Chicken Nugget Recall: How Safe Is Our Food?

The great chicken nugget recall has seen 75,320 pounds of frozen poultry pulled off the shelves because of the potentially poisonous pieces of plastic they might contain. Should we now be asking ourselves just what exactly is in the food we are eating?

Let’s have no qualms about it, a chicken nugget is not a thing of great beauty, nor is it particularly edible. The chicken nugget looks unappetizing, smells excessively bland, and also boasts a curious and slightly repellent shape.

To a person with a sense of taste that hasn’t been deadened by excessive sugar, coarsened by excessive salt and vulgarized by saturated fat, a chicken nugget tastes like a strange hybrid of sawdust, cardboard, and stringy meat which has been through another animal’s digestive system at least once before you get to chow down on it.

In short, the chicken nugget is very much a product of the consumerist era. It’s very convenient, yet in aesthetic and nutritional terms, the chicken nugget is woefully redundant.

However, the chicken nugget’s inherent worth is not the issue. Millions of poultry lovers everywhere will happily chomp on chicken nuggets until the cows come home, or at least until the last factory farmed chicken is slaughtered.

Chicken nuggets are of great importance at the moment because of the recent chicken nugget recall and what it signifies about the trustworthiness of our food chain. You can’t help wondering is the nugget exposure just the tip of a highly-toxic iceberg in terms of what we now eat?

The chicken nugget recall was initiated because of customer’s complaints to Tyson Foods Inc that small pieces of plastic had been found in their chicken nuggets, which in some instances caused minor oral injuries.

ABC Local reported that Tyson Foods voluntarily recalled the affected chicken nuggets which were produced on a single line in two days at one of the company’s 40 chicken production facilities.

The big question is how did the plastic get into the chicken nuggets? Well, apparently the folk over at the Agriculture Department (USDA) explained that small pieces of plastic were traced to a product scraper inside a blending machine. Ok then, that clears it up.

Or does it? If plastic can contaminate a chicken nugget that easily, and traces of horse-meat can end up in beef-burgers, isn’t it time we educated ourselves a bit better about what exactly goes on in our food processing plants and just what sort of things we are shoving down our greedy gullets as we are led like lambs to the slaughter to our nearest fast-food outlet.

Of course, pieces of plastic in a chicken nugget may be the least of our concerns. Your average chicken nugget contains a stomach-churning concoction of chipped bones, pure fat, blood vessels, cartilage, and wait for it, nerves. Your chicken nugget is also sprinkled liberally with an unhealthy dose of chemical additives and preservatives.

The anti-foaming agent dimethylpolysiloxane and a chemical found in anti-freeze called propylene glycol are just a few of the 20-30 plus ingredients apart from chicken found in your average nugget.

So perhaps the chicken nugget recall should be correctly relabeled the chicken by-product nugget recall. Bon appetite!