McDonalds usually gets the credit -or the blame- for inventing chicken nuggets. The company introduced the McNugget in 1980. But Cornell University professor Robert C. Baker had made the same thing in 1963!
It’s a mixed legacy for a man who wanted only to increase the market power of upstate New York’s poultry farmers—men whose families have since left the business, because the changes wrought by nuggets made it unprofitable. “I think you have to understand him as a person of his time,” Baker’s oldest son Dale, now 66, told me. “He grew up in the Depression, not having enough food to eat. When he’d buy a dinner, he would want to get the most calories for the price. He wanted to be sure the farmers would get the best prices for their birds.”
Read the story of how Baker came up with the nugget, and never got the credit for the idea that transformed the poultry industry and the American diet. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user yuichi.sakuraba)
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