Ohiofarmgirl's Adventures in The Good Land is largely a fish out of water tale about how I eventually found my footing on a small farm in an Amish town. We are a mostly organic, somewhat self sufficient, sustainable farm in Ohio. There's action and adventure and I'll always tell you the truth about farming.


Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Chicken McNuts

There is a McDonald's on our way to the biggest small town near us. We pass it everytime we drive in and its always busy. Always. Lately they've been advertising an inhuman amount of their Chicken McNuts for like $2. It just sounds horrible.

One of the downsides of making your own food - and I mean when Step #1 is running out there and butchering something in your yard - is that you can't go out to eat anymore. It doesn't taste good. And its not worth it. At best its expensive and disappointing - and at worst you end up with ecoli or botulism. Or just sick because your system rejects all the crap they put in their food. And when I say "they" I mean to tell you its just about everyone. There's a couple places we can go but mostly we just avoid most of it.

We met some folks at their favorite diner recently. It was awful. I could believe it wasn't butter. And those were barely pancakes. More like space pancakes because I'm pretty sure if we launched them into orbit they'd still be there a million years from now and probably wouldn't even burn up if they ever hit atmo. I guess after a while you start to taste all of the fillers and stabilizers and such. Blech.

A couple news stories caught my eye recently. I dunno if you saw the story about the teenager who only ate McNuggets?  Then she passed out and has health problems? Is anyone really surprised?

I tell you who isn't - Weight Watchers. Did you see that they have a "deal" with McD's to list McNuggets as a healthy option for their plan? I thought it was a joke at first. Seriously? Sure I get it that WW might want to list fast food in their points system. But to put the WW brand on the McD's menu? On McNuggets? Come on. I woulda loved to be at that marketing meeting. I bet a couple of them boys had a bet that it would never work.

Do you even know whats IN them chicken nuggets?  Have you seen this gross pink stuff? And more on it here...and check out Jaimie O and the kids.

As a person who regularily guts chickens I can tell you two things...

1. To be clear, there are parts on a chicken that could be considered "nuggets" - but no one wants to eat them. Chicken nuts do not resemble their nugget counterparts. Aside from a rooster's cojones, there are no nuggets located on a chicken.

2. They claim that a generous 50% of the ingredients really is chicken in a nugget . White meat. I'm here to tell you that most of the meat on a young, but still ready, creepy meat is kinda white meat. There really isn't dark meat because the commercially raised and processed bird is so young. I'm not sure if this is a technicality - and McD's says "white boneless chicken" - which leaves the door open for a lot of pieces and parts.  So I hope you weren't expecting all boneless breast meat in that whooping 50% meat.

Sure, you're saying to yourself, you dont eat that crap. What about the frozen stuff you're eating? Does it come in a bag? Does it pretend to be an appetizer or an anytime-tizer-thing? We got some a while ago thinking we'd have pizza and wing-dings. But after the first couple boneless wings we both started looking at each other. Sure, in an academic sense, it was in fact chicken. But there just seemed to be a little too much weirdness for us. Of all the chicken we've "made" here at home we've never had the same consistency or texture as what we found in an enticing bag of chicken wing bites in the freezer section of our local store.

I dunno. If we live in a world where someone's mother would let her kid eat nothing but nuggets for 15 years and where Weight Watchers strikes a "deal" with McDs to have a 50% meat-not-nut on their menu...then maybe we'd better have a little talk about nutrition in the next couple of weeks. What do you say?

I can tell you for a fact that we are not going to the McD's drive thru for a sack-o-chicken-nuts, no matter what the price.

Happy Tuesday everyone! Now spit out that breakfast-franken-food and go make yourself an egg!


12 comments:

Robin said...

First of all, what kind of mother would let her child eat nothing but McNuggets?? Isn't that some form of neglect??

We are with you on eating out. There is one really good restaurant about 20 minutes from here that serves only local & organic food. I think that is the only restaurant where we can eat and don't feel awful after the fact.

"The Italian" and I had a strange craving for "BK' about a year ago. He ran out and got it. After a couple of bites we looked at each other and said "this is awful"! Never again! I agree that after a while of not eating this crap, your can taste the ingredients and your body rejects it for sure.

Now let's go grow some food and cook it!

Big Onion said...

You might find this interesting.

http://www.snopes.com/food/prepare/msm.asp

Mmm. Pink meat paste. Although it's not soaked in ammonia, it's still pretty freaking nasty.

We've only just started eating the birds we raise, but already we try and avoid things like this if we can. Even if I do go to a McD's or other fast food place I try and get whatever kind of grilled chicken breast sandwich they might have. That spongy texture -- whether it's all "white meat" or not -- is just too creepy.

Ohiofarmgirl said...

Isnt that just the weirdest story, Robin? Who does that? I see people feed a lot of weird stuff to their kids.

Thanks BigO - and I added your link. I think the original one is updated with much the same info. And I loved the Jamie O clip. There are, tho, weird parts on chickens. We throw just about everything into the pot for stock and some of it is just odd. Good for cats tho. But its true, the more you eat your own food, the weirder production stuff gets.

freemotion said...

Wow, those girl's eyes are just weird. Dull. And her skin and hair....yowza. Her mother needs a slap.

Most of the meat from our roosters is as dark as beef! Commercial meat chicks have white feathers....does that make them "white meat?"

And pork: "The other white meat." Our pasture raised hogs produce meat that is far from white! What is this obsession with meat being white???

SHEESH!

Buttons Thoughts said...

This is so funny but sad to say true. My brother ate at Mc D's for two years only there no where else he was a bachelor and obviously lazy. He went to the doctor with a very strange illness. Scurvy yes this is true seems his body was not getting any vitamin C. The doctors were amazed as they had never seen this before I guess they never met Christopher Columbus:) He has to to this day take Vitamin C supplements everyday. He is lucky that is all he has to do in the OLD OLD days he would have no teeth and probably be dead. Just a true story I thought I would share. B

Gingerbreadshouse7 said...

Once you raise some your own food and cook fresh..you taste the difference first bite..we don't like eating out, half the time you don't know what the heck your really eating..We stopped the kids from giving us gift cards to eating places..

Dreaming of Chickens said...

I read the article about the chicken nugget girl. I love how it said that her mother "is exasperated by her daughter’s refusal to eat a healthy and varied diet". So, I guess when the kid was 2 the mother thought she was already capable of making her own food choices. sheesh. people.

Tiffany said...

Good grief, that pink paste is disgusting. Mechanically separated meat is in nearly everything, too. Canned soup, hot dogs, you name it!! The worst part is that if you don't do your homework, you can imagine that mechanically separated chicken, for instance, is just a machine pulling off bits of meat here and there off of a carcass. Not so, folks!

Ruth Trowbridge said...

and how do they get so many chicken fingers . . . great post, peace

David said...

Good stuff. I don't do the Mcd's. It always makes me feel ill. W/o access to my own birds I can't get my own but one day....

Unknown said...

Its so true that you can no longer eat out when you start making your own! I find myself searching the menu for something that we DON'T have in the freezer at home, as mass produced beef, pork, chicken, fish. eggs and veges just don't taste right anymore!

Ohiofarmgirl said...

Free - i thought the same thing, that kid looked terrible. what is with the white meat?

Buttons, that is such an important story to tell. Thanks for sharing. Wow.

Good work, Ginny, you know I'd love to sit at your table! Even if you don't 'grow your own' you can still cook from scratch.

DOC, I'm constantly amazed at what people feed their kids. Or decide what to eat. We didn't have a choice.

TW, I laughed when McD's said they dont do that anymore - I'm sure they replaced it with something MUCH better... yeah right. Sheesh!

Ruth, chicken fingers? Blech! That reminds me of a terrible story.. heh heh heh. Maybe for later.

Dave, even if you dont have your own food standing out in the yard, you are WAY ahead of the curve by cooking as much as you do!

Farmer Liz, its that weird? You'd never imagine that commercially produced "food" is so far from whats real.

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