There's Hardly Any Chicken In School Lunch 'Chicken Nuggets'

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An investigation into Chicago-area school meals revealed something fairly disturbing about students' lunches - those chicken nuggets might not be exactly what you think.

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According to Grub Street, Chicago journalist Monica Eng recently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to find out the recipe for school lunch chicken nuggets, discovering that there are dozens of ingredients in the so called "meat." Students' other options aren't any better, as many of Chicago Public Schools' most popular lunch choices were made the same way.

"The district's top three entrees include processed chicken patties, processed chicken nuggets and processed chicken crumbles over nachos. Each of those chicken products alone contains dozens of ingredients," Eng writes in a local news report.

The chicken "meat" - not even counting the breading surrounding the nugget - was made up of 28 different ingredients, which included some chemical compounds. NPR's Scott Simon revealed the ingredients in his "Weekend Edition" show this weekend:

Yesterday, the Chicago public schools finally responded [to Eng's FOIA request] and supplied a recipe that lists at least 28 ingredients, even without the breading. Chicago public schools' chicken nuggets turn out to be made from textured soy protein concentrate, isolated soy protein - hope I'm not going too fast for you to write all this down - brown sugar, salt, onion powder, maltodextrin, silicon dioxide, citric acid, potassium chloride, sodium phosphates and, oh, yes, a little chicken.

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[H/T Grub Street]