He doesn’t wander alone across the wilds of the Internet yet, so he can’t have come across a video of the English chef-crusader Jamie Oliver trying to turn school kids against chicken nuggets. It’s a fascinating document of our times, a clip from an early episode of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.” Oliver rode in to Huntington, W.Va., to save the townspeople from their own renegade appetites. One of his first acts was to gather some students from the local elementary school and, he said, “show them one of the most disgusting ingredients in some of the worst processed foods.”

The prime example is the chicken nugget, and the disgusting ingredient is what the poultry trade calls “mechanically separated chicken.” Oliver makes his version by grinding a chicken carcass in one of those food processors that can crush rocks. Then he adds chicken skin and forces the pulp through a sieve. At this point, he holds the pink mush up in the kids’ faces to watch them squirm. Next, he shakes on powders to flavor and bind it, “because this has got loads of connective tissue and things that aren’t really meat, to be honest.” He cuts out circles of this chickenish substance, dusts them with bread crumbs and fries them into golden cakes.

“Now who would still eat this?” Oliver asks the boys and girls of Huntington. They raise their hands, down to the last child.

Oliver seems to find this way more depressing than I do. To him, it’s proof that American children have been “brainwashed.” But to me, it shows that some kids are smart enough to get past the “ewwww” reflex, and that means they have a decent shot at growing into sensible, mature eaters.

Image Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times. Food Stylist: Molly Rundberg.

The pink mush, after all, looked just like what comes out of my food processor when I make chicken meatballs or sausages. Of course, I don’t start with a whole chicken carcass, largely because pushing mashed chicken through a sieve by hand to strain out ground bones is not my idea of fun. But many, many foods that look absolutely disgusting at some point in their creation taste absolutely wonderful by the time they reach the table. Potentially, this could even be true of mechanically separated chicken, which, seen from a certain angle, is nothing more than an industrial form of nose-to-tail eating. Cooks have been fashioning soup from carcasses forever; why not meat patties?