s’ archives, he said, and then, “when food technologists sat down to examine those issues, they pulled out his research bulletins and said, ‘OK, where do we go from here?’ ”
Baker never made any money from the billions of nuggets that have been sold over the past three decades. By the time he died in 2006, his connection to them had mostly been forgotten, and only a few obituaries noted it. Even at Cornell, he is best-known for a barbecue sauce that is a staple of firehouse fundraisers; every summer, his daughters run a much-loved barbecue stand at the New York State Fair where “Cornell chicken” is their most popular plate.
Given nuggets’ later reputation, that might be fortunate. A New York State judge called the McNugget a “McFrankenstein creation” in 2003. Videos of ostensible nugget stuff—“mechanically separated chicken,” a flesh-pink paste being forced out of a grinding machine—come up so high in Google searches that both Snopes.com and the National Chicken Council devote pages to debunking the notion that nuggets are made of it. (Mechanically separated chicken may have been an ingredient in early commercial nuggets—it extracts the maximum amount of meat from carcasses, and Baker used it in other products—but McDonald’s changed its recipe in 2003 to use white-meat pieces, and the rest of the industry followed. The National Chicken Council says the paste now appears only in hot dogs and lunch meat.)
Baker’s family prefers to think of him as someone who did his job thoughtfully and with pride, and who could not have predicted the consequences.
“When he was doing this, it was looked at as progress: producing more food, more cheaply,” Dale said. “For his era, he was extremely successful. But things change; times change. I don’t eat Chicken McNuggets, myself.”
