by Bryant Simon
Even in the early 1990s, at that crucial moment when chicken overtook beef in the battle for national meat supremacy, sales of chicken lagged behind production. While chicken consumption in 1990 climbed 6 percent, overall production jumped 10 percent. Because of these sideways numbers, chicken never really had a chance to celebrate its historic victory over cows. Even in its moment of triumph, the industry saw a ceiling building over its head. It had to figure out how to knock through that to get to another level or it would risk a long, unpredictable run of overproduction, underconsumption, and uncertain profits.44
Part of the problem was chicken itself. While chicken became cheaper in the 1970s and 1980s at the very moment when prices started to matter more to inflation-rattled consumers, it lacked the different cuts and varied textures and tastes found with beef and pork. There were no savory ribs or smoked bacon or buttery tenderloins. Big jumps in output that were dependent on an endless diet of corn and additives, moreover, produced mild, flavorless chickens. The renowned chef James Beard joked as early as 1962 that industrial chickens “looked beautiful, but taste like absolutely nothing.”45 With consumers constrained by the simple choice between bland dark meat and blander white meat, marketers detected, in this age of endless variation, a new problem for the broiler industry: “chicken fatigue.”46
Robert Baker spent much of his career battling “chicken fatigue.” All the better, he believed, if he could come up with convenient options that used leftover parts and pieces of the bird. Better still if the items’ hidden qualities hooked customers and kept them coming back for more. Between 1960 and 1980, Baker helped to create more than fifty further-processed chicken-based foods in his Cornell lab.
The site is important here. Food in postwar America increasingly came from labs, not fields. Scientists working with marketers tried to come up with new and alluring products made from cheap ingredients. Many of Baker’s creations were like the drinks that recovering alcoholics concoct in their kitchen sinks. They looked like the real thing and sometimes tasted a little like the real thing, but they weren’t quite the real thing. In Baker’s case, the “real thing” was beef or pork. Over the years, he developed chicken baloney, chicken steak, chicken salami, chicken chili, chicken hash, and chicken pastrami. Another of his inventions was chicken loaf. “That’s like meat loaf,” Baker said. Chic-A-Links “looks and tastes like pork sausage.” And as for Chickalona: “That’s chicken baloney that’s white.”47
But Baker’s most famous and lasting invention was the chicken nugget. He drew his inspiration from the fish stick. Already by the start of the 1960s a staple of frozen food aisles, this early convenience food turned leftover parts and bits into something saleable. Using all of the chicken became even more important as poultry companies looked for added revenues in the feverishly competitive, supermarket-driven market where profit margins were constantly getting squeezed by each and every new merger, productivity gain, and big store opening.
Initially, Baker tried to imitate the fish stick made famous by Gorton’s.48 Creating a thin, two-inch-long, rectangular chicken product with white-colored meat on the inside surrounded by a crunchy golden crust presented two food engineering challenges for Baker and his student collaborator on the project, Joseph Marshall. First, they had to devise a way to meld the meat extracted, scraped, or sucked off chicken carcasses along with ground-up feet, skin, and other parts of the bird as well as the fillers together without using a thin outer skin like the one on the outside of a hot dog. Second, they had to figure out how to make sure that the batter stayed attached to the meat despite the inevitable shrinkage caused by the heat from a fryer and the cold from a freezer used to preserve the food. “They solved the first problem,” explains the food writer Maryn McKenna, “by grinding raw chicken with salt and vinegar to draw out moisture, and then adding a binder of powdered milk and pulverized grains.” The end result resembled moist white clay, malleable enough to shape but dense enough to hold its form. Baker and Marshall added sodium phosphate to the mix to cover up off notes, or sour and bitter tastes. The salty additive also ensured that the chicken sticks would have a longer shelf life, another key to further-processed supermarket foods. Baker and Marshall cracked the second problem by shaping the clay-like food into narrow strips, coating them in a batter of eggs and cornflake crumbs, and then freezing them before they heated them up. After cooking, the food scientists cooled their product a second time in a blast freezer set at minus ten degrees. That way, the nugget-sticks were already partially cooked and could easily be reheated at home in an oven or microwave or in a fryer at a fast food restaurant. This allowed marketers to pitch the further-processed chicken pieces as an easy-to-make, timesaving, freedom-delivering convenience food.49
Baker knew enough about the psycho-biology of food to know that the texture of the chicken sticks combined with the fat and salt that he loaded into them would get eaters coming back for more. When one of his co-workers was asked whether Baker understood this almost addictive dynamic, he answered, “Yes, for sure.”50 The fat in nuggets rewarded the brain with instant feelings of pleasure. The salt had a similar effect. Baker added just the right bit of texture and crunch to the give the product a satisfying mouth feel. At the same time, the nuggets, like most of the foods he favored, had a broad, and never too strong, taste appeal. Like most food scientists, Baker knew that sharp and distinct flavors overwhelm the brain and depress the desire for more, so he made sure that his mainstream chicken concoctions had a pleasing but not overriding taste.51
Once the chemical and technical problems with the nuggets got sorted out, Baker and his team designed a label and shipped boxes of the chicken product off to five local supermarkets and grocery stores, where they seemingly had connections and where the items would find a place in the frozen food aisle near the Swanson TV dinners and Gorton’s fish sticks. In their first six weeks in stores, Baker and his team sold more than 1,200 boxes of these precursors to the chicken nugget. Within six months, they had sold out. But they didn’t make any more once the last packs left the stores. Baker and Marshall and the others in the lab moved on to the next chicken product. The nugget, it seems, remained a secret of upstate New York for more than a decade.52
By the 1970s, McDonald’s, apparently unaware of Baker’s experiments with chicken sticks, began to search for its own car-friendly, easy-to-eat chicken alternative to hamburgers. With the price of poultry falling with each new efficiency gain in the animal factories in the fields and the slaughterhouses, and with warnings about the health risks associated with beef popping up in news articles more frequently, the fast food giant needed a chicken option on its menu. Company officials also worried about the “veto factor,” when someone in a lunch party, for instance, rejected a trip to McDonald’s because they didn’t see any healthy choices on the overhead menu.53 In these early days of red meat fears, chicken, and anything called chicken, fell under the wide umbrella of “good for you.” To meet the new demand, the senior chairman of the company, Roy Kroc, suggested as a possibility chicken potpies similar to the firm’s handy and successful hot apple pies. The product flopped in taste tests. McDonald’s experiments with not so healthy KFC-style fried chicken didn’t go much better.
Around this time, in that laboratory that D’Angelo from The Wire imagined, Rene Arend, McDonald’s European-trained executive chef, was tinkering with a new side product he called Onion McNuggets, bite-sized chunks of fried onions. Frustrated because he couldn’t get real onions to conform to the company’s industrial standards of utterly predictable taste, he abandoned the project. “But Rene,” a colleague asked not long after the chicken pies and fried pieces of onion failed to catch on, “why not try chicken nuggets instead?”54
Within days, Arend came up with a prototype of the Chicken McNugget, breaded and fried pieces of chicken meats and parts encased in a crunchy crust. Over the next few years, he and his co-workers in the McDonald’s kitchens confronted the same challenges Baker had faced years before�
��how to extract moisture from the meat and get the breading to stick to the mixture of meat pieces, parts, and filler. By 1979, they had figured out the problems on their own without Baker’s advice or knowledge.
Without much advance advertising, in March 1980, McDonald’s debuted the McNuggets, cooked at the time like its fries, in beef tallow, at fifteen outlets in Knoxville, Tennessee. They couldn’t keep the boxes of McNuggets in the heating trays, as the new chicken product set sales records at just about every outlet. “Word of the new product’s magic,” writes Salon’s Maryn McKenna, “spread quickly among franchisees.” Store managers from Spartanburg to Spokane wanted the new item. They didn’t get them right away because the fast food company couldn’t make enough of them. To meet the soaring demand, Tyson Foods hastily developed and patented a new breed of broiler chickens especially for McNuggets and dedicated an entire Arkansas factory to producing the new fast food sensation. By 1983, McNuggets got rolled out nationally, and just a few years later, McDonald’s became the world’s second-largest consumer of chickens; only Colonel Sanders’s Kentucky Fried Chicken bought more birds.55
McNuggets weren’t just a hit at McDonald’s stores; they changed the American way of eating chicken. By the 1990s, less than 15 percent of slaughtered broilers were sold as whole birds. At the supermarket, some consumers still chose parts wrapped in see-through plastic, which were branded as fresh and wholesome in endless Tyson and Perdue television advertisements. By this time, though, shoppers were becoming more likely to purchase further-processed chicken. Most of it would be shaped into something that didn’t look like chicken, and it would be soaked in salt and fried in fat. So much for chicken as a healthy alternative to beef, but perception and reality took a while to match up on this score, especially with helpful nutritional information hard to come by.56
McNuggets were a nearly perfect industrial food, at least in the short term and from the producers’ perspective. They started with cheap, essentially leftover ingredients, stray pieces of chicken and bits stuck to the bone as well as unused skin and other parts. From there, the manufacturers added corn-based filler and a corn-based coating. Corn, of course, was the incredibly cheap, highly subsidized agricultural wonder of the postwar era and, as a result, it often cost food-processing companies less then it cost farmers to grow and harvest the crop. Salt, another main ingredient, was even cheaper, selling for less than ten cents a pound and delivering a wallop of flavor and the promise of a longer shelf life. Water was the cheapest, and probably most highly subsidized of all of the ingredients in nuggets. In some cases, it made up as much as 15 percent of the foodstuff. “The more water you can add to your nuggets,” observed the food writer Mark Schatzker, “the greater the profit.” The finished product could be zapped in a microwave and eaten on the go. Nuggets required neither a fork nor a plate. That meant no cleanup. This was a tailor-made convenience food for hard-working, wage-stagnant, inflation-wrecked America.57
But it was the dipping sauces that powered the nuggets’ success. Almost single-handedly, they warded off chicken blandness and chicken fatigue. “We like foods that have an identifiable strong flavor, but we tire of them very quickly,” explains the taste scholar Michael Moss. Yet, accompanied by small plastic trays filled with sweet, high fructose corn syrup–infused (and therefore inexpensive because of subsidies) ketchup, honey mustard, and barbeque sauce, nuggets could change all the time, even between bites. This malleability maximized the appeal and everyday (or every other day) eat-ability of McNuggets and the many knockoffs they inspired.58
Adults liked Chicken McNuggets and their imitators, but kids, it seemed, couldn’t get enough of them. They wanted nuggets at McDonald’s, Burger King, Red Lobster, Shoney’s, and every other restaurant. They wanted them at school and at home. They got them on metal trays with applesauce in the cafeteria and in microwave-ready containers with fries in the frozen food section of the supermarket. They got them shaped like cartoon characters, trucks, trains, and dinosaurs. Because of their popularity and ubiquity, chicken nuggets were crowned the “hot dog of the 1990s.”59
Looking for new ideas and information on the latest food trends, Emmett Roe occasionally flipped through the pages of the trade journal Restaurant News. It didn’t take him long to learn about nuggets after their debut in the early 1980s and the new markets they opened up for chicken parts and leftover pieces. He wanted in.60 By the time he made his move, however, nuggets, even low-quality ones made with lots of filler and dark meat remnants, had already become an incredibly competitive and risky slice of poultry capitalism.61 As factory farms and slaughterhouses added to their capacities and killed increasingly bloated chickens at faster and faster rates, the broiler industry endured wave after wave of overproduction, followed by another round of aggressive cost-cutting. In this tight market, further-processed products presented potential new revenue streams and additional sources of profit—and new bouts of competition. Not long after the McNuggets’ astonishing debut, Tyson, Perdue, and the other industry giants pounced. Using their size and ability to invest in new highly automated machinery for their factories to their advantage, they grabbed hold of the massive fast food and supermarket business for salty and fatty breaded and fried chicken products. They weren’t letting go of this money-making sector. That left a tiny corner of the market, the specialty niche, for smaller companies like Imperial Food Products.62
Shut out of the mass market for nuggets, Roe manufactured in Hamlet further-processed and customized chicken products made mostly from already cut up frozen boneless breasts. He sold them to small and medium-size restaurant chains in the South. He used discarded meat to make generic nuggets that his traveling salesmen marketed to schools and other companies, which sometimes sold them under their own labels. But, like a shark, Roe had to keep moving or die in the unforgiving waters of the 1980s poultry industry, where the choices for smaller players, like Imperial, were always pretty narrow.
To position his company in this tight market, Emmett Roe—and later Brad—enlisted Imperial in the fight against “chicken fatigue” and, even more immediately in the mid- to late 1980s, against the quickly emerging phenomenon of nugget fatigue, especially for grown-ups. Many adults wanted less breading and more meat with their chicken. One option was the tender, typically a two-inch strip of white meat pulled from a chicken breast or a fillet of white meat cut from the breast. Companies like Shoney’s and Long John Silver’s served these items battered and fried. Pitted against the nugget, tenders were bigger and had a wider surface area, which could lap up more sauce. Even though they were usually served fried, some consumers still regarded tenders as a wise and healthy fast food choice. Unlike the 1980s-era McNuggets and other chicken nugget products made from a little of this and a little of that and fried in saturated fats, tenders were pulled from or cut from chicken breasts and often were prepared in 100 percent vegetable or soy oil. They seemed meatier and more chickeny, which, in turn, gave them a hint of healthiness or at least less of a sense of unhealthiness.63
For another segment of the quickly changing chicken-eating market, fried tenders weren’t healthy enough. Looking to capture part of this niche, product designers in the late 1980s came up with an array of roasted, broiled, grilled, boneless, and skinless chicken items. Better yet if these new foodstuffs were convenient and easy to prepare—and loaded with heaps of unseen salt and high fructose corn syrup to keep costs down, deliver a blast of flavor, and leave them on the shelves for as long as possible without spoiling.64 Roe and the small restaurant and fast food chains he worked with paid close attention to fluctuating consumer demands, and they picked up on slight, but still significant, shifts in chicken preferences, designing their products to meet these changes.
Monica McDougald worked at Imperial in the months leading up to the fire. She usually spent a part of her day laying pieces of Cagle’s chicken breasts, dipped in sweet and salty lemon, barbecue, and teriyaki sauces, on the conveyor belt. Other times, like the morning of the
blast, she shredded meat for chicken fajitas, another item on the company’s ever-changing product list.65 Still, in 1991, Imperial’s mainstay remained battered, fried, and salted chicken tenders. It sent these to the southern outlets of Long John Silver’s, Red Lobster, Captain D’s, and, of course, Shoney’s.
Despite the niches in poultry capitalism they had carved out for themselves, Emmett and Brad Roe couldn’t insulate their firm or their family from the relentless competition and predatory practices of other companies. Knowing that they held the upper hand, fast food chains and schools demanded to pay later and pay less when they did write checks. Emmett Roe responded to business pressures by cutting costs wherever he could and getting as much out of his labor force as possible. Leading up to the fire, he and Brad and his plant management in Hamlet continued to demand that workers wear smocks and caps on the job, but now they made them pay for the gear. He started to charge them for a larger portion of their health insurance as well. He got his supervisors, including Brad, to ride the women on the line to make sure they limited their bathroom breaks, stayed busy during their time on the clock, and, it seems, processed tainted meat when the USDA men weren’t looking.66