Have you ever questioned what goes into making Chicken McNuggets?
According to the Huffington Post, McDonald's Chicken McNuggets are made from actual chicken breast meat. That's a surprise to some who believed the rumor that the fast food chain's Chicken McNuggets were made from "pink slime."
During Sunday's Super Bowl, the McDonald's Canadian branch released a video showing exactly what McNuggets are made out of, despite what the Internet had previously stated.
In the video, Nicoletta Stefou, McDonald's Canada's Supply Chain Manager, compared the actual process of how a McNugget is made to a photo of a winding, tube-like heap of pink slime that has been rumored to be the main ingredient in a McNugget.
"It's an image that often gets associated with McDonald's and it's a question that we get a lot," Stefou explained. "We don't know what it is or where it came from, but it has nothing to do with our Chicken McNuggets."
Stefou and Jennifer Rabideau, a product development scientist, take a tour through the production factory where McNuggets are made. The process begins with separating "all the chicken cuts and setting aside the chicken breasts meat for Chicken McNuggets."
The meat is then blended, grinded and seasoned. It is later portioned into the Chicken McNugget shapes, covered in batter, fried, frozen and then shipped.
According to the McDonald's website, ingredients inside of a Chicken McNugget in America include "white boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning (autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring [botanical source], safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid), natural extractives of rosemary, breaded with: water, wheat flour, yellow corn flour, modified corn starch, spices, salt, baking powder, dextrose, wheat starch, corn starch, modified hydrogenated soybean oil, cooked in 100% vegetable oil. CONTAINS: WHEAT."
From 2004 to 2012, several McDonald's locations in the U.S. used beef that reportedly contained "pink slime." Celebrity Chef Jamie Oliver alerted the public of the fast food giant's actions during his "Food Revolution" TV program, which aired in 2010.
As a result of Oliver's public announcement, McDonald's reportedly quickly stopped using the pink-colored product in their hamburgers and McDonald's Canada branches disavowed ever using pink slime. McDonald's Canada has dedicated an entire page to answering questions about their food products.
According to a recent study from the University of Mississippi Medical Center, after testing chicken nuggets from various unnamed fast food restaurants, researchers found that a chicken nugget contained 50 percent meat. However, it also contained mostly fat, blood vessels, nerves, cartilage and pieces of bone.