McNuggets will now have fewer than 32 ingredients
The fast-food phenomenon has been great for McDonald’s, bad for chickens, and ‘pink goop’ for diners
When a company’s food product gets linked in the public’s mind to an ingredient dubbed “pink goop,” it’s probably time to rethink that product’s formula. Or, at least, be more transparent about it.
McDonald’s this week, according to Crain’s, is planning to clean up the recipe for its beloved Chicken McNuggets after years of rumoring over their contents. Instead of the current 32 ingredients, the new “cleaner” McNuggets could have fewer, the company says, and those ingredients will be more recognizable, like lemon juice and rice starch, rather than multisyllabic emulsifiers and stabilizing agents.
Right or wrong, when a product is made out of animals, yet contains no bones and bears no resemblance to a living creature, it invites speculation. You can’t blame people for wondering what’s inside.
But, really, McDonald’s can only tinker so much. McNuggets are a feat of food engineering — marvels, really, of efficient processing and culinary disguise that have — for good or for ill — profoundly influenced the way Americans eat and farm.
In the late 1970’s, as government advisers began warning of the perils of saturated fat, McDonald’s execs started hunting around for menu items beyond red meat that might tempt the public. In 1979 the company’s CEO Fred Turner said he wanted a food that people could eat while driving, and wouldn’t compete, at least overtly, with Kentucky Fried Chicken or other chicken chains. That meant no bones.
After six months of testing, McDonald’s had its product: “small pieces of reconstituted chicken, held together by stabilizers, breaded, deep fried, frozen…. shipped to the outlet, then reheated,” according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.
McDonald’s first launched the McNugget in test markets in 1980, then introduced them to the wider public the following year. They were an immediate smash hit — a winning play that proved McDonald’s could do more than just burgers.
Their success meant that McDonald’s — and its copycats in the rapidly growing “chicken tenders” business — needed a lot more chicken. They began contracting with chicken giants, like Perdue and Tyson, to ensure a steady supply. And, as with other segments of the meat industry, chicken processing eventually got more and more consolidated. The big guys took over the little guys, and before long, a handful of major corporations controlled the country’s chicken production.
In 1980, most of the chicken sold in the US was whole chicken. After the chicken McNugget, the predominant form of chicken became processed chicken and chicken parts. Chicken consumption, already on the rise, shot up even further. The US became a nation of chicken eaters, largely thanks to cheap, “comminuted” chicken parts pressed into the shape of dinosaurs and stars.
The phenomenon, many contend, spelled bad things for chicken producers — and even worse things for chickens themselves.
The big processors contracted with chicken farmers, who were under the gun to produce more birds, more cheaply. Production soared.
The birds, crowded together in cages and poultry barns, were bred to gain weight faster. Reports of chickens so large-breasted they can’t stand or with broken legs, living in horrific, diseased conditions started to surface. When the industry, decades later, began pushing for faster processing to keep up with demand, government data revealed that as many as a million chickens were getting accidentally boiled alive in slaughterhouses each year.
All the consumer attention on the chicken industry — and the food industry more broadly — meant the companies had to start listening. Consumers have been increasingly more concerned about the provenance of their food, prompting responses from the food industry and regulators. Several chicken producers, including Tyson and Perdue, have said they’ll curb the use of growth-promoting antibiotics, for example. McDonald’s last year said it would stop buying chicken produced with antibiotics used in humans. Egg producers have committed to “cage-free” production. Other livestock producers have declared their intentions toward better animal welfare.
This list goes on — all because the marketplace demanded it.
But the marketplace has also shown its continued demand for breaded chicken patties shaped like planets and extinct species. Or in McDonald’s case, the four “B’s” — balls, bells, boots and bowties. And no matter what the company reveals to the public about the ingredients of its McNuggets, they will, by design, never, ever truly resemble chicken.
Why? Because that’s how McDonald’s makes a lot of money.
