dear wally 61 nuggets

Dear Wally-

I can’t get my 4 year old to eat anything but nuggets. It’s getting out of hand. I need some help before he gets scurvy from lack of fruit.
-Frustrated.

Dear Frustrated:
I’m hearing a lot of this from folks these days. Not sure what we really did before the now ubiquitous nugget. I cringe to think how many kids withered away to nothing in those dark, culinarily prehistoric days. We have McDonalds (I think) to thank and blame for nuggetization, and with childhood obesity issues plaguing the entire country, our kids are actually starting to look like nuggets! But while the fast food giant has opened a Pandora’s box of food and health-related problems, they are now nowhere to be found when it comes to fixing the problem. Assuming it is a problem…
There’s nothing inherently wrong with nutrition coming in a playful, unnatural form. The complete absence of nutrition notwithstanding, we’ve all been eating animal crackers for generations and we’re ok. So no marks against corporate for putting food in a novel package, especially if it helps kids eat. The bigger problem is that the nugget ends up being a suspiciously opaque vessel for the very kinds of things we do not directly want going into our loved little ones. There’s no accountability because science can’t even reverse engineer these things to ID the yuck and point a finger. (Point a fish finger, that is).
McDonalds is the single largest buyer of cow lips in the world. This is a horrific, urban legend ‘fact’ known to all kids on the playgrounds of all schools (along with unprintable things about Richard Gere and gerbils) and thus it must be true.
Cow lips.
Remember what Grandma said, “Don’t eat anything that can taste you back.” Once again she makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of cow parts that need to go somewhere and, when industrially homogenized into nugget form, well, the horns and hoofs and ears and tails finally have a handy, cheap place to go. Same for undesirable fish parts like tails and gills. In this (and only this) respect, the nugget is quite efficient- an engineering marvel, even.
If you work in a lumberyard and sell OSB or particle board, you know that sometimes a product is greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes, however, it is not and no amount of catsup can change that fact for the nugget.
We’re also doing children an anatomical disservice by letting them think chickens and fish have fingers. This very notion of chicken and fish fingers gets right up in the face of anti-Darwinist creationalists. While I personally think that fish will eventually evolve to walk on land and legitimately have fingers such that they can sit in a boat, drink beer, drop a hook in the water and ‘man,’ now is not the time for that discussion. Nor is it the time to speculate that over the next 30,000 years chickens will grow fingers and learn to raise their middle ones at us for our past transgressions against their kin like dipping their ancestoral body parts in jerk sauce.
I suspect parents, myself included, would be quite happy feeding a nugget of some known healthy material to their kids. It is for that reason that I have been working on an invention prototype—a wall mounted ‘nuggetizer’ which, with your financial help, I would like to sell on late night TV. My invention would bolt onto the kitchen wall and have a generous steel hopper with a long telescoping handle for leverage. Here’s how it works: You simply dump in broccoli, liver, peas, carrots, grapefruit and whatever else you find healthy and have laying around but your child finds repulsive as a standalone item. Then close the hopper lid and pull down the lever! The lever moves a plunger which shoves the stuff into a chamber under great force and out the other end --kinda like the human GI track. (hee hee).
It can be fun and educational for the whole family as they make their own appealing food and learn about physics at the same time. By screwing on one of the available mold shapes, your nutritious mush mix would be forced by 10 tons of compressive pressure into the shape of your choosing and voila! --out comes a ‘finger’ or a ‘nugget’ or a heart shape, or a 3d bust of Beethoven, Luke Skywalker or even (if I get enough seed money for a 3d AutoCAD modelleling tool) a full body recreation of a beloved departed family member like grandma made out of broccoli! 3 weeks of roughage in one little grandma-shaped nugget!
I’ve tested extensively and found that the perfect binder for the raw ingredients in the nuggetizer is the Dear Wally column (after it has been read of course). Just rip it out of the BSP, crumple it up and toss it in! It adds a nice crunch and will help your loved ones stay regular while giving them a shiny coat.
This could be an all around win/win and more importantly, deal a crippling proletariat blow to ‘big food’ by arming the masses with the micro-industrial food processing capacity heretofore only dreamt of.
(You have been dreaming of this, right??)
The nuggetizer might be the solution. But if you are worried about scurvy now, before I can get to market, sign your 4 year old up for a few month tour on a British warship- they figured the scurvy thing out years ago.
-Wally
Got a question for our advice columnist or just want to invest in his hair-brained schemes? Contact him at cwn4@aol.com