Why making plant-based chicken nuggets is easier than many fake meats

The ongoing effort to replace meat with plant-based alternatives is about to take on the chicken nugget. Another brilliant breakthrough in synthetic cuisine? In fact, it wasn’t so difficult at all. Caleb Pershan on Eater points out that the chicken nugget was created—in a lab in 1963—as a highly processed food, and continually refined, with the result that real white-meat chicken comprises only one of 20 nugget ingredients (e.g., eggs, grains, crumbs, starches, not to mention all the unpronounceables). Consequently, it’s relatively easy to replace the actual chicken in a nugget without anyone noticing the switch. Moreover, as Pershan adds: “Everything, as the old joke goes, tastes like chicken.”