McDonald's has been attempting to clean up their reputation online by debunking many of the myths that people have come to believe about their food. First they tackled the McRib, and now they've released a new video diving into the granddaddy of all fast-food mystery meat -- the Chicken McNugget.
Of course, you can't bust myths without a certified Mythbuster (or at least that's what McDonald's thinks), so they had Grant Imahara from the show take a tour of one of the Tyson food plants where the chicken nuggets are made to get some answers.
Right off the bat Imahara asks the question on everybody's mind -- chicken McNuggets aren't made of this pink slime stuff, are they? The image below spread across the web a while back, and since then has dominated searches of "what is in a McDonald's chicken nugget?"
That's definitely not the case, at least according to Amy Steward, principal meat scientist (what a fun title) for Tyson Foods. She shows Imahara around, taking him step by step through the process. First, an assembly line of workers make cuts on chickens. Dark meat doesn't go into the nuggets, but the rib, breast and tenderloin all do. The skin is removed from each piece of meat, only for a small amount of skin to be added back in later down the line for "flavor." You can learn more about the ingredients here.
Eventually Imahara is shown the ground meat product that will be molded into the familiar chicken nugget shape, but it is definitely different from the near textureless pink slime everybody is now familiar with. That chicken then gets mixed in with marination and skin before being pressed into nugget form, coated with breading, flash frozen and then shipped to a McDonald's near you.
It's an interesting look into the process, but despite the the fast food giant's best efforts, dispelling long held beliefs about the mysterious nature of McDonald's food with this transparency campaign isn't going to be so easy. And it definitely won't make chicken McNuggets taste any better.
