Chicken nuggets are the food Americans hate to love

“Chicken nuggets are a food I have never fed my kids,” TikTok creator @thehealthywife says as she carefully places raw chicken breasts into a food processor, in a video from this spring that got more than 50,000 likes. “That’s because I prioritize their health over convenience.”

That means making nugget-like chicken snacks from scratch, no matter how messy or time-consuming it may be. As she measures out scoops of pulverized chicken meat, dredges them in her own breading mixture, and fries them in schmaltz, she’s acting out one of the biggest contradictions in contemporary food culture: Americans love chicken nuggets, and we hate ourselves for buying them, eating them, and serving them to our kids.

Sales of frozen nuggets topped $2 billion last year nationwide, and the global demand is only expected to grow, bringing in a projected $46.5 billion by 2032.

“It crosses class lines, it crosses ethnic lines, it crosses age groups. Everybody eats or feeds their families chicken nuggets,” said Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a professor of global gender and sexuality studies at the University at Buffalo who studies food and eating.

But the ubiquitous little blobs of protein have also become widely reviled as a lazy shortcut, an ultraprocessed food that some want to blame for everything from childhood obesity to Alzheimer’s disease (never mind the lack of research).

“Chicken nuggets have become something of a keyword for neglecting your children,” Tompkins said.

Parents have plenty of valid reasons for feeding their kids nuggets — they’re cheap, they’re fast, and kids tend to like them, for starters. But the shame that seems to adhere to their crunchy, golden crusts says a lot about the expectations placed on parents, and especially moms, to give their kids fresh, whole foods in an economic and social environment that makes it punishingly difficult.

Chicken nuggets are a reminder of the ways “our choices are taken away from us” in American food culture, Tompkins said. They’re “both delicious and suspicious.”

The contemporary chicken nugget owes its existence to a man named Robert Baker, a poultry scientist at Cornell University who, in the 1960s, set out to help chicken farmers make more money by finding a use for all the “little bits and bobs you couldn’t sell on your own,” said Emelyn Rude, a historian and the author of Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favorite Bird. He figured out how these once-undesirable chicken pieces could be glommed together, then breaded, fried, frozen, and reheated, creating an entirely new kind of food.

Groundbreaking as it was, Baker’s “chicken stick” didn’t really take off with American s. That wouldn’t happen until the early ’80s, when a McDonald’s chef named René Arend, originally from Luxembourg, developed the McNugget (McDonald’s has said there’s no record of contact between Arend and Baker, though Baker did share his recipes freely). Introduced nationwide in 1983, the creations took the country by storm, with 5 million pounds sold every week in the first 12 weeks of the rollout.

Within about a year, every other fast-food chain had a McNugget copycat, said Patrick Dixon, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and the author of the forthcoming book Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet. Bagged chicken nuggets became available in grocery stores shortly after.

Chicken nuggets rode a wave of anti-beef sentiment in the 1980s, in the wake of a 1977 government report urging Americans to eat less red meat, Rude said.

Poultry, even if it was breaded and fried, was seen as a “light alternative,” Dixon said. It was also cheaper, thanks to a rise in beef prices in the 1970s.

But perhaps the biggest secret to the appeal of chicken nuggets is also the simplest: They’re tasty. Unlike other McDonald’s innovations (the ill-fated Onion Nugget, for example), chicken nuggets captivated Americans with their bland yet pleasant flavor.

The backlash, however, started almost immediately. At first, commentators lightly made fun of nuggets as new-fangled junk foods. They became a symbol of emptiness — all filler and no substance. A 1986 Wall Street Journal article even used the analogy of a McNugget to lampoon political news coverage, arguing that Americans were getting chopped-up, overprocessed sound bites rather than meaty discussion of the issues.

In the 1990s, however, growing panic about obesity led to sharper criticism, Dixon said. “Rather than ‘This is stupid’ or ‘This is junk,’ it becomes, ‘This is threatening the health of the nation.’”

The chorus of critics grew louder in the 2000s, with the publication of the book Fast Food Nation and the release of the film Super Size Me, both of which accused chains like McDonald’s of making Americans fat and unhealthy.

In 2011, chef and TV personality Jamie Oliver even tried to disgust a group of kids by showing them exactly how chicken nuggets are made (it didn’t work — the kids still wanted to eat them).

Today, with a rise in concern about processed foods and the advent of DIY tradwife culture and TikTok wellness influencers, anti-nugget rhetoric typically focuses less on obesity and more on allegedly harmful ingredients. A popular format involves a list of additives coupled with scary slogans like “STOP EATING CHEMICALS.” Influencer @thehealthywife says she makes her own chicken nuggets from scratch to avoid ingredients like vegetable oils, despite a dearth of evidence of any harms.

But even among parents who would never dream of spending all day grinding chicken, there’s a general sense that heating up a plate of nuggets for the kids represents failure. That’s especially true for moms, who face an outsize level of judgment over the food their kids eat. “Our idea about what makes someone a good mother is really intricately linked to how they feed their children, in a way that it’s not at all for fathers,” said Priya Fielding-Singh, a sociologist and the author of the book How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America.

“Mothers are told that they should be feeding their kids whole foods, unprocessed foods, limiting their sugar, limiting their sodium,” Fielding-Singh said. The mothers she spoke with for her book “generally had a feeling of guilt, like they weren’t doing enough.”

Blaming moms for serving chicken nuggets ignores the larger issues at play, experts say.

For low-income families, foods like nuggets can be a reliable source of joy when other sources are out of reach. The lower-income parents she interviewed were used to having to tell their kids “no,” many times a day, but “food was one of the few things that they could say yes to,” Fielding-Singh said. “There are few other things in life that you can afford to buy your kids that they really like and that provide instant gratification.”

Chicken nuggets are also a meal that many kids will reliably eat, a key concern for families who can’t afford to waste food, Fielding-Singh said. Meanwhile, many neurodivergent people — kids and adults — appreciate the predictability of processed foods like nuggets.

There’s also the issue of time. With dual-income families increasingly the norm — and working hours often long and unpredictable — few households have someone at home during the day who can reliably prepare a complex meal.

“We may want to think about convenience foods as a Band-Aid on the problem of people not having enough time to prepare foods that they want to eat,” said Marcia Chatelain, a professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.

And rather than blaming parents for feeding their kids processed chicken, Fielding-Singh said, we should be focusing on the forces “working against parents as far as helping them provide a nutritious diet for their children,” including aggressive food-industry marketing, insufficient SNAP allotments, and lack of access to whole foods.

However we think about the chicken nugget and its role in American family life, one thing is for certain: The nugget itself isn’t going anywhere. Since Robert Baker’s “chicken stick,” processed chicken products have only proliferated, with the rise of dino-shaped nuggets, nuggets coated with cauliflower, and even high-end versions topped with caviar.

Chicken is cheap to raise, easy to transport, and palatable to diners around the world, Rude said. “I just envision a very chickeny future for us all.”