if I was buying the clothes from some ethical source.
Suffice to say (without turning this into a 3 page long diatribe) it is hard to justify the human cost of our consumerist culture. It is hard stomach the ethical implications of pulling into the McDonalds drive-thru or the parking lot of a Wal*Mart.
I think if we really take seriously our role as the image-bearers of God in the world, and think "how would God treat his beautiful creation?" ...it is likely that we wouldn't answer that by saying "eh, throw half of it in a meat grinder while still alive, and enslave the other half to make some cheap shoes!"