Friday, March 23, 2007

I'm Proud to Report I Never Eat at McDonald's

I encourage you to check out this article describing the ingredients in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets. You may not be surprised to learn that they are less than 50% chicken, or that they contain several entirely synthetic compounds---chemicals which are not parts of plants or animals---but the article is still a sobering read.

3 comments:

  1. The fact that a McNugget is mostly corn is pretty amusing, and not terribly surprising given its flavor.

    The fact that it contains a bunch of evil synthetic "chemicals" neither impresses, scares, surprises, nor deters me from eating them. Everything is a poison if taken in enough quantity, and I'd wager that a careful chemical analysis of nearly any natural product is going to reveal a whole raft of products that will kill you dead if taken in 5-gram quanitites.

    In addition, the sentence "TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid)" is absolutely incorrect, and suggests its author is either completely ignorant of chemistry or is exaggerating in a completely intellectually dishonest attempt to make his argument seem scarier. Butylhydroquinone is a derivative of butane, not a form of it. What's more, the hydroquinone moitey is larger than butane, so it's a more correct description to describe TBHQ as a derivative of hydroquinone, not the other way around. Describing TBHQ as a "form of butane" is like describing sarin as a "form of" isopropanol because it has an isopropoxy group hanging off it.

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  2. Yes, I was suspicious of the "form of butane" claim, which is why I didn't single out TBHQ as the creepiest component of McNuggets. It's good to have the input of an actual chemist on this issue.

    Still, the degree to which Chicken [sic] McNuggets are removed from being actual pieces of chicken is interesting and more than suffices to keep me from eating them.

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  3. Yeah, I'm not at all bothered by the "chemical" additives (as if there are non-chemical additives; anyone ever see "neutron star material" or "quark-gluon plasma" listed as an ingredient in a box of breakfast cereal?) in McNuggets; I'm bothered by the fact that their taste and texture recalls a battered and fried packing peanut. The fact that their actual composition is not that far from a modern packing peanut (i.e. cornstarch) is pretty dang funny.

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