One of the humbler items on the menu at McDonald’s is the Chicken McNugget. It’s not as grand as the Big Mac, yet it’s a step above just ordering fries. The spiced and breaded ground chicken treasure has been a nationwide cornerstone of the menu since 1983. For a long while the nuggets were just slightly round clumps meant to be dipped in barbecue sauce, ketchup, honey mustard, or whatever sauce tickled your fancy (by all means, fight over what sauce is best among yourselves…even though we all know it’s barbecue, obviously). Over time, though, the McNugget shape became a cookie-cutter set of four shapes: the Ball, Boot, Bell, and Bone.
Um, yeah. There’s an obvious slight difference, but we’re not seeing a lot of “bones.” Anyway, McDonald’s Canada has been answering customer’s questions online and posting them on their page. One such question was “why the four shapes?” Their response was …. interesting? “The 4 shapes we make Chicken McNuggets in was the perfect equilibrium of dipability and fun. 3 would’ve been too few. 5 would’ve been, like, wacky.” Five is known to be a wacky number. Also, dipability is fun (see sauces above).
In the end, fun and dipability are kind of an unsatisfactory and dippy answer to why there are four kinda-distinct shapes to the McNugget, but it’s not like we’re going to stop eating them because we’re suspicious of how they look. We’ve got love for every shape of McNugget out there.
(Via Food Beast)
