Chicken Nuggets--the good, the bad, and the ugly

My kids love chicken nuggets. They used to love eating McDonald's. Alexa would get a hamburger and Carter would get chicken nuggets. Once I saw Food Inc. and started reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, well, that changed me and my kids' diet. I read this interesting passage from his book that I copied from a web site online:

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

I get that you would need to consume a large amount of McNuggets to obtain the lethal dose, but still...yuck! How can you have knowledge of this information and still give these to your child? This is one of many strange ingredients that appear in a "chicken" nugget that actually contains 38 ingredients and is made up of 56% corn! I found this interesting article that goes into further depth.

But the facts are the facts. Kids like chicken nuggets. I don't always have the time to make them from scratch, and they are not always as good when I do. We found these at our grocery store, Harris Teeter, and they are quite popular in this house!

Coleman has chicken nuggets and chicken strips available (among other products) and they are humanely raised and sustainably farmed.


Enjoy!

=o)
Jen