Robert C. Baker
Sources
By Sydney Stroud
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/love-chicken-nuggets-thank-cornell-poultry-professor-robert-c-baker-62527/?no-ist
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2012/12/robert_c_baker_the_man_who_invented_chicken_nuggets.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_C._Baker
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/nyregion/16baker.html?_r=0
Robert C. Baker
Inventor of chicken nuggets
Conclusion
Personal Background
- Born in Newark, NY on December 29, 1921
Robert C. Baker's invention had a large impact on our lives and the food industry. Soon after he invented chicken nuggets, they became popular and many people began to eat them and that caused one of the largest fast food companies, McDonalds, to "create" their own version of the chicken nugget. Once McDonalds started selling chicken nuggets, they became even more widespread and they are still a very popular food to this day.
- In 1970 he founded the university's Institute of Food Science and Marketing.
- He invented chicken nuggets while working at Cornell University.
Education
- Baker was elected a fellow of the Institute of Food Technologists in 1997.
- He died on March 13, 2006 in Lansing, NY
- Robert Baker earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1943
The First Chicken Nugget
- Robert Baker traveled the world innovating how people eat and view chicken. He spent his entire academic life at Cornell University (1957-1989), and published some 290 research papers.
- His bachelor’s degree, from Cornell, was in fruit agriculture.
- Accredited to him are more than 40 poultry, turkey and cold cut innovations, making him the "George Washington Carver of poultry"
- Due to his contributions to the poultry sciences, he is a member of the American Poultry Hall of Fame.
- He aspired to be a Cornell professor, but his widow, Jacoba, remembers his mentors advising him to work somewhere else first.
- Baker’s prototype nugget, developed with student Joseph Marshall, mastered two food-engineering challenges: keeping ground meat together without putting a skin around it, and keeping batter attached to the meat despite the shrinkage caused by freezing and the explosive heat of frying.
Education Cont.
- After earning a master’s in marketing at Penn State, Baker went to Purdue University for a Ph.D. in food science.
- He joined the Cornell faculty in 1949, and set up a poultry-products technology lab 10 years later.
- He took a position as a cooperative extension agent—a liaison between land-grant universities and local communities.
- While Baker was working on chicken nuggets, he also created 50 other edible things made from chicken and egg.