BIOPHILE 16 — JUNE/JULY 2007 R25 - Biophile Magazine

What’s really ina Mcdonald’sChickenMcnugget?The Omnivore’s Dilemma by MichaelPollan is a fascinating book thatdetails the changing eating habits ofAmericans. It explains how, over thelast 30 years, Americans have become anation that eats vast quantities of corn.Most people assume that a chickennugget is just a piece of fried chicken,right? Wrong! Did you know, for example,that a McDonald’s Chicken McNuggetis 56% corn?Besides corn, and to a lesser extent,chicken, The Omnivore’s Dilemmadescribes all of the thirty-eight ingredientsthat make up a McNugget — one ofwhich I’ll bet you’ll never guess. Duringthis part of the book, the author hasjust ordered a meal from McDonald’swith his family and taken one of the flyersavailable at McDonald’s called A FullServing of Nutrition Facts: Choose the BestMeal for You.The ingredients listed in the flyersuggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget.And a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eightingredients it takes to make a McNugget,thirteen can be derived from corn:• the corn-fed chicken itself;• modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverizedchicken meat);• mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers,which keep the fats and waterfrom separating);• dextrose;• lecithin (another emulsifier);• chicken broth (to restore some of theflavor that processing leeches out);• yellow corn flour and more modifiedcornstarch (for the batter);• cornstarch (a filler);• vegetable shortening;• partially hydrogenated corn oil;• and citric acid as a preservative.A couple of other plants take partin the nugget: There’s some wheat inthe batter, and on any given day thehydrogenated oil could come fromsoybeans, canola, or cotton rather thancorn, depending on the market priceand availability.According to the handout, McNuggetsalso contain several completelysynthetic ingredients, quasiediblesubstances that come from a petroleumrefinery or chemical plant. Thesechemicals are what make modernprocessed food possible, by keeping theorganic materials in them from goingbad or looking strange after months inthe freezer or on the road. Listed firstare the “leavening agents”: sodiumaluminum phosphate, mono-calciumphosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate,and calcium lactate. These areantioxidants added to keep the variousanimal and vegetable fats involved in anugget from turning rancid. Then thereare “anti-foaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene,added to the cookingoil to keep the starches from bindingto air molecules, so as to produce foamduring the fry. The problem is evidentlygrave enough to warrant adding a toxicchemical to the food: According to theHandbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxeneis a suspected carcinogenand an established mutagen, tumorigen,and reproductive effector; it’s also flammable.But perhaps the most alarmingingredient in a Chicken McNugget istertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ,an antioxidant derived from petroleumthat is either sprayed directly on thenugget or the inside of the box it comesin to “help preserve freshness.”According to A Consumer’s Dictionaryof Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane(i.e. lighter fluid) which the FDA allowsprocessors to use sparingly in ourfood: It can comprise no more than 0.02percent of the oil in a nugget. Which isprobably just as well, considering thatingesting a single gram of TBHQ cancause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in theears, delirium, a sense of suffocation,and collapse.” Ingesting five grams ofTBHQ can kill.There you have it – lighter fluid. Betyou never thought that was in yourchicken McNuggets![Source: Al Nye, the Lawyer Guy]Biophile Issue 1611