Followup: Food Math
Per our unofficial field work, a McDonald's chicken nugget is approximately 1.5 inches long, by 1 inch wide, by about .5 inches deep. Let's ignore its varied shapes, and just call it a rectangular prism. This gives us a volume, per McNugget, of 0.75 inches.
At most McDonalds restaurants, you can buy four McNuggets for a dollar -- meaning your $500 gets you 2000 nuggets, or 1500 cubic inches of deep-fried all-white-meat chicken bites. For those of you keeping score at home, that is also just under one cubic foot, or about one third of a human body (this per the no doubt entirely accurate lyrics of One Man Guy, by Loudon Wainwright III, where a person is "three cubic feet").
It is worth noting at this juncture that the goal of our investigation here was to see if $500 would buy you enough chicken nuggets to fill a jacuzzi. The answer is, sadly, no: even the smallest jacuzzi we found holds a whopping 200 gallons, which is 26.73 cubic feet, or the equivalent of $15,400 worth of chicken nuggets. Or $10,266 if it's a 6-piece-for-a-dollar sale.
Consider yourself informed.
[Photo: Ms. McNugget via Kate Shepard's Flickr]
Comments
But wait -- you wouldn't have to compact the nuggets, so there would be plenty of air between them. Maybe 1/2 air, 1/2 nugget in total volume. And even an ankle-deep layer of nuggets would be enough to kind of wallow around in. Actually, I bet you could have a pretty good time with $500 worth of nuggets in a jacuzzi!
Posted by: Peter | July 15, 2008 04:52 PM
Ooh, great point, Peter! If we pack the nuggets in too tight, there won't be room for folks to dive into the nuggets and splash (nugg?) around.
Posted by: Helen | July 15, 2008 05:07 PM
Nugg: possibly the least necessary and most wonderful new verb ever.
Posted by: Paul Gowder | July 15, 2008 05:16 PM