Nuggets! How a Little Bite Became a Big Deal

The chicken nugget looks simple enough: a bite of chicken, a crisp coating and a dipping sauce that somehow becomes the most important decision at lunch. But the little golden shape has a surprisingly big history, and it was never meant to belong only to children.

One important step came in 1963, when Cornell University poultry scientist Robert C. Baker developed a chicken “stick” made from ground chicken that could hold its shape and keep its coating during cooking. His work helped lay the groundwork for the modern nugget. McDonald’s developed its own Chicken McNugget years later. Created by chef René Arend in the late 1970s, the product reached every McDonald’s restaurant in the United States in 1983. The hamburger chain had found another way to get people thinking about chicken.

Then came the shapes. Perdue filed a U.S. trademark application in 1991 for the three-dimensional shape of a breaded chicken nugget resembling a dinosaur. That was two years before Jurassic Park sent dinosaurs stomping back into popular culture. The timing makes the little prehistoric bites feel like a perfect product of the era, even though the trademark filing came first.

Nuggets have also proved they can grow well beyond the kids’ menu. They appear in fast-food combos, freezer aisles, restaurant appetizers and plant-based versions. In 2013, Empire Kosher Poultry even unveiled a 51.1-pound chicken nugget at a trade show, reportedly the equivalent of 720 regular nuggets. That is less a snack than a poultry-related furniture problem.

The appeal is easy to understand. Nuggets are portable, familiar, easy to share and built for dipping. Adults may pretend they have moved on to more sophisticated food, but put a hot basket of crisp nuggets and a good sauce in front of them and watch that confidence disappear.

The chicken nugget may be small, but it has earned a permanent place at the table. And apparently, at least once, it needed a table of its own.