Developed in the 1950s by finding a way to make a coating adhere, chicken nuggets have become a very popular fast food restaurant item, and are widely sold frozen for home use.

[1] The chicken nugget was developed in the 1950s by Robert C. Baker, a food science professor at Cornell University, and published as unpatented academic work.

Baker's innovations solved these problems and made it possible to form chicken nuggets in any shape by first coating the meat in vinegar, salt, grains, and milk powder to make it hold together and then using an egg- and grain-based batter that could be fried as well as frozen.

[3] Dinosaur-shaped (or simply dino) chicken nuggets were first trademarked by Perdue Farms in 1991, and its rise in popularity was possibly assisted by the success of the Jurassic Park franchise.

This is done either manually, or by a series of automatic blades, or by a process called grinding (a method of deboning in which the softer parts of the chicken carcass are forced through a mesh, leaving behind the more solid pieces, resulting in a meat paste.

The dish has inspired gourmet restaurants,[11] exercise routines,[12] and even feature-length productions, including Cooties, a movie about a grade school child who eats a chicken nugget infected with a virus that turns prepubescent children into zombies.

[1] On Twitter, the most retweeted tweet of 2017 was made by Carter Wilkerson who asked Wendy's what it would take for them to offer him a year of free nuggets.