McDonald's Uses 3 Cuts Of Chicken For Nuggets (With No Pink Slime Involved)

The slightly unnatural form of most chicken nuggets always has people assuming they must be filled with strange mixtures of anything but real meat, and this concern doubles when dealing with fast food like McDonald's Chicken McNuggets. In McDonald's case, this was exacerbated by a viral online rumor, which supposedly showed a rough-looking mixture of smooth meat called "pink slime." The burger chain is not totally off the hook for using pink slime in the past, but the mixture is not and never was used in Chicken McNuggets. What the company uses are three different pieces of white meat: The breast, tenderloin, and rib meat.

Beyond the fact that all McDonald's chicken is USDA-inspected, we know how Chicken McNuggets are made because the company has tried to be as open as possible in letting people into its suppliers' factories in recent years. The white meat for the chicken nuggets is separated and cleaned of excess fat by assembly line workers, and then the chicken cuts go into a giant grinder. This produces a mixture not unlike ground chicken you would find in a supermarket. McDonald's Chicken McNuggets do have some extra ingredients, like seasonings and some natural additives that help flavor and bind the mixture together, but nothing like the ammonium hydroxide in pink slime. The ground chicken is then molded into the three recognizable Chicken McNugget shapes — the boot, circle, and bow tie — before being double-battered and fried.

The chicken breast used in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets is familiar to pretty much everybody, and the tenderloin and rib meat are just white meat from other areas around the breastbone. The tenderloin, which chicken tenders are made of, comes from underneath the breast, to which they start out attached. Rib meat is also attached to the breast, but its connection to the rib makes it harder to remove, which means it can go to waste, but there is nothing less desirable about it otherwise. So while they are defined as different cuts of chicken, McDonald's is technically just using the whole breast when making McNuggets.

McDonald's has also cleaned up other aspects of McNuggets over time. Back in 2016, it removed artificial preservatives from its chicken, along with other additives like citric acid and sodium phosphates. The pink slime controversy was not completely unfair to McDonald's, however. The confusion comes from how the product is beef, not chicken. Known in the industry as lean, finely-textured beef, pink slime is treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria like E. coli. McDonald's did actually use it in its burgers, but stopped doing so in 2011, partially due to customer concern. So while concern over what is in your McDonald's chicken nuggets is mostly unfounded, food transparency is still a good thing, and companies do need to be held accountable for what they are feeding people.