so I'm going to tell you a little story about how
you can use all the leftover bits to make food and watch me
[intense music]
[grinding]
meat and bone
now who would still eat this
Jamie Oliver has an interesting relationship with chicken nuggets and it's something I find deeply
fascinating because it's this weird convergence of both an extremely political rhetoric and one man's
personal pride it's a conflict that has led the man to take on chicken nuggets in some
form in every show he's made to flex over them and display superiority right down to basically
lying like in the 2011 miniseries jaime's dream school where he promises a room full of troubled
teens that he can teach them to make nuggets better cheaper and faster than frozen nuggets
and this is one pound 90. it's 10 pence cheaper i'm gonna do it in half the amount of time
and this is do you think this is better for you or that all the way back in 2005 on the show Jamie's
school dinners Jamie demonstrated the contents and production of chicken nuggets for a group
of children which is as with a lot of food kind of gross these are the kids that won't eat my chicken
you know these are the kids that want their their nuggets back so I want to show them
what's in their [ __ ] nuggets then what they do is they add more chicken skin
that is how that part is made at the end he asks if any of the kids still want nuggets and
all of them decline anyone one of these
in 2010 on the show Jamie Oliver's food revolution the production recreated the
scenario with kids from Huntington, West Virginia but this time when Jamie asks if they still want
the nuggets after learning how they're made all the kids say yes now who would still eat this
they all want those nugs and who can blame them chicken nuggets are delicious this bit is one of
those clips that's in a sort of perpetual virality every few months it makes the rounds again with a
new caption new commentary and new conclusion for the audience to draw and it's one that fascinates
me because jaime's argument against chicken nuggets is just so comically bad there's a lot of
possible arguments against chicken nuggets a lot of reasons you can consider chicken nuggets to be
bad and jaime is making none of them for example you can argue that chicken nuggets are a product
of a corrupt industry that is often deeply inhumane towards the animals that pass through it
making it immoral to enjoy the products of that inhumanity or you can argue that eating meat is
intrinsically immoral that we have for the most part move past the need to get sustenance at the
expense of animals you can argue that the meat industry is exploitative of its workers at the
mundane and merely engaging in aggressive anti-union practices and predatory hiring
of migrant workers who can then be threatened with punitive use of the immigration system
and at the extreme end buying slaves from christian drug rehab programs but Jamie's
argument against chicken nuggets is that they're bad because they're made from the bad parts of the
bird arguing that there are the good clean parts of the chicken that are appropriate to eat and the
rest of the bird which is garbage take this bit for example which uses the grammar of television
to suggest that even the kids see this plainly obvious fact now chicken wings are worth quite a
lot of money I showed them where all the nice cuts of meat came off the chicken so we just popped the
legs off and then you're left with a carcass with all the ribs and the little bits of giblets and
blood and skin and stuff like that what do you think happens to this it gets thrown away he'll
have people sniff store-bought chicken nuggets and ask weird leading questions like doesn't this
smell dirty but then no one ever responds because it probably just smells like a chicken nugget
now smell your nugget and then smell the other one your one should sort of smell quite clean
and then the other one smells a bit dirty Jamie makes a lot of hay about mechanically reclaimed
meat and indeed the entire thrust of his scare presentation with these kids revolves around the
fact that the middle parts of the process where they take the bad dirty parts of the bird and
process it into food are kind of gross looking the process involves taking the parts of the
carcass that aren't prime cuts of meat parts that still have a lot of good muscle tissue attached a
lot of connective tissue and gristle which aren't very tasty but contain collagen and elastin which
breaks down into useful amino acids leftover skin removed from cuts that are sold skinless
organs and bone marrow grinding that into a paste straining out larger solids than using the
resulting meat goo as an ingredient in food like chicken nuggets and you know what I will concede
this fact the stuff looks gross I would not pipe tepid meat goo into my mouth this does not make
me hungry but so what lots of food looks gross when it's raw or partially cooked we literally
have a popular phrase about the making of sausage for this exact reason if your requirement is that
food look delicious and appealing at all stages of preparation then I'm sorry that's really a you
problem so like I said there's a lot of reasons to criticize the food industry the meat industry
above all but what you can't really argue about the meat industry and chicken nuggets in specific
is that they're wasteful and this is something of a complexity of the issue they definitely use all
of the bird now make no mistake this frugality is in no way motivated by an ideological aversion to
waste but rather stems from maximizing the return on their product literally anything left over at
the end of the process they're going to try to find someone to sell it to mineral solids contain
keratin and calcium so dry it out grind it up and mix it with fertilizer organ proteins are used in
pet food various soft proteins fats hair hide feathers and other by-products can be rendered
into glycerin gelatin oils lubricants and pastes which are used in food cosmetics pharmaceuticals
and industrial applications it is notoriously difficult to go truly 100 vegan because
products often contain other products that are themselves made in part with animal products which
is complicated because if you're going to accept that it's okay to eat animals and use
animal products which at the moment is the mainstream opinion in our society then clearly
if you're going to use the bird at all you should use the whole bird now while pink goo isn't the
apocalyptic nutrient void that Jamie Oliver wants to paint it as it is undeniably the lower quality
stuff I don't want to mislead you into thinking that frozen nuggets are something that they aren't
they're not great but you already knew that but like it's not sawdust it's still food after taking
the prime cuts off a bird there's a lot of second rate but usable nutrients left on and in the bones
this is why it was customary in ye olden days that after you ate all the easy parts off a roast
chicken you'd boil the scraps and bones to pull out whatever was left and create chicken stock
at least that's what you do if you're too poor to just buy another chicken if you can't afford
to not extract every last calorie out of the bird you bought now I don't want to suggest that Jamie
Oliver is classist I don't know the secrets that lay in the inner cloisters of his heart
but these arguments definitely are Oliver isn't arguing against nuggets because of what they
contain or because they tie into complicated questions of morality and the ethics of eating
meat or even entirely because of their actual nutritional value more on that later but because
of what they represent which is a low-class diet this is the language being evoked the implication
that low-class people are dirty and thus cheap and dirty are synonymous there's bits on it that are
worth lots of money the breasts are the most expensive part it's the biggest and it's the
white meat okay the other thing that I want to talk about briefly is the rhetorical function
of this clip something fascinating about it is that from the point of view of the production
from the messaging viewpoint there really isn't a wrong answer to jaime's offer of nuggets
meaning that no matter what answer the kids give I as the conceptual author of the show
can use it I can use the whole bird if the kids reject the processed nuggets they validate the
assertion that nuggets aren't just low quality cheap food made from leftovers but are dirty and
inedible if the kids still want the nuggets even knowing that before being cooked they were a pink
slime then that validates jaime's superiority the assertion that america is doomed that the kids are
broken that there is a spiritual epidemic and that is exactly how it's employed in the actual episode
i mean what's scary is that we've brainwashed our kids so brilliantly so even though they know
something is disgusting and gross they'll still eat it if it's in that friendly little shape
as a fascinating extension the clip as it makes its rounds through memetic cycles
alternates how it's being employed based on what community it's passing through it is shared in
equal measure by people laughing at Jamie Oliver getting dunked on by some kids who want them
saucy nugs and people who agree with jaime that this reflects a metaphysical illness in society
which is the source of the physical illness of obesity now this argument is stupid but it's also
extremely popular there is a pervasive belief in our society that poorness is a moral failing
that the poor inflict on themselves that the disastrous and growing class divides in the world
are the result of a type of person who just loves chicken nuggets so much that they're not willing
to stop being poor of course that's all extremely wrong the real answers are far more complex school
lunches suck because there's no money for quality ingredients the staff are often poorly trained if
not unqualified because there's no money for training or hiring qualified personnel there's
no money for hiring qualified personnel because of a belief that school lunch lady is a meaningless
trivial job where you slop food at children and not a position where you're expected to serve food
to several hundred people in a mere 45 minutes the logistics don't magically get easier just because
the patrons aren't old enough to buy cigarettes there's no money for quality food because there's
no political will to allocate that money and there's no political will because of all sorts
of messed up priorities including the belief that pornis is a self-inflicted problem why that sounds
like a vicious cycle doesn't it you could address this complexity and in fairness Jamie Oliver
hasn't strictly ignored this even as he's drafted lunch menus that would drain an entire year's
budget in a month but it's a lot easier to look at chicken nuggets as a thing that just happens
to be in proximity to the problem and blame it for everything back to jaime's dream school
Oliver promises that he can make nuggets cheaper faster and better than the store-bought nuggets
and it ends up exposing a lot of the charade and this is one pound 90. it's 10 pence cheaper i'm
gonna do it in half the amount of time and this is do you think this is better for you or that now to
a degree he's not strictly lying if you have a very well laid out kitchen all the ingredients
a familiarity with the recipe and confidence in your tools and technique then measuring from the
moment you start to when you start eating you can probably make fried chicken strips faster
than an oven can heat up a box of tenders and the recipe he gives here I mean it's lightly seasoned
fried chicken probably tastier than most nuggets as long as you make it right and you know what it
might even cost you less by weight than the most expensive box of chicken in the grocery more than
twice as much as the cheap box though just for the chicken breast not including the other ingredients
also this isn't really that much healthier it's still got plenty of salt it's still
fried in oil but also healthy versus unhealthy is really a terrible way of conceptualizing food
in the first place this is actually a persistent problem with Oliver's version of healthy eating
which really isn't driven by actual nutritional value he still uses a lot of sugar and salt but is
better conceptualized again as clean versus dirty things with lots of listed ingredients are bad
things with fewer ingredients are good regardless of what those are don't
24 25 26 27 28 29 30. 31 32 30 30 44 35 46 40 41 42 40 44 okay how many ingredients in there guys
so he's not lying but the whole exercise requires so many caveats and so much deck stacking that it is disingenuous.
It's just an extension of the argument that poorness is the result of things
like food choices rather than food choices being largely dictated by being poor.
I mean one you're probably not buying the $16 box you're buying the $7 box and you're not coming home
and heating up two dollars worth of mechanically reclaimed chicken strips because everything else
in your life is going great the biggest hole in all of it of course is the issue of time
with the stacked deck the linear time is about comparable but what's not comparable at all
is the actual amount of work I mean it it's so self-evident that I i feel insane even pointing
it out jaime's fried chicken bites are good but you spend the entire time making fried chicken
plus it generates a huge amount of mass that you will then need to clean up food prep is extremely
time and energy intensive and it's maddening that so much of the hay about healthy eating relies on
pretending that it's not so the whole thing is an argument that displays such a fundamental lack of
understanding about why people eat what they do and it's a dangerous argument because again it's
a popular argument and it's popular with the kind of people who write and pass laws seemingly every
day there's another proposal for a law to heavily tax unhealthy food or arbitrarily remove things
like soda french fries and chicken nuggets from the already asinine list of things food assistance
can and can't be spent on food is an almost unfathomably complex subject and there are very
real issues of public health and ecology tied up in it. People broadly eat what they have access to
and access is dictated by class and class in our society is so very often dictated by race.
it's about free time, stress, how far away you live from a grocery store, whether or not you live in a
neighborhood where the freshest vegetable is the lettuce in a Big Mac, it connects to problems with
jobs, wages, the physical design of our cities, the priorities of our politicians, and the incentives
of our economic system. It's a big intensely complex problem which is why it's ultimately a lot
easier to just be a stooge to go on tv and blame the audience for having bad taste like
no you're making the nuggets wrong you're making dirty nuggets stop making dirty nuggets
♪ TENDIES by Hot Dad ♪