Jerry Seinfeld used to do a joke where he asked what part of the chicken was the source of the McNugget and a woman in Elkhart, Ind., may have found the answer.
Much to her dismay.
Last week, Raquel House stopped by her local McDonald's to pick up a four-pack of McNuggets, some french fries and an ice cream cone, but found something in the nuggets that is making her chicken about eating at the fast food giant ever again: A feather.
But she didn't notice the feather until after she took a bite from the second nugget, LiveLeak.com reported.
“I started to feel like there was hair in my mouth, and that’s when I saw that there was white hair on my tongue; and I looked at my food, and there was feathers coming off the nugget,” House told ABC57.com reporter Jason Aubry, who admitted being skeptical.
"When I met with her, she showed me photos she took and the nugget with the foreign object sticking out of it," Aubry said during his initial report. "It certainly did not look like anything I have ever seen in a nugget before, so we started to dig whatever it was out of the nugget.
"We eventually were able to pull it free from the nugget and take a closer look. The outside felt smooth and a little bit like plastic, or finger nail to me. It even appeared to have fibers shooting out of one end."
Harry L. Smith, who owns the McDonald's that supplied the McNuggets with the McFeather to House, gave the TV station this written statement: “We take matters regarding food safety and quality very seriously and caution anyone from jumping to conclusions. Upon learning about this claim, we immediately began the process of collecting the facts. Our customer’s health and safety is paramount.”
McDonald's representatives are trying to determine which supplier provided the batch of nuggets with the McFeather, and says they'd like to look at the object House found in her food, but say she won't let them see it.
However, she insists she is willing to allow them to examine the feather, but she is hesitant to let it out of her sight.
Meanwhile, House and Aubry didn't want to wait for McDonald's to do the investigation so they took the McFeather to Charlotte Wolfe, the owner/operator of Prairie Winds Nature Farm, and someone who has both raised and processed chickens.
After examining the object, she determined the strange object was a pin feather.
“It looks like a small pin-feather, from a broiler-type chicken that would be used for meat in just about any kind of processed chicken product,” Wolfe told ABC57.com, adding that the defeathering process can break the pin feather and lodge it in the bird’s skin.
No word on whether House plans to file a lawsuit, but she told Aubry the results of the investigation won’t matter much to her if the object turns out to be some other part of the bird, and not a feather.
“It needs to look like meat, and it needs to feel like meat. It doesn’t need to be other parts in there and if it is, then they need to put that on the box so that we know what else we are eating,” she said.
Meanwhile, Dumb As A Blog columnist Nik Manikatos believes House's experience is actually a feather in the cap for McDonald's.
"As gross as it is, I would be a little relieved to learn that McNuggets are made of real chicken, but this lady was not," Manikatos said. "It's like the thought of eating actual chicken is what sickens her and not the fact that she's eating some kind of Play-Doh byproduct."