McDonald’s didn’t invent the nugget. The credit goes to a scientist named Robert Baker. In the 1950s and ’60s, Baker worked with farmers and chicken companies. His mission was to get Americans to eat more chicken.
Until the mid-1900s, chicken had been a fancy food that people ate only on special occasions. Why? Getting a bird on the table took a lot of work. First, you had to raise one in your backyard or buy one (alive) at the market. Then you had to kill the bird, drain its blood, scoop out its insides, and pluck out its feathers in sticky clumps. Yikes!
By the 1950s, you could skip these steps and instead buy a ready-to-cook chicken at the grocery store. But chicken still took time to prepare. People preferred quick foods like burgers, hot dogs, and fish sticks. As a result, chicken farmers struggled to make money.
Baker wanted to make chicken as easy to eat as those fast foods—but how?