One Day in the Life of a Chicken Nugget

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

One Day in the Life of a Chicken Nugget

King: Forks?

Becket: Yes.  It’s a new instrument…for pronging meat and carrying it to your mouth.  It saves you dirtying your fingers.

King: But then you dirty the fork?

Becket: Yes.  But it’s washable.

King: So are your fingers.  I don’t see the point.

-      Becket, Jean Anouilh

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Shukov always removes his hat when eating.  As a long-term prisoner in one of Stalin’s Siberian gulags, his purpose is to work and suffer until he dies.  Cold, malnourished, and overworked, there is no reason for Shukov to take off his cap over his evening bowl of fish heads and other, more mysterious bits of solids floating in the hot water except for this: Shukov is determined to maintain his sense of self. 

Most of the other prisoners have completely surrendered to dehumanization.  Shukov, too, can do nothing against the tyranny of Communism, but he can choose to remember who he is.  That he takes off his cap in the grim, cold chow hall causes him to stand out.

Shukov also eats with a spoon, a forbidden object, and not with his hands or a wood chip.  He cast the spoon from a scrap of aluminum in another camp some ten years before, and has managed to keep it concealed from the perpetrators of progress.  The illegal spoon is another symbol of Shukov’s self-hood, of civilization.

He can do nothing about his ugly, padded uniform made from scraps.  His number, Shcha-854, painted on his cap and trousers, is the identity imposed upon him.  But inside, and through subtle acts, he keeps his dignity.

The gulag’s chow hall anticipates modern dining in America: men wear their caps in restaurants and eat mysterious substances with their hands, and their formless clothing is badged with the alias identities of the Communist factories where it is made.

Quite often moderns stand as petitioners before windows or at stainless-steel counters in cinder-block, bunker-like structures for food and drinks whose antecedents, shipping, and handling are questionable.  Consider the now common chicken nugget, now made by many purveyors of comestibles, which is not a nugget although it may share some strands of DNA with a long-dead chicken.

Fred Turner, the man who in the 1980s invented the first chicken nugget for McDonald’s, died last week.  A generation has grown up eating this staple of fast food and cafeteria service.  Mr. Turner’s chicken nugget is finger food, perfect in a country where the possession of knives, forks, and spoons, even soft plastic ones, by The People can be suspect.

Hamburgers (not from Hamburg), tater tots (made from real tots?), tacos, wraps (not your granny’s coat), fish fingers (one wants to see that fish in the wild), and steak fingers (ditto for that cow), are all ordered from pictures and sometimes through loudspeakers: “That’s be a snakefinger basket, big ol’ chemical fizzy-drink, and fries!  Oh, and Prisoner #6 is to report to the delousing shed!”

In our sad world, are dishes, forks, napkins, menus, identifiable foodstuffs, and sitting at a table with one’s hat off really important?

In Jean Anouilh’s fictionalized play about the relationship between King Henry II and Thomas Becket, the king is unfamiliar with forks, an otherwise trivial matter which foreshadows his own uncivilized behavior later on.

 When the king says to Becket that he doesn’t see the point of a fork, Becket replies “It hasn’t any, practically speaking.  But it’s refined, it’s subtle.  It’s very un-Norman.”

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