Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Student sustainability video festival 8: Jamie Oliver's chicken nuggets

It's the end of the semester, which means it's grading time.  It also means posts light on text and analysis until the grades are posted.  Time for another entry featuring the videos my students have used in their presentations during the past twelve months.

Here's one that was used during the same semester that was aired the same semester that the videos in Student sustainability video festival 6: Urban farming and Student sustainability video festival 7: Hantz Farms were shown, Jamie Oliver - Nugget experiment epic failure.

From the show Jamie Oliver Food Revolution. Jamie Oliver attempts and fails miserably in trying to convince a group of American kids that consuming processed chicken nuggets are bad.
It turns out that a student had shown this to me before.  Back in 2011, one of my students in Global Politics of Food found this and convinced me to let the class watch this.  It's now the definitive clip I use to answer the question, "how are chicken nuggets made."  Just the same, note that Jamie Oliver himself points out that McDonalds doesn't make their Chicken McNuggets this way any more.  As Snopes points out, they've been made of white meat, not mechanically separated poultry, since 2003.

2 comments:

  1. You know something funny?

    Outside of all the chemicals involved in the classic "pink slime" nuggets, the fact of actually using ALL of the animal for food is actually a pretty good one.

    Of course, one recognizes that the "pink slime" is full of other stuff that nobody wants to eat, but I'm not sure I can find something "bad" about using every possible bit of an edible animal that you can, if you're going to eat animals at all.

    I definitely get and whole-heartedly endorse the rejection of "pink slime" and all the other ridiculously over-used antibiotics and steroids as well as the often cruel treatment of animals raised for food...but there's a part of me, maybe an echo from my native american side, going "hey...waste no part of the animal, right?"

    Given the great likelihood that we'll need to continue finding new ways to "stretch" our food as best we can, it seems like maybe it would be more effective to find ways to do this without all the chemicals and such, rather than just calling it "gross and disgusting" and hoping that's enough.

    The kids actually made a huge point that Oliver didn't notice: "I'm hungry" will nearly always trump "gross and disgusting."

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    Replies
    1. You have a point, and one that is echoed by at least one person leaving comments on the video. Waste not, want not. Just the same, I'd rather save the mechanically separated meat for pet food.

      On the other hand, I'm someone who is known for eating bugs and posting about it. I shouldn't complain about "gross and disgusting."

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