Chicken nuggets wereinventedin a laboratory at Cornell University in New York by food scientist Robert C. Baker in the 1960s. In 2018, Americans reportedly ate2,3 mlnof them, whileone in threeThe British eat them regularly. They have beenpromotedas a good protein source for picky eaters. But they are also seen as the archetypal cheap processed food, and are haunted by the question of what is actually in them.
IS THE CHICKEN NUGGET REAL CHICKEN?
There is no clear answer to this question. Of course, chicken nuggets are not just meat, breadcrumbs and other ingredients are also added for taste and texture. But the amount of chicken in them varies depending on which company made them, and they may not contain the parts of chicken you'd expect – more on that below.
WHAT'S IN CHICKEN NUGGETS?
Some nuggets use almost no chicken meat at all. Ainspectiontitled "Autopsy of Chicken Nuggets Reads 'Chicken Little'", published in 2013, analyzed the composition of chicken nuggets from two American fast food restaurants and found that they contained fat, bone, nerves and connective tissue. “Chicken nuggets are usually fatty,” the researchers concluded, “and their name is a misnomer.”
Image from "Opsy of Chicken Nuggets Reads 'Chicken Little'" shows a chicken nugget that is 50% skeletal muscle, with the rest being mostly fat, with some blood vessels and nerves.
McDonald's McNuggets are made with chicken breast meatmixedwith herbs and chicken skin. They also contain potassium chloride, a synthetic salt additive, water, glucose syrup and vegetable oils, among other things. The breading is made with corn and wheat flour. A few fast food nuggetscontains other additivessuch as food coloring.
Nuggets sold in supermarkets may have the same composition as those from a fast food chain, such as Bird's Eye Chicken Shop Battered Chicken Nuggets. They are made from 51 percent chicken breast, while the remaining 49 percent consists of the ingredients in the dough, including flour, vegetable oil and raising agents. Some brands are clearly more uncertain about which part of the animal the meat comes from and only list 'chicken' as the main ingredient. You have to wonder what they're not telling us.
HOW ARE CHICKEN NUGGETS MADE?
Confinement of chickens in overcrowded stables
You don't get billions of nuggets every year without lots of chickens being bred, raised and slaughtered. The majority of birds captured in this system are raised on industrial farms. They arrive there at one day old after being born in an industrial hatchery. During their short lives, they never see daylight, feel the ground beneath their feet, or breathe fresh air. The barns are generally bare and do not provide any source of enrichment for the chickens. For intelligent birds, this is nothing short of cruelty.
Around25.000Birds are kept together in each house, but in some cases there can be as many as 50,000, with 19 birds per square meter of floor space – which is slightly larger than the average flat-screen TV. This arrangement makes it difficult for the chickens to move properly and can cause stress,weakeningthe immune system of the chickens.
In the European Union, waste is in the shedthen cleaned upevery flock has been sent to slaughter, meaning the chickens live their entire lives on their own waste. But worryingly, this is the best-case scenario, and elsewhere several flocks may have to live and breathe in the stench and pathogens of previous flocks' nests. No wonder ill health and disease are rampant.
The reality of these chicks' lives has been captured on several occasions by undercover investigators, including VFC'slatest presentationof a farm that was featured in a KFC advertisem*nt. The VFC footage showed dead, dying and crippled chickens suffering. Chickenshas been filmedcannot reach the water bowls that are set too high and suffers from burns from the ammonia in the urine and the feces that soak the floor. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of birds from each house do not survive the conditions and die before they are six weeks old.
GIVE CHICKENS ANTIBIOTICS
Crowded, stressful conditions make chickens more susceptible to disease, so they are given antibiotics to treat and prevent disease. But this reckless overuse makes antibiotics less effective when it comes to treating human diseases.
In response to growing concerns about antimicrobial resistance and the role it playstowerAs a player, some countries are trying to reduce the amount of antibiotics used on farms. But globally, antibiotic use in chicken farming – and across livestock farming as a whole – remains worryingly high, contributing to a crisis of antibiotic resistance as bacteria adapt to the drugs.StayMany antibiotics have been found in chicken meat worldwide.
Another reason why antibiotics are used in chicken farming is to promote growth. Its use as a growth promoter is banned in the EU, UK and US, but is still practiced elsewhere. Growth promotion means greater profits, and this is a strong incentive for farmers to continue using antibiotics, even under the guise of disease prevention. Of course, if farmers really wanted to prevent disease, they wouldn't lock tens of thousands of stressed, immunocompromised birds together in a filthy barn.
REMOVAL OF WEAK CHICKS
Chicks can be thrown away because they are weak or sick before they even get to the farm, with newborn chicks being put on a conveyor belt in hatcheries andthe unwantedthrown in the trash. Of those who come to the farm, approxbrand pctdie or are killed due to illness and injury on industrial farms, while millions more are 'rejected' every year from slaughterhouses in England and Wales due to illness and infirmity. So much death, even before we think about the birds whose bodies are being eaten.
TRANSPORT
Captive gangs pick up the chicks manually - grabbing them by the legs and sometimes their wings or necks - or they are picked up mechanically and then the frightened birds are pushed into crates. These boxes are then stacked on trucks for the long journey to the slaughterhouse. More than a million chickensdie during transportEvery year, hundreds of thousands of people in Britain arrive at slaughterhouses with cuts and bruises, indicative of rough treatment and the unsafe way they are loaded onto trucks and transported. In Britain there is very little protection for animals during transport. It is not even illegal to transport them during extreme weather conditions such as heat waves.
SLAUGHTER
There are more and more chickens in Britainkilled by gas. They remain in the boxes they were transported in and are placed in a gas chamber where they are killed with carbon dioxide or other gases. This at least eliminates handling of the chickens during slaughter, but a painless death is far from guaranteed. While the gases should render the chickens unconscious, improper concentrations can cause asphyxiation and severe suffering.
The other common method involves hanging conscious chickens upside down by their legs from metal brackets on a moving conveyor belt. Imagine being chained up by sore or broken legs – a common injury in farmed chickens. The birds are then dragged through an electrified water bath designed to stun them before the conveyor belt moves them along and their throats are slit by a machine. Stunning is not effective in all cases, which is why many birds reach for the knife completely consciously.
Finally, their bodies are dropped into boiling water to loosen their feathers and prepare them for slaughter.
BONING AND GRINDING
There are machines that do the job of removing the bones from the chickens' bodies and pulling their bodies apart. The pieces used for nuggets are ground and mixed with other ingredients, such as spices, to make a uniform paste.
FORMS AND BRIDES
The meat paste is mechanically formed, coated in a batter and fried. McDonald's nuggets are only partially fried to allow the batter to set, leaving the chicken raw during the final frying process in restaurant kitchens.
ARE THE CHICKEN NUGGETS HEALTHY?
They are definitely not healthy foods!
CHICKEN NUGGETS NUTRITION FACTS
The nutritional profile of chicken nuggets varies depending on what's in them. At worst, as the "Chicken Nuggets Autopsy" study shows, they can be predominantly fatty and have little nutritional value. Some also contain a lot of salt and sugar. There is frequent consumption of fried foodslinked tocoronary diseases, heart failure, diabetes and high blood pressure.
THE TRUTH ABOUT CHICKEN NUGGETS
ANIMALS SUFFER
Billions of chickens suffer short, stressful, desperate lives and inhumane deaths. Being chickensskilled, curious, social animals, with great personalities and love for life. When they are locked up in factory sheds, they have virtually no chance to behave naturally or express their own personalities.
Due to the rapid growth for which they were specially bred on modern farms, heart disease and lameness are all too common. By the end of their short lives, many can no longer stand, let alone move freely, not that they can even go anywhere.
ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION
The boom in chicken farming in recent decades has led to enormous environmental problems. Chickens are fedmainly made from soy, where often comes fromdeforested areasof South America. Deforestation releases greenhouse gases, decimates wildlife and makes ecosystems less resilient to climate change. Industrial chicken farming also produces enormous amounts of manure, which is spread on fields as fertilizer and ends up in waterways, causing rivers such asthe Wyepoisonous and deadly to wildlife.
HUMAN HEALTH IMPLICATIONS
Besides the fact that chicken nuggets are potentially quite unhealthy to eat, especially if you consume them regularly, industrial chicken farming poses a risk to the health of all people. In areas where intensive agriculture is concentrated, ammonia emissions can occurexceeds critical limits, deteriorationparticlesthat is dangerous to human health. This affects both farm workers and anyone living near an intensive farm. In addition, intensive chicken farms have contributed to the spread of new speciesbird flu, which can be fatal to humans. There are experts in infectious diseaseswarnedthat a bird flu pandemic in humans “is on the horizon.”
CONCLUSION
Chicken nuggets may have a reputation as an easy snack, but they are the end product of a cruel, unforgiving and polluting system of food production. If the nutritional value is questionable, consumers should ask themselves whether they are worth the cost to animals and the environment. But they don't have to give up the taste of chicken nuggets completely; there are more and more of themcruelty-free vegan versionschoose between it tastes just as good and is kinder to the animals and our shared home.
