Yeah, but when I fry chicken at home, I don’t use 32 ingredients. Not that they’re using the same process, but it does seem like a lot of ingredients. Flour + oil + chicken + some various spices, maybe two or three things instead of/with flour depending on the recipe (egg? Milk? buttermilk?). It’s reasonable to suspect that many of those 32 ingredients don’t play into making the actual food but serve some other purpose (preservative just being the most likely, but I’d expect some “flavor enhancers” too - like the MSG in the popcorn chicken above).
I’m not one to freak out about “chemicals in food” (we’re all chemicals!), but I think it’s reasonable to question the complexity of food and to aim for a simpler - less processed, less industrialized - meal. I know no one goes to McD’s looking for that, but even McD’s can be improved (and it seems like maybe the C-suite recognizes that if they’re changing ingredients). Less than 32 is an improvement. Less than 12 would be a bigger one!
I have to agree with @Chesterfield Outside of a few stabilizers to keep everything in suspension/emulsified a lot of those ingredients are the same thing I’d pull out of my spice cabinet to make fried chicken with. Obviously they are substituting industrial ingredients for the more basic grocery items, but there isn’t much on that list that I’d worry about.
Besides it’s the mystery items that should raise an eyebrow, not the things with long chemical names… Like Flavorings…that’s just a can of who the F knows.
They say to try to avoid things where the added sugar is listed as one of the first three ingredients. I wonder if, conversely, one should avoid chicken when one of the first three ingredients listed is ‘not’ chicken?
Questioning is great. I’ve done that myself and ended up moving from Alice Waters’ to Nathan Myhrvold’s camp.
By the way, I doubt your home made fried chicken has less than 10 ingredients. For example, King Arthur all purpose flour (a pretty standard flour) contains wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, and folic acid. That’s 7 ingredients right there.
[quote=“WalterStabosz, post:17, topic:77252”]I still miss the old recipe before they started making them “all white meat”. They’re just not the same.[/quote]I miss them too. The “all white meat” just seems like the same “all white meat” you can find anywhere; the old recipe was much more mysterious and exotic.
[quote=“Blaze_Curry, post:19, topic:77252, full:true”]That reminds me: has anyone looked at the nutritional content of modern eggs lately? I did, and it’s only slightly better than a serving of chips.
This is doubly sad: GMO magic has turned eggs into near-junkfood,and impoverished people have long relied upon eggs for a cheap, effective source of nutrition.I guess soy will have to come to the rescue. Until that gets GMO’d into garbage too.[/quote]Do you have a reliable source for any of that? I’m pretty sure it’s kind of difficult to mess up a chicken egg. And I’m also pretty sure soy is one of the most genetically-modified crops on the market.
Oh ha ha! 32 is a big number! Must be BAD! I bet it’s all chemicals! Good nuggets would not contain any salt or seasonings, and the coating would be poi.
About 60-70 calories an egg. About 5g of fat and 6g of protein. High in cholesterol, but… they’re eggs. They evolved to breed chickens, I would be amazingly surprised if they were lower in cholesterol. And we no longer think dietary cholesterol is all that bad anymore. This compares very favorably to a bag of chips or a candy bar, depending on the specific nutritional needs.
As for GMO, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Hormones, which aren’t the same thing? Chickens who lay eggs are also not given hormones. Young chickens lay eggs at the rate of one every 23 hours. They already lay eggs as fast as chickenly possible. There’d be no point. All containers that say “hormone free” have the same honesty content as a bottle of olive oil saying, “a low-carb snack!”
As for GMO? Maybe in the feed, but chickens are not genetically modified, they’re still selectively bred. Which I suppose is “genetically modified.”
It’s awful I tell you! Soon you won’t be able to eat anything at all without dying immediately! Even Whole Foods will have nothing but Twinkies and Spam!
I get that there are a lot of STEM-type folks who really need everyone to know that they are waaay smarter than that poor harried soccer mom blocking the aisle reading a label in the Whole Foods (not directing this snarkism at you, you just inadvertantly gave me a chance to get in a pot shot at an archetype which annoys me), but I have to stick up a little for the label readers. I think the worry about chemically-sounding ingredients stems more from a (rightful) distrust in governmental regulatory bodies like the FDA and food manufacturers than any generalized fear of chemicals. Shit is safe until it isn’t. Which usually takes a looong time and a lot of cases of (white) people getting sick before anyone moves on it. Lead, asbestos, mercury, cadmium, etc. are all chemicals too, just like you, that were totally legal and used in a dizzying array of products for a very long time despite health concerns. Just look at BPA. Still to this day used in a ton of inappropriate food products. And those manufacturers that list their cans and packaging as ‘BPA-free’ are just using more obscure estrogenic chemicals that most people aren’t aware of yet. Personally, I defer to what people much smarter than me and who have studied things for much longer say, and in this case, it would be Michael Pollan. ‘Eat food, mostly plants, not too much’ and try not to eat anything with more than 5 ingredients. With a little planning and an incredibly modest food budget, I’m usually able to stick to that.
You know, except that KFC is kinda gross, none of those ingredients are any worse for you than any other fried food. And on balance I support your choice to eat less KFC.
" It declined to provide the full list while it’s in beta"
I don’t know US and FDA law but I’d have thought selling food to the public they’d be legally required to give full ingredient lists to customers. If not that’s more shocking to me than anything specifically about McD’s chicken nuggets.
Was more that I don’t really see the need for all those ingredients in what’s essentially such a simple product. Their normal chicken fillets are better, but still not great.
If I’m honest, I was hoping for something far simpler (for all these products)… I guess mostly through ignorance.
