The Last Word
Peck, Keenen
Chicanery I've been thinking about chicken lately. The food that simmers in the pots of millions doesn't taste like chicken any more. This occurred to me during a recent visit to Florida, one of...
...Keenen Peck, an associate editor of The Progressive, likes his chicken broiled but not broasted...
...The older the bird is, the more flavor it has...
...However, reducing the amount of "bacteria in the gut" affects the bird's flavor, according to Sunde...
...The butcher...
...Television...
...Though I would never doubt the word of the leading chicken expert of a major land-grant university in the Middle West, one of my co-workers has her own theory about insipid poultry: The newfangled broilers don't get enough "fresh air and exercise," says Kate Juderjahn, who raised fifty chickens in her back yard until an owl or similarly inconsiderate bird of prey destroyed her flock...
...So pass the wallpaper, and take the Colonel's advice: Lick your fingers instead of the chicken...
...The eighty million broilers that sign on with agribusiness concerns every week are uniform—birds of a feather and little capitalists every one of them...
...Sunde says today's commercial broiler is typically killed after seven weeks...
...Colonel Harland Sanders, who was once sued for calling his restaurants' gravy "wallpaper paste," would turn down a serving of the wallpaper itself, were he alive...
...The same holds true, I've found, for the poultry sold in my local supermarket and especially for the fowl hawked in fast-food franchises...
...Right beneath your nose and mine, commercial chicken has been turned into a medium for surface flavoring...
...Who is responsible for the disappearance of old-time chicken taste...
...It has almost every attribute of chicken except the taste, for it smacks only of whatever sauce or batter is affixed to the skin...
...Nine out of eleven on the panel could tell the difference, and the majority preferred conventional chicken...
...Squeezed by the pressures of the competitive market, the modern chicken has shrewdly developed characteristics—including taste-lessness—that enable it to reach the stores quickly and with minimum expense...
...Of course, Kentucky Fried stands at the low end of the poultry pecking order...
...Unfortunately, real chicken is not easy to come by...
...One way of speeding up the process is to spike the chickens' diet with growth promoters, and one way of protecting the living investment is to add a dash of antibiotics...
...But they are not really chickens...
...And it will continue to be a scarce commodity no matter who is elected President in November...
...Just walk into any Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, order a red-and-white-striped box of dismembered chicken, and strip away the Colonel's "secret blend" of eleven herbs and spices (which, by the way, seems indistinguishable from ordinary ground pepper...
...Alas, the chicken is to blame...
...The restaurateur...
...And it has chosen to live and die in the hi-tech environment of modern chicken factories...
...in the past, the average barnyard chicken celebrated at least its twelfth week before ending up on someone's picnic table...
...Why is America being denied genuine chicken...
...The exposed fleshy substance tastes no better or worse than the soggy cardboard in which it is retailed...
...This occurred to me during a recent visit to Florida, one of the so-called Broiler Belt states, where chicken is plentiful and, if you catch dinner on an Early Bird Special, cheap as well...
...Factory chickens are "kept in one spot," she notes, and that makes them weak and flavorless...
...You've never had chicken until you've had a real chicken," says Juderjahn, adding that the pure stuff is "yellow, not pale white" and "not so slimy" as its commercial counterpart...
...We did some work years back with germ-free chickens, comparing the flavor of the meat with regular chicken," he says...
...Chicken cultivators hold down their major cost— which is chicken feed—by growing the birds faster, he points out...
...Today's bird has learned to mature in half the time required by its ancestor twenty-five years ago...
...For most consumers, however, such options are out of reach...
...It has acquired a taste for antibiotics...
...Still, many discriminating ornithovores agree that higher-grade chicken also lacks chicken essence, the elusive piquancy experienced by eaters who were raised on farms, have traveled abroad, or are no spring chicken in age...
...A handful of food cooperatives offer organically grown birds, and here and there small farmers sell old-style chickens...
...Modern-day chicken isn't the same as the old one because the modern one grows so fast," explains Professor Milton Sunde, head of the poultry science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...
...The farmer...
Vol. 48 • March 1984 • No. 3
