Have a Nugget

Have a Chicken Nugget tonight - in memory:

Robert C. Baker, an agricultural scientist who looked at chickens and envisioned chicken nuggets, not to mention chicken hotdogs, helping transform what is now a $29 billion poultry industry, died on Monday at his home in North Lansing, N.Y. He was 84. NYTimes

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Among the more than 50 chicken products that Dr. Baker and his team of technicians and graduate students developed were chicken baloney, chicken steak, chicken salami, chicken chili, chicken hash, chicken pastrami and chicken ham. He performed similar magic for turkeys and eggs, doing some of the earliest work on frozen omelets.

Part of the magic lay in extracting all the meat from the poultry carcass and reshaping it. In 1982, Forbes magazine credited Dr. Baker with having invented processed chicken in 1963. De-boning machines, which Dr. Baker helped develop, made the new shapes possible — even nuggets in the form of dinosaurs.

Perhaps we will dine at Dino's tonight. They make great dinosaur-shaped nuggets.