This short article promises "The Reason McDonald's Chicken McNuggets Come in Four Distinct Shapes" and I'll save you the click by quoting the sizzling, deep-fried revelation…
The reason why they are all a standard shape and size is to ensure consistent cooking times for food safety in all McDonald's restaurants, the company wrote on its Q&A page. But the varying shapes are also geared toward kids. "Our Chicken McNuggets are shaped uniquely for kids and kids at heart-it makes dipping more fun!" the company wrote.
I don't buy that. I mean, I haven't bought Chicken McNuggets in a decade or three but I don't buy that explanation. It always seemed to me that they could have all been pressed/stamped into the same shape but someone was concerned that would constantly remind people that they weren't eating unprocessed chicken. They wanted you to think or maybe just assume that somewhere, someone was cutting up pieces of actual, uncooked chicken and then deep-frying it.
If they'd done that, the McNuggets would not have all looked alike so they said, "Okay, let's stamp them out into several different shapes so they don't all look nearly identical." And then someone else decided that four different shapes were sufficient to create that illusion. That's also why they didn't try to make any of those shapes look like, say, chickens or dinosaurs or letters of the alphabet. The less you think about it, the more you're likely to think there's real chicken under all that fried batter.