Gregory J. Ochab

English 103H

Tammie Bob

Is everything made with chicken?

            I was curious when McDonalds began advertising their McNuggets as now consisting of white meat. I didn’t care that it was a different color of meat; I was just curious as to what the McNuggets were made with before if it wasn’t “white meat”. I was under the impression that they have consisted of white meat since their creation in 1983. I started wondering whether it was the “white” in the advertisement that was advertised, or the “meat”.

Boneless chicken breast, water, modified cornstarch, salt, chicken flavor (yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (animal source), safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid, rosemary), sodium phosphates, seasoning (natural extractives of rosemary, canola and/or soybean oil, mono-and diglycerides, and lecithin).

 I don’t know if this is a common misconception, but it seems to me that this list of ingredients in the chicken portion of Chicken McNuggets (as opposed to the breading) is a lot longer than it should be. Maybe I am idealistic, but I thought that the ingredient line should have stopped after “boneless chicken breast.” Even so, I guess I can deal with the water, salt and other additives, but adding “chicken flavor” is ridiculous. The funny thing is that the “animal source” that is in the chicken flavor is almost always made from beef. (Sundaram) It seems as if they take chicken, add water and other ingredients to strip it of it’s flavor, and then add beef flavorings to make it taste like chicken.

It’s not just McDonald’s McNuggets that are distasteful once you realize of what they are comprised of, or even fast foods in general. There are very good reasons not to want to be an Oscar Meyer wiener. Why would anyone want to consist even partially of “pork stomach, snout, intestines, spleens, edible fat, and, yes, lips”? (Moore) And hot dogs are not the deli section’s only culprit. It is not right when a package of bologna has more “mechanically separated chicken” than pork. Discounting the two percent of the bologna that are mainly spices and flavorings, the remaining ingredients are; water, corn syrup (i.e. sugar) and salt in that order. (Cole) Sounds like the ideal meal, right?

Supermarket chicken is made up only of chicken, but the way future McNugget chickens are raised is not only cruel to the chickens, but dishonest to those who buy them. They are confined to 16 inch cages (that is, five or six are confined to one 16 inch cage) and their beaks and claws are removed so that they cannot kill each other. Even worse, because of the poor living conditions, disease is all too common among the chickens. But the problem does not stop with the disease. In order to counter the illness, the chickens are pumped with antibiotics to suppress the immune system so that they can continue laying eggs. This not only allows the disease germs to flourish, but also adds chemicals to the body, polluting the bird for those who would care to eat it. When you add this to the high amounts of hormone acceleration through drugs and genetic engineering (used to produce more meat faster) you would find that the chicken’s digestive tract is easily overloaded. No chicken lives long enough to be able to filter the drugs out naturally, so consumers unknowingly consume most of the drugs when they eat the bird. (Zimmern)

Neither McDonald’s nor Kraft publish where they get the chicken that they use in their products. I was concerned enough about this topic to ask the question (along with several others) as a post on Yahoo!’s health forums. After a week all that I received in reply was a cynical “they guard their dark secrets well”. That’s real helpful. I could not locate a source that had an answer, even on company websites which should have that type of information listed under their nutrition sections. In fact, the Kraft website did not have an ingredients list or nutrition tables for their hot dogs. There was a claim to click below and you would be led there to see nutritional information, but no place to click. The lack of information they provided kind of makes you wonder which takes more “Krafting”; their food, or their public relations?

Mechanically separated chicken is a good example of crafted meat, and is a common ingredient in the deli section. We realized earlier that there is more of it than there is of pork in Oscar Mayer’s bologna, and it enjoys the same prestige among most other “pork” meats. But what exactly is “mechanically separated chicken”? Well, it’s chicken…at least, all the bad parts. According to research done by journalist Bruce Cole, mechanically separated chicken "is a paste-like and batter-like poultry product produced by forcing bones, with attached edible tissue, through a sieve or similar device under high pressure to separate bone from the edible tissue." In other words, they take the leftover chicken, and grind and beat the carcass, bones and some of the organs into a pulp, and then sell it to you. (Cole) Of course, it doesn’t cost as much as regular meat; in fact, the whole reason that mechanically separated chicken is used in deli meats is to make them cheap.  Think about it. You kill a chicken, take off everything that you can, and then reshape the rest so that people will eat it without questioning it. Then it not only turns into a profit, but you also don’t have a dead chicken to dispose of. Quite convenient for those not wanting to be the disposal fee (i.e. “everyone”).

Some people claim that “Every third-grade boy knows what nasty things lurk in hot dogs—from ears to eyelids—and delights in sharing this information with his more squeamish friends”. (Moore) But most people are only vaguely aware of what actually goes into the meat that we eat. Chicken in pork, beef flavoring in chicken, chicken skin, pig lips; why don’t we just label everything as “processed meat” and be done with it? What strikes me is that when you consider how much of the time it is that that “processed meat” consists of a certain mechanically separated bird, I think we will find that it is no wonder that everything tastes like chicken.

Cole, Bruce.  " Artisan Baloney."  Saute Wednesday.  http://www.sautewednesday.com/artisanbaloney.html

 Kirby,Alex. ‘Why Farm Antibiotics Are a Worry,’ BBC News, 8 Oct. 1999. ...
 

SUNDARAM ,VIJI . India-West . North America  09/04/01
 Where's the Beef? It's in Your French Fries  http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/mcds/indiawest090401.html
 

Zimmern, Andrew. "Edibles--a Game of Chicken?"  Lifetime Fitness, 2003 http://www.lifetimefitness.com/magazine/index.cfm?strWebAction=article_detail&intArticleId=105