Jamie Oliver's War on Nuggets

0:00 [Jamie Oliver] "So I'm going to tell you a little story

0:01 about how you can use all the leftover bits to make food.

0:05 And watch me...

0:11 Meat and bone.

0:12 Now, who would still eat this?

0:17 Jamie Oliver has an interesting relationship with chicken

0:21 nuggets and it's something I find deeply fascinating

0:24 because it's this weird convergence of both

0:27 an extremely political rhetoric and one man's personal pride.

0:32 It's a conflict that has led the man to take on chicken nuggets

0:35 in some form in every show he's made to flex over them and display superiority,

0:41 right down to basically lying.

0:43 Like in the 2011 miniseries Jaime's Dream School where he promises a room

0:47 full of troubled teens that he can teach them to make nuggets better,

0:52 cheaper, and faster than frozen nuggets.

0:55 "And this is £1.90.

0:56 It's 10 pence cheaper.

0:57 I'm gonna do it in half the amount of time and this is,

1:00 do you think this is better for you or that?" [Group,

1:02 in unison] "That." All the way back in 2005 on the show Jamie's School

1:06 Dinners Jamie demonstrated the contents and production

1:08 of chicken nuggets for a group of children,

1:11 which is, as with a lot of food, kind of gross.

1:14 "These are the kids that won't eat my chicken.

1:16 You know, these are the kids that want their- their nuggets back.

1:20 So I want to show them what's in their fuckin' nuggets.

1:22 Then what they do is they add more chicken skin...

1:26 [loud blender noise] That is how that part is made." At the end he

1:35 asks if any of the kids still want nuggets and all of them decline.

1:38 "Anyone want one of these?" [Group] "Nah,

1:41 nope." In 2010 on the show Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution,

1:44 the production recreated the scenario with kids from Huntington, West Virginia.

1:47 But this time when Jamie asks if they

1:49 still want the nuggets after learning how they're made, all the kids say yes.

1:55 "Now who would still eat this?" [dramatic stinger] They all want those nugs.

2:03 And who can blame them?

2:05 Chicken nuggets are delicious.

2:06 This bit is one of those clips that's

2:09 in a sort of perpetual virality every few months it

2:11 makes the rounds again with a new caption new

2:14 commentary and new conclusion for the audience to draw,

2:17 and it's one that fascinates me because Jaime's

2:20 argument against chicken nuggets is just so comically bad.

2:26 There's a lot of possible arguments against chicken nuggets,

2:29 a lot of reasons you can consider chicken nuggets to be bad.

2:34 And Jaime is making none of them.

2:37 For example, you can argue that chicken nuggets are a product of a corrupt

2:42 industry that is often deeply inhumane towards the animals that pass through it,

2:46 making it immoral to enjoy the products of that inhumanity.

2:50 Or you can argue that eating meat is intrinsically immoral,

2:53 that we have for the most part moved past

2:56 the need to get sustenance at the expense of animals.

2:58 You can argue that the meat industry is exploitative of its workers

3:02 at the mundane and merely engaging

3:04 in aggressive anti-union practices and predatory hiring

3:08 of migrant workers who can then be

3:10 threatened with punitive use of the immigration

3:13 system and at the extreme end buying slaves from christian drug rehab programs.

3:19 But Jamie's argument against chicken nuggets is that they're bad

3:23 because they're made from the bad parts of the bird,

3:27 arguing that there are the good clean parts of the chicken that are

3:30 appropriate to eat and the rest of the bird which is garbage.

3:35 Take this bit for example, which uses the grammar of television to suggest

3:38 that even the kids see this plainly obvious fact.

3:42 "Now chicken wings are worth quite a lot of money.

3:45 [Jamie VO] I showed them where all the nice

3:47 cuts of meat came off the chicken." 'So we

3:49 just popped the legs off." "And then you're left

3:51 with a carcass with all the ribs and the little

3:53 bits of giblets and blood and skin and stuff

3:55 like that." "What do you think happens to this?" [Kids]

3:58 "It gets thrown away." He'll have people sniff

4:01 store-bought chicken nuggets and ask weird leading questions like,

4:04 "doesn't this smell dirty?" but then no one ever

4:08 responds because it probably just smells like a chicken nugget.

4:12 "Now smell your nugget and then smell the other one.

4:15 Your one should sort of smell quite clean...

4:17 "Yeah, it smells nice." 'And then the other one smells a bit

4:20 dirty." Jamie makes a lot of hay about mechanically reclaimed meat and indeed

4:24 the entire thrust of his scare presentation with these kids revolves around

4:28 the fact that the middle parts of the process where they take the "bad",

4:32 "dirty" parts of the bird and process it into food are kind of gross looking.

4:37 The process involves taking the parts

4:39 of the carcass that aren't prime cuts of meat,

4:41 parts that still have a lot of good muscle tissue attached,

4:44 a lot of connective tissue and gristle- which

4:47 aren't very tasty but contain collagen and elastin

4:50 which breaks down into useful amino acids- leftover

4:53 skin removed from cuts that are sold skinless,

4:56 organs and bone marrow, grinding that into a paste, straining out larger solids,

5:01 then using the resulting meat goo as an ingredient in food like chicken nuggets.

5:06 And you know what I will concede this fact: the stuff looks gross.

5:11 I would not pipe tepid meat goo into my mouth, this does not make me hungry.

5:17 But so what?

5:18 Lots of food looks gross when it's raw or partially cooked.

5:23 We literally have a popular phrase about

5:26 the making of sausage for this exact reason.

5:29 If your requirement is that food look delicious

5:32 and appealing at all stages of preparation then I'm sorry,

5:36 that's really a you problem.

5:39 So like I said, there's a lot of reasons to criticize the food industry,

5:43 the meat industry above all.

5:44 But what you can't really argue about the meat

5:47 industry and chicken nuggets in specific is that they're wasteful.

5:51 And this is something of a complexity

5:53 of the issue they definitely use all of the bird.

5:58 Now make no mistake this frugality is in no way motivated by an ideological

6:04 aversion to waste but rather stems from maximizing the return on their product.

6:09 Literally anything left over at the end of the process

6:13 they're going to try to find someone to sell it to.

6:15 Mineral solids contain keratin and calcium so dry it

6:18 out grind it up and mix it with fertilizer.

6:21 Organ proteins are used in pet food.

6:23 Various soft proteins fats hair hide feathers

6:25 and other by-products can be rendered into glycerin,

6:28 gelatin, oils, lubricants, and pastes which are used in food,

6:33 cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and industrial applications.

6:36 It is notoriously difficult to go truly 100% vegan because products often

6:40 contain other products that are themselves

6:43 made in part with animal products, which...

6:46 is complicated because if you're going to accept

6:50 that it's okay to eat animals and use animal products,

6:54 which at the moment is the mainstream opinion in our society,

7:00 then clearly if you're going to use the bird at all,

7:05 you should use the whole bird.

7:07 Now while pink goo isn't the apocalyptic nutrient void that Jamie Oliver

7:13 wants to paint it as, it is undeniably the lower quality stuff.

7:17 I don't want to mislead you into thinking

7:20 that frozen nuggets are something that they aren't;

7:22 they're not great, but you already knew that.

7:26 But, like, it's not sawdust, it's still food.

7:30 After taking the prime cuts off a bird there's a lot

7:34 of second rate but usable nutrients left on and in the bones.

7:38 Tthis is why it was customary in ye olden

7:41 days that after you ate all the easy parts off

7:44 a roast chicken you'd boil the scraps and bones

7:46 to pull out whatever was left and create chicken stock.

7:50 At least, that's what you do if you're too poor to just buy another chicken,

7:55 if you can't afford to not extract every

7:58 last calorie out of the bird you bought.

8:01 Now I don't want to suggest that Jamie Oliver is classist.

8:05 I don't know the secrets that lay in the inner cloisters of his heart.

8:09 But these arguments definitely are.

8:11 Oliver isn't arguing against nuggets because of what they contain

8:16 or because they tie into complicated questions of morality and the ethics

8:20 of eating meat or even entirely because of their actual nutritional

8:24 value (more on that later,) but because of what they represent,

8:29 which is a low-class diet.

8:32 This is the language being evoked,

8:34 the implication that low-class people are dirty

8:37 and thus "cheap" and "dirty" are synonymous.

8:41 "There's bits on it that are worth lots of money.

8:44 The breasts are the most expensive part,

8:46 it's the biggest and it's the white meat,

8:48 okay?" The other thing that I want to talk

8:50 about briefly is the rhetorical function of this clip.

8:53 Something fascinating about it is that from the point

8:56 of view of the production from the messaging viewpoint,

8:59 there really isn't a wrong answer to Jaime's offer of nuggets.

9:05 Meaning that no matter what answer the kids give, I,

9:10 as the conceptual author of the show, can use it.

9:14 I can use the whole bird.

9:17 If the kids reject the processed nuggets,

9:19 they validate the assertion that nuggets aren't just low quality

9:23 cheap food made from leftovers but are dirty and inedible.

9:27 If the kids still want the nuggets even knowing

9:30 that before being cooked they were a pink slime,

9:33 then that validates Jaime's superiority the assertion that America is doomed,

9:38 that the kids are broken, that there is a spiritual epidemic.

9:44 And that is exactly how it's employed in the actual episode.

9:48 "I mean, what's scary is that we've brainwashed our kids so

9:53 brilliantly so even though they know something is disgusting and gross,

9:57 they'll still eat it if it's in that friendly

10:00 little shape." As a fascinating extension the clip as it

10:04 makes its rounds through memetic cycles alternates how it's

10:07 being employed based on what community it's passing through.

10:11 It is shared in equal measure by people laughing at Jamie

10:14 Oliver getting dunked on by some kids who want them saucy nugs,

10:18 and people who agree with Jaime that this reflects a metaphysical illness

10:22 in society which is the source of the physical illness of obesity.

10:26 Now this argument is stupid, but it's also extremely popular.

10:31 There is a pervasive belief in our society that poorness

10:35 is a moral failing that the poor inflict on themselves,

10:38 that the disastrous and growing class divides

10:41 in the world are the result of a type

10:44 of person who just loves chicken nuggets so

10:47 much that they're not willing to stop being poor.

10:50 Of course that's all extremely wrong, the real answers are far more complex.

10:54 School lunches suck because there's no money for quality ingredients,

10:58 the staff are often poorly trained if not unqualified

11:02 because there's no money for training or hiring qualified personnel.

11:07 There's no money for hiring qualified personnel because of a belief

11:11 that school lunch lady is a meaningless trivial job where you

11:14 slop food at children and not a position where you're expected

11:18 to serve food to several hundred people in a mere 45 minutes.

11:22 The logistics don't magically get easier just because

11:26 the patrons aren't old enough to buy cigarettes.

11:29 There's no money for quality food because there's no political will to allocate

11:33 that money and there's no political will

11:36 because of all sorts of messed up priorities,

11:39 including the belief that poorness is a self-inflicted problem.

11:43 Why that sounds like a vicious cycle, doesn't it?

11:46 You could address this complexity and in fairness

11:49 Jamie Oliver hasn't strictly ignored this even

11:51 as he's drafted lunch menus that would drain an entire year's budget in a month,

11:56 but it's a lot easier to look at chicken nuggets as a thing

12:00 that just happens to be in proximity to the problem and blame it for everything.

12:06 Back to Jaime's Dream School Oliver promises

12:08 that he can make nuggets cheaper faster

12:11 and better than the store-bought nuggets and it

12:14 ends up exposing a lot of the charade.

12:16 "This is £1.90.

12:17 It's 10 pence cheaper.

12:19 I'm gonna do it in half the amount of time.

12:20 And this is- do you think this is better for you or that?" [Group,

12:23 in unison] "That." Now to a degree he's not strictly

12:26 lying if you have a very well laid out kitchen, all the ingredients,

12:30 a familiarity with the recipe, and confidence in your tools and technique,

12:36 then measuring from the moment you start to when you start eating,

12:41 you can probably make fried chicken strips faster than

12:45 an oven can heat up a box of tenders.

12:47 And the recipe he gives here, I mean...

12:50 it's lightly seasoned fried chicken.

12:52 Probably tastier than most nuggets as long as you make it right.

12:56 And you know what it might even cost you less

12:58 by weight than the most expensive box of chicken in the grocery.

13:01 Aore than twice as much as the cheap box though.

13:04 Just for the chicken breast not including the other ingredients.

13:07 Also this isn't really that much healthier.

13:09 It's still got plenty of salt, it's still fried in oil.

13:13 But also healthy versus unhealthy is really a terrible

13:17 way of conceptualizing food in the first place.

13:21 This is actually a persistent problem with Oliver's version of "healthy" eating,

13:25 which really isn't driven by actual nutritional value,

13:27 he still uses a lot of sugar and salt,

13:31 but is better conceptualized again as "clean" versus

13:35 "dirty." Things with lots of listed ingredients are bad,

13:40 things with fewer ingredients are good regardless of what those are.

13:46 "Talk out loud.

13:47 Loud.

13:48 Loud." "24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42- 44!" "Okay,

14:00 how many ingredients in there guys?" So he's not lying but the whole

14:05 exercise requires so many caveats and so

14:08 much deck stacking that it is disingenuous.

14:11 It's just an extension of the argument that poorness is the result of things

14:14 like food choices rather than food choices being largely dictated by being poor.

14:21 I mean, one, you're probably not buying the $16 box,

14:25 you're buying the $7 box and you're not coming home and heating up two dollars

14:30 worth of mechanically reclaimed chicken strips because

14:33 everything else in your life is going great.

14:35 The biggest hole in all of it of course is the issue of time.

14:39 With the stacked deck, the linear time is about comparable but what's not

14:44 comparable at all is the actual amount of work.

14:48 I mean it it's so self-evident that I- I feel insane even pointing it out.

14:54 Jaime's fried chicken bites are good,

14:57 but you spend the entire time making fried chicken.

15:02 Plus it generates a huge amount of mess that you will then need to clean up.

15:08 Food prep is extremely time and energy intensive and it's maddening that so

15:13 much of the hay about healthy eating relies on pretending that it's not.

15:19 So the whole thing is an argument

15:21 that displays such a fundamental lack of understanding about

15:24 why people eat what they do and it's

15:28 a dangerous argument because again it's a popular argument.

15:32 And it's popular with the kind of people who write and pass laws.

15:37 Seemingly every day there's another proposal for a law

15:41 to heavily tax "unhealthy" food or arbitrarily remove things like soda,

15:45 french fries, and chicken nuggets from the already asinine list

15:48 of things food assistance can and can't be spent on.

15:52 Food is an almost unfathomably complex subject and there are very

15:56 real issues of public health and ecology tied up in it.

16:00 People broadly eat what they have access to, and access is dictated by class,

16:07 and class in our society is so very often dictated by race.

16:12 It's about free time, stress, how far away you live from a grocery store,

16:16 whether or not you live in a neighborhood where

16:18 the freshest vegetable is the lettuce in a big mac.

16:22 It connects to problems with jobs, wages, the physical design of our cities,

16:27 the priorities of our politicians, and the incentives of our economic system.

16:32 It's a big intensely complex problem,

16:35 which is why it's ultimately a lot easier to just be a stooge,

16:41 to go on tv and blame the audience for having bad taste,

16:45 like, 'no you're making the nuggets wrong.

16:49 You're making dirty nuggets.

16:51 Stop making dirty nuggets.' ["Suckin' on My Tendies" by Hot

17:01 Dad]♪ Suckin' on my tendies like you wanted me♪♪ Suckin'

17:07 on my tendies like you need the meat♪♪ Suckin'

17:11 on my tendies brings you big delight♪♪ Suckin' on my tendies almost

17:16 every night♪♪ You're starin' at my tendies hungrily♪♪ You want

17:22 my tendies 'cause you love to eat and suck that meat♪♪

17:26 Put those tendies in your mouth and seal your lips♪♪

17:29 Chew and suck my chicken treats until they're gone, swallow bliss♪♪