BY ANNIE RAUWERDA, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

Illustration by Melia Kenny, Page Design by Sarah Chung

If we are what we eat, we’re a generation of 

chicken nuggets. I grew up eating fun finger food 
as an after-school snack and an easy dinner, some-
times in the shape of dinosaurs and Disney char-
acters. Nuggets please even the pickiest of eaters 
(case in point: this teenager who ate chicken nug-
gets for 15 years and practically nothing else) and 
take just minutes to prepare. As an adult, I pass 
on meat for environmental reasons but I join a 
growing number of nugget-inclined consumers 
opting for meatless alternatives. We’ve created a 
demand, and top companies are battling tooth and 
nail to be our supply. With release after release of 
new imitation chicken, fall 2021 is shaping up to be 
the golden age of imitation chicken nuggets. What 
a time to be alive. 

What happens when you take chicken nuggets, 

an obscenely processed food to begin with, and 
remove the only recognizable ingredient? The 
vegan form emerges out of the shadows, a mystery 
meat sans meat … so, just a mystery. They’re not 
just fried tofu. Depending on the brand, they’re a 
concoction of protein isolate, soy protein concen-
trate, textured vegetable protein, wheat gluten 
and preservatives no one’s great-grandma would 
recognize. Chickenless chicken is a slew of para-
doxes: both earthy and artificial, highly processed 
yet classified as a healthy alternative, plant-based 
but without any recognizable plants (clearly made 
inside a plant, though). They taste eerily similar to 
the real thing, a pinnacle of food science. 

Vegan chicken nuggets also play into a nugget-

obsessed culture, for they are more than just a 
food. A generation of young people uses “chicken 
nugget” as a term of endearment and paste slo-
gans like “nugs not drugs” and “nug life” on water 
bottles and laptops. Such phrases not only signal 
an affinity for breaded chicken but also a know-
ing lameness, a message that the nugget-lover is 
down-to-earth and easy to please. 

“Even though I look like a burnt chicken nug-

get, I still love myself,” said a little kid in a 2016 
Vine.

“Chicken nuggets is like my family,” says 

another kid in another viral video, before eating 
the breaded poultry for breakfast. 

The most retweeted tweet in English is a 

17-year-old’s attempt to win free chicken nuggets 
from Wendy’s.

One of RedBubble’s chicken nugget products is 

a shirt that says “Chicky Nuggies” above an image 
of Yoda eating nuggets. There’s a sticker that says 
“26.2 (chicken nuggets eaten)” and others that 

read “Netflix and chicken nuggets.” Chicken nug-
gets have transcended sustenance and entered the 
realm of cultural obsession — similar to Trader 
Joe’s and wine, two other consumables with great 
PR. Buying nuggets brings back memories of 
childhood family dinners and play date snacks, of 
simpler times and simpler cuisines. You don’t need 
the chicken itself to get the same nostalgic expe-
rience. Like alcohol-free wine (which is surging 
in popularity), chickenless chicken is about more 
than taste: It’s about participating in culture. The 
deep-fried, faux-poultry confections, despite their 
obscure ingredients, fill a need—a cultural soft 
spot and a growing market share. 

The fake chicken wars
Fake nuggets fill my freezer. Right now, my 

roommates and I have four different brands, each 
packed in earthy green tones and labeled with law-
suit-skirting phrases like “chickenless strips” and 
“chik’n.” One brand is Boca, a stalwart vegetarian 
brand started in the late 70s (now owned by Kraft 
Heinz) that boasts “the original chick’n veggie nug-
get.” I find that their nuggets are quite similar to 
Morning Star Farm’s (owned by the Kellog Com-
pany), another decades-old company: powdery 
breading and not too greasy. In contrast, the nug-
gets from Raised and Rooted (owned by Tyson 
Foods) are a greasy nostalgia trip to McDonald’s 
play places; they waft umami flavors through the 
house and pack a deliciously huge caloric punch. 
We’ve also bought Earth Grown, Gardein, Trader 
Joe’s and Whole Foods brands. Lightlife has new 
tenders and filets, MorningStar has Incogmeato 
Chik’n, and Nestle is investing in fake meat too.

It’s a packed market, but two booming rivals 

hog a lot of recent press: Impossible and Beyond 
Meat. Like Coke and Pepsi, the Whopper and 
the Big Mac, Starbucks and Dunkin’, the big-
gest difference between the two powerhouses is 
the branding, not the products. This year, both 
Impossible and Beyond have branched out from 
fake beef and taken a highly publicized stab at rec-
reating chicken. 

The fake meat giants, which boast millions in 

seed funding, are focused on converting meat-
eaters. This month, Impossible came out with 
new vegan nuggets, and rival startup Beyond 
Meat is coming to the freezer aisle, too. After dis-
continuing its disappointing imitation chicken in 
2019, Beyond is trying again. Its fava-bean-based 
tenders, which have been at restaurants since July, 
are coming to grocery stores like Walmart as soon 
as October.

Standing beside the big rivals is the cool kid of 

fake meat startups, Simulate (formerly Nuggs), 
which is led by a 22-year-old from Australia 
named Ben Pasternak. The company is a media 
darling, and its branding is unconventional — 
unlike the earthy hues of other brands, Simulate 
is less “veggie” and more “edgy.” In a recent post, 
the brand’s official Instagram account parodied 
social justice slideshows with an absurdist story 
about Iceland. It starts with “What’s going on in 
Iceland right now and how you can help” and 
proceeds to describe a narrator’s “friend Jared” 
who said the narrator had “’mice hands,’ which 
is just so rude of him, because he knows I’m so 
sensitive about my small hands.” Later, the post 
shows a drawing of the narrator’s hand with a 
Nugg for scale. It didn’t make any sense at all, yet 
that was the point. 

Steeped in up-to-the-minute meme culture, 

and a whopping $44.99 for a pack of one hundred, 
the brand positions itself as the “Tesla of chicken 
nuggets.”

Where’s the beef? 
Vegetarians aren’t hippies anymore. Peeking 

behind the opaque walls of the meat industry can 
radicalize even the devout carnivore, and younger 
generations care more about the environmental 
impacts of what they consume. As observed in the 
rise of alternative milks, a climate-minded culture 
now invites vegan products — intentionally vegan 
products — out of health food aisles and onto end 
caps and advertisements: grocery’s prime real 
estate. 

At 15, I abruptly stopped meat after watching 

“Cowspiracy,” a documentary that unveiled the 
pernicious climate effects of the livestock indus-
try. Some of its facts and tactics were misleading, 
but its message holds up: Eating large quantities 
of meat is unsustainable. A 2018 study published 
in the journal Science found that while meat and 
dairy provide 18% of calories and 37% of the pro-
tein in our diets, they use 83% of farmland and 
produce 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas 
emissions. Those statistics have permanently 
changed the contents of my plate. 

Now, I am not only proud to have a climate-

conscious diet, but I am grateful that it’s easily 
attainable. It’s rare that I find a restaurant without 
a meatless option, and even fast-food giants are 
eschewing meaty menus at an astonishing rate. 
Passing on meat feels rather normal, not alterna-
tive. More than any time in recent history, the 
world caters to vegetarians. 

Why can’t the chicken cross the road? It’s too 

fat to walk

Imitation chicken is having a moment half a 

century after processed chicken itself captivated 
the world. 

If capitalism grows like a tree, the chicken nug-

get is its fruit: born out of an oversupply of poultry 
in the 50s and 60s, it took your grandma’s chicken 
dinner and returned something deboned, bat-
tered, deep-fried and packaged. Marketing efforts 
promoted a notion that true leisure wasn’t cook-
ing but consumption and nuggets allowed home 
cooks to sit back and relax. The work you once 
endured to prepare dinner had instead been done 
by an amorphous supply chain. The chicken nug-
get is, if nothing else, easy to prepare. 

Decades later, humans have a $66-billion-a-

year chicken habit. We’ve slashed their growing 
time to a third of what it once was and have bred 
birds that are nearly three times as large as birds 
a century ago. The chicken is the world’s most 
popular bird.

The chicken nugget’s ingredients, though ques-

tionable, don’t seem to phase people. Pink slime 
panic blew over, the headlines about lighter fluid 
in chicken dwindled away and the unpronounce-
able petroleum and corn derivatives weren’t 
enough to deter everyone. Celebrity chef Jamie 
Oliver showed a group of elementary schoolers 
how chicken nuggets are made, and though they 
let out groans of disgust at the liquified carcass 
and skin, they had no qualms about putting the 
finished product in their mouth. 

“Anyone want one of these?” he asked after 

his stomach-churning demonstration. When the 
kids proceeded to raise their hands and lunge at 
the plate, the camera panned to the chef’s disap-
pointed expression. 

Just like the traditional chicken nugget’s ability 

to transcend the bad press, fake chicken nuggets 
haven’t been phased by criticism of their ingredi-
ents or carbon footprint. Despite being ultra-pro-
cessed and packaged in plastic, a nugget forged out 
of soy may still seem greener than the real thing. 

Little research has evaluated the climate 

impacts of fake chicken, but there are studies 
about promising impacts of fake beef. A 2018 
report commissioned by Beyond Meat and con-
ducted by the Center for Sustainable Systems at 
the University of Michigan compared Beyond 
Meat burger with beef. 

Wednesday, October 6, 2021 // The Statement — 4

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

 VEGAN NUGGETS

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BY ANNIE RAUWERDA, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

