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One of the most common foods we eat as kids today
are chicken nuggets.
Whether it's out of the oven at home or from the drive-thru
at the fast food place down the street,
we just can't seem to get enough of them.
But who actually invented chicken nuggets?
Let's find out on today's episode of--
Colossal Questions.
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Just like many of our favorite modern foods,
the origin of the chicken nugget is a bit murky
and no one can say for absolute certain who invented them.
That being said, a scientist and professor
named Robert C. Baker is most often credited
with inventing chicken nuggets in his lab
at Cornell University in the early '60s.
Whether he was the true innovator of the nugget or not,
Robert C. Baker was clearly passionate about bird meat.
He came up with more than 40 new ways
to prepare poultry with inventions
like chicken hot dogs, ground chicken, and whatever
turkey ham is.
OK, so that's who likely invented the fast food staple.
But why was Baker trying to create a new concoction
and how did he do it?
The nugget was invented to solve a big problem for the slumping
chicken industry.
At the time, almost all chickens were
sold home, which kind of made it inconvenient.
A whole chicken wasn't thought to be quite enough
meat to feed an entire family, but it was definitely
too much for just one person.
On top of that, roasting a whole chicken
takes a lot of time and effort and families
were finding they had less and less time to dedicate to making
more complicated meals.
Now with these new fangled chicken nuggets,
it was finally a way to package poultry
in easy bit-sized servings that could be frozen and fried up
quickly.
Problem solved.
Baker's big innovation that made the chicken nugget possible
was because of another one of his poultry creations-- ground
chicken.
He molded chunks of skinless ground of chicken meat
and covered them with breading.
The breading is actually the key.
It holds the morsels of meat together
while sitting in a freezer or frying in a pan.
And almost overnight, chicken went from a food
not quite fit for a feast to one of the most popular proteins
in the country, all by turning chicken
into a handheld, well, nugget.
So next time you're plowing through a pile
of dino-shaped nuggets, you can thank a poultry pioneer
for making it his passion project to bring us
the perfect chicken snack and nailing it.
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