Jamie Oliver deconstructs @mcdonalds chicken mcnuggets. | Hacker News Reader

Jamie Oliver deconstructs @mcdonalds chicken mcnuggets.

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11 pointsbjonathan20 comments

What a fatuous and counterproductive argument. Total utilization is a categorically positive goal. Those "ewww!" bits he waved in front of the kids have had culinary uses for centuries --- maybe millenia. Presumably those kids never want to eat dim sum --- or chicken soup --- either.

Want to make an argument against pork with an appeal to children? Show them how a testa is made out of a pig's head:

http://skyfullofbacon.com/blog/?p=91

Ewww! You wouldn't want to eat that!

Here's total utilization of a duck. Gross!

http://ahungerartist.bobdelgrosso.com/2008/09/hunger-arttota...

Why, with minimal effort and the culinary sensibilities of 8-year-olds, I bet we could eliminate the entire pernicious craft of charcuterie from the planet in just months! You do know what sausages are encased in, right...?

If you want to honestly convince kids not to eat McNuggets, show them a factory chicken farm. Of course, don't expect them to eat that nice, expensive, white-meat chicken breast either; no matter what cut you get, supermarket chicken is steeped in sewage and pumped with antibiotics before it gets to the shelves. But that fact isn't convenient to Oliver's presentation.

He has a laudable goal, but he doesn't get to mislead to achieve it.

Cooking and "total utilization" are two different goals. It may be laudable (and very politically correct) to teach kids to "totally utilize" every last bit of food from yesterday's lunch, but it's not fine cooking.

I love leftovers. I love rillettes, and saucisson. I made saucisson once, when I was maybe ten. I watched the pig being killed, and hanged by the feet for the blood to go, and then I helped cut it, and put the meat in the machine and the intestine at the other end. I liked that. No problem. (The problem is you have to wait six months to eat what you just helped make).

But there is a reason why good restaurants serve food from the "noble" parts of animals, and chicken nuggets are found at McDonalds: noble parts taste better. They require less processing -- or no processing: "just the product".

The goal of Jamie Olivier is not to convince kids not to eat nuggets; it's to show how things are made.

This is absolutely not true. In fact, unless you eat a lot of Mexican and know the good places, you have to go to a fine dining restaurant to find the offal bits.

And, of course, in most kitchens, a fully cleaned chicken carcass in no way qualifies as "offal".

Incidentally, and I'm sorry that this isn't going to help your argument (OK, no I'm not): the #1 ingredient in McDonalds Chicken McNuggets? "White boneless chicken". And no other ingredient on the list is an animal protein, either.

The real world is pretty much the exact opposite of the argument you just made. In the real word, the "noble" meat is the cheap, unhealthy stuff, because it's the product of a hellaciously compromised system that is optimized to produce "noble" white meat chicken (from chickens that can't even walk properly because of the way they've been manipulated into bulking up) in huge volume; that meat is medicated from egg to slaughterhouse in antibiotics, raised on bone meal and fecal matter, and then finished off with a sweetened, dextrose-enhanced batter in a deep fryer.

If Jamie Oliver wants to convince kids not to eat chicken nuggets, bully for him. He should use the same argument he used with adults just a few years ago, when he filmed dinner tables full of people in evening dress buddying up with cute, fluffy baby chicks, and then killed all the male chicks in front of them. The kids would definitely remember that, and wouldn't be premising their diets on broken and unhealthy beliefs about meat quality.

Maybe I should mention that I'm French and live just outside Paris.

I buy my food at the "farmers'" market -- which is just the market: there is no other kind. (There are supermarkets though, of course; but even inside supermarkets you find real butcher's shops where you can buy whole animals. Well, not whole cows -- but you can find whole rabbits or chickens (or any kind of fish/seafood) in any supermarket here).

I would oppose "trash" to "noble" and not "offal"; a liver or a heart is "offal", but a chicken carcass (the subject of Oliver's piece) is not, because it can't be cooked and eaten as such.

Also, I think you fundamentally agree with Jamie Olivier: you're denouncing junk food just as he is. Your point is that meat is over-processed during its (short) life; his point is that we're fed carcass reprocessed to look like whole food. Aren't you both making the same point?

Yeah but are those parts really good in nutritive value? Bones, fat, "connective tissues"?

Seriously wondering if eating those parts is really a good idea? Or am I completely wrong and they are no worse than the rest?

Yes, they're just fine. Those are, among other things, the classic base ingredients of chicken stock.

You have a good amount of connective tissue in your body, and you'd be very sad if you didn't :-) Same with bones and fat, they're essential. Your digestive system has enzymes to break most of those down into individual amino acids (which are rebuilt into protein for your own body) and mineral ions which work just as well in your body as they did in the chicken's.

I didn't get the impression he was trying to gross the children out to discourage them from eating McDonalds stuff; it seemed more like the kids were the spoiled ones squealing at the first sight of reality, imho. Incidentally, I found the video interesting since I had never put much thought on how chicken nuggets are made.

If he really wanted to traumatize the kids, yeah, show them a video from PETA and call it a day.

I was thinking the same thing after watching it. "It's still chicken, right"? While it may not be as wholesome (especially after the additives you see him throwing in there), it's not like those particular pieces are necessarily more "disgusting" by any reasonable measure.

Never mind praising total utilization! What about the added chemicals seemingly required to make the gunge taste 'good' if that's the word?

Is this analysis just a lie or a complete exaggeration? http://www.rense.com/general76/chk.htm

Yummy!

Most of the ingredients in a McNugget --- which is bad and you shouldn't eat them --- have nothing to do with the chicken itself. The ingredients are broken out into chicken, flavoring, breading, and cooking medium.

The ingredient list starts with "White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning" and then gets complicated as they break down the seasonings and the batter (where things really start to get gross).

Uh... am I the only one who caught the ending? The last couple of seconds are him asking, when the nuggets are made and frying and presumably smelling quite nice, "Now, who would still eat this?" and after a moment's hesitation nearly all kids raised hands.

The moral of the story isn't that nuggets are evil or not tasty, but that you're better off knowing what's in your food. Even (or especially) if you decide to still eat it.

The problem with this video is that the real problem with McNuggets have nothing to do with the gross-looking bits of the chicken; the real problems are factory farming and the unhealthfulness of constantly consuming your proteins iin breaded, deep-fried form.

I think the whole thread is missing the an important aspect of the discussion: what Jamie wants is kids who are aware/concious of what they are eating, and hopefully, choose better.

See Jamie's speech on TED for more context: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIwrV5e6fMY

I agree strongly with and admire Oliver's overall mission, but that doesn't excuse him to make bogus and misleading arguments.

I think that I'm going to puke. The sieve was the worst.

I don't get it. What's disgusting about it? He took a whole chicken --- not the scrapings off a battery chicken farm abbatoir, but a nice-looking whole roaster --- and processed it. Nothing was in that food processor but chicken.

There's a classic French technique called rilettes that involves cooking pig parts in stock or fat and then mincing them to a spreadable paste. It's delicious, especially with duck confit as a base instead of simmered pork, and the easiest way to make it is very similar to what Oliver did.

And of course Oliver knows that. He's had far more cooking experience than I will ever have. He knows he's bullshitting those kids. He could gross them out just as easily by showing them the pink and red bits near the wing joints ("look at all that chicken blood! ewwww!"), but he doesn't; he points to them and says "this is the expensive bit right here".

When asked what to do with the chicken carcass, the kids said "throw it out". The proper response to that statement is "no, idiot, find a way to use it" (as a parent of 2 school age children let me argue forcefully for the culinary idiocy of 8 year olds). Instead, Oliver honors the kids and their stupid, damaging assumption about how meat works. Shameful.

Seriously, and on top of that, even if one objects to organ meats and connective tissue I would imagine very few people would object to taking that carcass and putting it into a big pot of water and simmering with with some vegetables to make a nice chicken broth (omg, connective tissue was used to make my delicious broth? no!!!!!!!!)

I think many omnivores forget exactly where their food comes from which is what's really unnatural about all of this.

Dude, I don't get it. What's so wrong with using the leftovers?

I don't understand people who find this disgusting, but have no problem with the fact that they're consuming the flesh (and possibly skin and some other bits) of what used to be animals that moved, breathed, defecated, etc.

Look, you're eating stuff that used to have a life of its own. Deal with it. You don't need me to go into details about eggs or sausages, do you?

I wish I could go back to thinking they were made out of cardboard.

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