Should the young kid working in fast-food or retail really be the food safety critical control point, the kid that carries the brand on her shoulders?

A five-year-old boy has sworn off chicken nuggets after he was served a near-raw six-pack from a McDonald’s Drive Thru on the New South Wales south coast on Wednesday night.

Riley Luke’s dinner from the Woonona restaurant looked normal at first but was strangely “soft” when he bit it.

He alerted two of his brothers, who also sampled the pink poultry.

Together they ate about half a nugget before their mother, Tracy Luke, responded to their calls and told them: “Don’t eat that!”

The mother of four said the Woonona store manager told her, “Oh, sorry … we’ve had another one complain about that” when she returned later that night and asked for a refund.

She said she was later contacted by an area manager, who told her the error probably lay with “a young kid” working at the restaurant and asked her to remove a photo of the uncooked food she had posted on a Facebook page called Name, Shame and Praise Illawarra.

She refused.

“I’m livid. My son’s epileptic too – he could have possibly died from this,” Mrs Luke said.

“I said I won’t [remove the photo] until something’s done.

“I just don’t want this to happen to someone else.”

Neither Riley nor his brothers took ill in the following days.

Mrs Luke has since complained to McDonald’s head office.

A McDonald’s spokeswoman told the Illawarra Mercury the company was investigating.

Lydia Buchtmann, spokeswoman for the Food Safety Information Council, said chicken needed to be cooked all the way through, until it was 75 degrees in the centre, to kill the bacteria.

“People shouldn’t consume chicken if it appears uncooked,” she said.