The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [58]
Well-designed fast food has a fragrance and flavor all its own, a fragrance and flavor only nominally connected to hamburgers or French fries or for that matter to any particular food. Certainly the hamburgers and fries you make at home don’t have it. And yet Chicken McNuggets do, even though they’re ostensibly an entirely different food made from a different species. Whatever it is (surely the food scientists know), for countless millions of people living now, this generic fast-food flavor is one of the unerasable smells and tastes of childhood—which makes it a kind of comfort food. Like other comfort foods, it supplies (besides nostalgia) a jolt of carbohydrates and fat, which, some scientists now believe, relieve stress and bathe the brain in chemicals that make it feel good.
Isaac announced that his white-meat McNuggets were tasty, a definite improvement over the old recipe. McNuggets have come in for a lot of criticism recently, which might explain the reformulation. Ruling in 2003 in a lawsuit brought against McDonald’s by a group of obese teenagers, a federal judge in New York had defamed the McNugget even as he dismissed the suit. “Rather than being merely chicken fried in a pan,” he wrote in his decision, McNuggets “are a McFrankensteinian creation of various elements not utilized by the home cook.” After cataloging the thirty-eight ingredients in a McNugget, Judge Sweet suggested that McDonald’s marketing bordered on deceptive, since the dish is not what it purports to be—that is, a piece of chicken simply fried—and, contrary to what a consumer might reasonably expect, actually contains more fat and total calories than a cheeseburger. Since the lawsuit, McDonald’s has reformulated the nugget with white meat, and begun handing out “A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts.”* According to the flyer, a serving of six nuggets now has precisely ten fewer calories than a cheeseburger. Chalk up another achievement for food science.
When I asked Isaac if the new nuggets tasted more like chicken than the old ones, he seemed baffled by the question. “No, they taste like what they are, which is nuggets,” and then dropped on his dad a withering two-syllable “duh.” In this consumer’s mind at least, the link between a nugget and the chicken in it was never more than notional, and probably irrelevant. By now the nugget constitutes its own genre of food for American children, many of whom eat nuggets every day. For Isaac, the nugget is a distinct taste of childhood, quite apart from chicken, and no doubt a future vehicle of nostalgia—a madeleine in the making.
Isaac passed one up to the front for Judith and me to sample. It looked and smelled pretty good, with a nice crust and bright white interior reminiscent of chicken breast meat. In appearance and texture a nugget certainly alludes to fried chicken, yet all I could really taste was salt, that all-purpose fast-food flavor, and, okay, maybe a note of chicken bouillon informing the salt. Overall the nugget seemed more like an abstraction than a full-fledged food, an idea of chicken waiting to be fleshed out.
The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leaches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There’s some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from