MANCHESTER, N.H. — Fifty years ago, the breaded, fried chicken tender as we know it was invented in Manchester, New Hampshire.

At least, that’s what they say in Manchester. Such claims are usually impossible to prove, and the picture is clouded in this case because of the loose way the term chicken tender gets thrown around.

Those who are not particular about poultry terminology use tender to refer to any thin strip of boneless chicken. To people in Manchester and to chicken farmers, though, it means something specific: the tenderloin, a muscle along the backbone that gets very little exercise, hence its tenderness. Restaurants were cooking chicken sticks and chicken fingers before 1974. So far, though, nobody has seriously challenged Manchester’s status as first in the nation to embrace the true tender.

Whether you fully accept the claim or not, though, the floppy strips of white meat in a deep-fried crust do seem to have first appeared around that time. If you were born in the United States more than 50 years ago, you can probably remember a world without chicken tenders. If you grew up later, you can’t.

Today, the chicken tender is not just familiar. It is triumphant. It is a fixture of school lunches and kids’ menus, of all-night diners and gas stations. It can be found at airports, food courts and stadiums. It is a major reason for the double-digit sales growth that Chick-fil-A, Popeyes, Raising Cane’s and other chicken-centric chains have reported for five straight years.

Along the way, the chicken tender has become a symbol, although its meaning is hard to pin down. It can be an icon of simple, straightforward, unpretentious American taste. It can also be an expression of dull, unadventurous food engineered for the lowest common denominator. Restaurants, in their drive to stand out, have expended great effort devising crunchier breading, zestier dipping sauces, more tender tenders. And yet all the sauces in the world will never quite dispel the suspicion that the tender itself is, at heart, not very exciting.

If you share this suspicion, you probably shouldn’t voice it too loudly in Manchester. Last year, the city issued a formal proclamation declaring itself the Chicken Tender Capital of the World.

You can’t go very far in Manchester before bumping into a chicken tender.

They are sold at drive-in seafood shacks, coated in the same golden shell as the whole-belly clams. At a cafe in one of the hulking old mills beside the Merrimack River, they are served over waffles with hot honey and powdered sugar. A corner pizzeria in a residential stretch of northeastern Manchester is renowned for sweet and spicy Asian tenders that seem to be distantly related to General Tso’s chicken.

Like many stories about dishes that became touchstones of American cooking, the tale of the Manchester chicken tender starts with immigrants. In 1917, two men who were born in Greece and settled in Manchester, Arthur Pappas and Louis Canotas, opened a candy store downtown called Puritan. The shop grew and moved and grew some more.

In 1974, Pappas’ children added a large sit-down restaurant behind the shop, the Puritan Backroom. As one of them, Charlie Pappas, built out the menu, a fry cook told him “he had a small piece of chicken he didn’t know what to do with,” according to Charlie Pappas’ son, also named Arthur. This was the tenderloin.

“All it does is align the vertebrae,” said Russ Whitman, director of market reporting at Urner Barry by Expana, which tracks commodity prices. “It’s not used for walking or flapping the wings, so it is a very tender piece of meat.”

In those days, the tenderloin (or, to biologists, the pectoralis minor) was invariably sold with the rest of the breast attached. But if the bird was cut up before cooking, the tender has a habit of coming loose. This is what happened at the Puritan, where, after some tinkering, Charlie Pappas hit on a method for preparing it.

The recipe he devised is, in many ways, a peculiar item for a Greek-owned family restaurant in New England. For one thing, before it is fried, the meat soaks in a pineapple-juice marinade. It’s also served with what the Puritan calls “duck sauce,” a thinnish, yellowish, sweetish liquid. Arthur Pappas said that his father was inspired, in part, by the glowing orange condiment that Chinese restaurants give out with egg rolls, but that he experimented until “he came up with something he thought was a little different.”

In the early years, Charlie Pappas’ tenders were outsold by his barbecued lamb, broiled chicken breast and pizza. But something about the taste of fried white meat dipped in rejiggered duck sauce captured Manchester’s imagination. Word spread. Sales climbed. Imitators arose. Presidential candidates visiting the Puritan for meet-and-greets were obliged to eat a tender or two.

Slowly, inexorably, chicken tenders began to outsell everything else at the Puritan Backroom. At every birthday party, bar mitzvah and wedding celebrated at the restaurant, and there are many, tenders are mandatory. Although many, many tenders are eaten on site, even more leave the premises in takeout orders, sometimes in buckets of 150. On a typical week, Arthur Pappas said, the kitchen fries about 4 tons of tenders — 5 tons during the busiest times of year.

Orders of chicken tenders and French fries with a proprietary condiment it calls duck sauce at the Puritan Backroom in Manchester, N.H., Sept. 26, 2024. The breaded, fried tenderloin turns 50 this year. Yes, there was a time before it was sold in every cafeteria and airport. (Kieran Kesner/The New York Times)

Despite their local fame, fried chicken tenders were almost unknown outside New Hampshire for at least a decade. That changed for good in the 1980s, when Burger King, jealous of the McNugget, introduced its own hand-held morsels of fried chicken. A $20 million advertising campaign for the chain’s new Chicken Tenders worked too well. When locations around the country ran out of chicken, Burger King had to pull the ads.

The campaign had another effect, according to lawyers for the restaurant: It inspired imitators to sell their own chicken tenders. Burger King sued one of them, a poultry-packing firm, for copyright infringement. The trial was more dramatic than the run-of-the-mill intellectual property proceeding; on one of the nine days, a professor showed the courtroom where tenders come from by breaking down a 3-pound plucked chicken with a butcher’s knife.

Burger King won its case — the jury decided that, in effect, the words chicken tender described a product rather than a mere muscle.

One result of the verdict is that tender became a marketing term, like chicken fingers. Many people think the two items are interchangeable, although few of those people live in Manchester. Tender connoisseurs have little trouble knowing when they’ve ordered a pectoralis minor and been given a pectoralis major instead.

Even with Burger King’s help, chicken tenders did not begin to move in meaningful numbers until 1999, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture noticed enough volume to start tracking their price, and then only in the Northeast. It was, at that time, one of the cheapest pieces of the bird by weight, which made it appealing to restaurants.

“Because it was an unused portion of the chicken, it was a value at the time,” Whitman said. Today it is the most expensive cut. (In second place is the wing, another byproduct of chicken breasts that rose to stardom in the same period.)

The tender has other things going for it, too.

“Some of the popularity of the tender is that it is whole-muscle white meat that doesn’t have to be cut or portioned, and when cooked it makes a great hand-held item,” said Terrence O’Keefe, the content director of agribusiness news at WATT Global Media. The tender could, in other words, go from the box to the batter to the deep fryer to the table in minutes.

It wasn’t that easy in 1974, when most chickens in the United States were sold whole, according to data from the National Chicken Council. Since them, there’s been a huge shift toward cut-up parts. As carving technology at poultry plants grew more sophisticated, it became easy for processors to separate the tenders from the rest of the breast and pack them on their own.

One trait of the chicken tender that seems to have very little to do with its success, though, is flavor. On its own, without marinades or sauces, it has almost none. It is a piece of protein so mild it won’t offend anybody, although that, come to think of it, may be what has allowed it to come so far.

You could ask yourself why the least assertive part of the bird is the one Americans love best. You could wonder why no restaurant chain here has devoted itself yet to the French method of stewing gizzards to tenderness in duck fat, or cooking livers in pomegranate molasses in the style of Lebanon. You could get a little downcast thinking about how hard it is to find a good dish of cibrèo, the astonishing Tuscan stew of livers, hearts, coxcombs and testicles.

Or you could get creative, as the Puritan Backroom has done over the years. Besides its classic chicken tenders with duck sauce, the restaurant now offers tenders in a spicy breading, coconut-crusted tenders, and a version made by drenching the original recipe in Buffalo-wing sauce. Other restaurants will fry the meat in crushed cornflakes, Ritz crackers or Cap’n Crunch cereal. One brewpub offers more than a dozen sauces including Korean barbecue and Western apricot.

The front of the Puritan, where the Puritan Backroom is known for its chicken tenders, in Manchester, N.H., Sept. 26, 2024. The breaded, fried tenderloin turns 50 this year. Yes, there was a time before it was sold in every cafeteria and airport. (Kieran Kesner/The New York Times)

There’s something a little ridiculous about Manchester, the city that was once the center of the American industrial revolution, devoting so much energy to fried strips of chicken, and devoting itself so thoroughly that it can claim the title of chicken tender capital of the world. But there’s something impressive about it, too.

“It’s a silly idea,” said Nick Lavallee, who first went before the town aldermen to propose the declaration and kept bringing it up until the politicians surrendered.

“But you ask yourself: Is it true? Yes,” he went on. “Is it important? Sure. Manchester has had an identity problem. Why not point out the things worth celebrating?”

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Bethel University on Wednesday announced a $20 million donation that will help launch a health sciences school, the first of four colleges the university is developing as part of a larger restructure.

The donation comes from Barbara and Rollie Anderson, longtime supporters of the Arden Hills university and namesakes of the Anderson Center, which houses the university’s graduate physician assistant and nurse-midwifery programs, among others.

Barbara is a university alum. Rollie previously served on Bethel’s board of trustees and is CEO of the St. Cloud-based Anderson Trucking Service.

“We have a lot of family members in the health care field. The work that’s done in health care is a natural fit for expressing care. I see this as a place where our family can extend that kind of care,” Barbara said in an interview. “It’s a great opportunity for us to make a difference in the future for patients who are in a very vulnerable situation in their lives.”

The Anderson Family College of Health Sciences will support the university’s nursing and health care programs and combine health care courses and departments from the College of Arts and Sciences — the university’s undergraduate college — and the College of Adult and Professional Studies and Bethel’s graduate school. That includes applied health sciences, counseling, nursing, social work, nurse-midwifery and premedical offerings, among others.

“This allows us to have synergy between different professional programs as we collaborate with health care systems to provide clinical training spaces,” Provost Robin Rylaarsdam said. “And it increases our ability to do inter-professional training, preparing our graduates better for their careers — they’ll practice in groups with different types of health care workers, all cooperating for the patient’s benefit.”

The donation will support the hiring of a health sciences dean, as well as new clinical spaces and financial support for students. It’s the start of a restructuring at Bethel that will result in the creation of four colleges.

For the health sciences college alone, the university hopes to raise $40 million.

“We are restructuring in a format that emphasizes the discipline or the specific area of expertise and training that we provide. So this case, it’s health sciences. And so we’re really excited to start with this one,” Allen said.

The three other colleges will focus on business, arts and sciences, and biblical theology and seminary, Allen said.

Health workers in demand

According to the Minnesota Hospital Association’s 2024 workforce report, the overall vacancy rate for health care workers was 12.9% in 2024, down from a peak of 16.2% in 2022 amid the coronavirus pandemic. That rate was just 4.7% in 2019.

Overall employment is expected to grow much faster than average for all health care occupations in the next decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Due to employment growth and worker turnover, the government projects around 1.9 million health care openings per year through 2033.

Research by the Minnesota Department of Health points to shortages in nearly every health profession in nearly every region of the state, according to department spokesman Garry Bowman. The number of health care providers planning to leave the profession due to burnout more than doubled from 2019 to 2022, and there aren’t enough new nurses to meet demand.

For example, Minnesota institutions graduated 3,770 registered nurses in 2022, about 550 shy of what researchers say was needed.

Nate Chau, a student in Bethel’s physician assistant program, said students will especially appreciate the financial aid created by the donation.

“I think anything that can be done to alleviate that stress for students will help prevent the burnouts that are pretty prevalent in the health care field today,” he said.

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By ANITA SNOW and MARY KATHERINE WILDEMAN, Associated Press

PHOENIX (AP) — On just one sweltering day during the hottest June on record in Phoenix, a 38-year-old man collapsed under a freeway bridge and a 41-year-old woman was found slumped outside a business. Both had used methamphetamine before dying from an increasingly dangerous mix of soaring temperatures and stimulants.

Meth is showing up more often as a factor in the deaths of people who died from heat-related causes in the U.S., according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Death certificates show about one in five heat-related deaths in recent years involved methamphetamine. In Arizona, Texas, Nevada and California, officials found the drug in nearly a third of heat deaths in 2023.

Meth is more common in heat-related deaths than the deadly opioid fentanyl. As a stimulant, it increases body temperature, impairs the brain’s ability to regulate body heat and makes it harder for the heart to compensate for extreme heat.

If hot weather has already raised someone’s body temperature, consuming alcohol or opioids can exacerbate the physical effects, “but meth would be the one that you would be most concerned about,” said Bob Anderson, chief of statistical analysis at the National Center for Health Statistics.

The trend has emerged as a synthetic drug manufactured south of the border by Mexican drug cartels has largely replaced the domestic version of meth fictionalized in the TV series “Breaking Bad.” Typically smoked in a glass pipe, a single dose can cost as little as a few dollars.

At the same time, human-caused climate change has made it much easier to die from heat-related causes in places like Phoenix, Las Vegas and California’s southeastern desert. This has been Earth’s hottest summer on record.

Phoenix baked in triple-digit heat for 113 straight days and hit 117 degrees Fahrenheit (47.2 Celsius) in late September — uncharacteristic even for a city synonymous with heat. The triple digits have carried into October — this week, the National Weather Service again warned of excessive heat.

“Putting on a jacket can increase body temperature in a cold room. If it’s hot outside, we can take off the jacket,” explained Rae Matsumoto, dean of the Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy at the University of Hawaii in Hilo. But people using the stimulant in the outdoor heat “can’t take off the meth jacket.”

These fatalities are particularly prevalent in the Southwest, where meth overdoses overall have risen since the mid-2000s.

In Maricopa County, America’s hottest major metropolitan area, substances including street drugs, alcohol and certain prescription medicines for psychiatric conditions and blood pressure control were involved in about two-thirds, or 419 of the 645 heat-related deaths documented last year. Meth was detected in about three-quarters of these drug cases and was often the primary cause of death, public health data show. Fentanyl was found in just under half of them.

In Pima County, home to Tucson, Arizona’s second most populous city, methamphetamine was a factor in one-quarter of the 84 heat-related deaths reported so far this year, the medical examiner’s office said.

A fake watermelon, used to disguised a shipment of methamphetamines, is shown after a bust by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Friday, Aug. 16, 2024, in Otay Mesa, Calif. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection via AP)

In metro Las Vegas, heat was a factor in 294 deaths investigated last year by the Clark County coroner’s office, and 39% involved illicit and prescription drugs and alcohol. Of those, meth was detected in three-fourths.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration notes in its 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment that 31% of all drug-related deaths in the U.S. are now caused by stimulants that speed up the nervous system, primarily meth. More than 17,000 people in the U.S. died from fatal overdoses and poisonings related to stimulants in the first half of 2023, according to preliminary CDC data.

Although overdoses have been more associated with opiates like fentanyl, medical professionals say overdosing on meth is possible if a large amount is ingested. Higher blood pressure and a quickened heart rate can then provoke a heart attack or stroke.

“All of your normal physiological ways of coping with heat are compromised with the use of methamphetamines,” said Dr. Aneesh Narang, an emergency medicine physician at Banner University Medical Center in downtown Phoenix.

Narang, who sits on a board that reviews overdose fatalities, said the “vast majority” of the heat stroke patients seen in his hospital’s emergency department this summer had used street drugs, most commonly methamphetamine.

Because of its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, Phoenix is considered a “source city” where large amounts of newly smuggled meth are stored and packaged into relatively tiny doses for distribution, said Det. Matt Shay, a seasoned narcotics investigator with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

“It’s an amazing amount that comes in constantly every day,” Shay said. “It’s also very cheap.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized about 164,000 pounds (about 74,000 kilograms) of meth at the U.S.-Mexico border this last fiscal year ending Sept. 30, up from the 140,000 pounds (about 63,500 kilograms) captured in the previous 12 months.

And sellers often target homeless people, Shay said.

“It’s a customer base that is easy to find and exploit,” Shay said. “If you’re an enterprising young drug dealer, all you need is some type of transportation and you just cruise around and they swarm your car.”

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Jason Elliott, a 51-year-old unemployed machinist, said he’s heard of several heat-related deaths involving meth during his three years on the streets in Phoenix.

“It’s pretty typical,” said Elliot, noting that stimulants enable people to stay awake and alert to prevent being robbed in shelters or outdoors. “What else can you do? You have stuff; you go to sleep, you wake up and your stuff is gone.”

Dr. Nick Staab, assistant medical director of the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, said brochures were printed this summer and distributed in cooling centers to spread the word about the risk of using stimulants and certain prescription medicines in extreme heat.

But it’s unclear how many are being reached. People who use drugs may not be welcomed at some cooling centers. A better solution, according to Stacey Cope, capacity building and education director for the harm reduction nonprofit Sonoran Prevention Works, is to lower barriers to entry so that people most at risk “are not expected to be absent from drugs, or they’re not expected to leave during the hottest part of the day.”

Wildeman reported from Hartford, Connecticut.