Words From: Bret Thorn, senior food editor
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A story I wrote went viral recently.
Not super viral — not Harlem Shake viral. But it got passed around on Twitter a fair amount and generated some discussion on Facebook.
The story was about how sales of “boneless wings” had grown faster than actual chicken-wing sales in 2012.
I didn’t think that was a big shocker. Boneless wings are made from chicken breast, which has uncharacteristically been cheaper than wings for a while now. It makes sense for restaurants to switch to the cheaper product, which tends to appeal more to women anyway and which, according to point-of-sale analysis done by GuestMetrics, fetched a higher average price on menus than actual wings did last year. Everybody wins.
But not everyone thought so.
“This is a travesty, America,” one reader observed on Twitter. That was then retweeted by celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, respected food scholar John T. Edge and several hundred other people.
I assume their objection was that boneless wings aren’t proper wings. They’re 100-percent chicken, it’s true, but they’re not wings. So they’re fake — glorified chicken nuggets, some people said.
A discussion began on my Facebook page, in which I explained why chicken breast is cheap. American producers have bred chickens to have large breasts because that’s the part of the chicken Americans like. However, most of the world prefers dark meat, and with the explosion in wing popularity and the softening of the U.S. market overall, wing prices have risen while breast prices haven’t.
Straightforward enough, but nonetheless someone started harping on genetic modification and told me to read “Oryx and Crake.”
That’s a book — a terrific, surprisingly non-preachy one, it turns out — by Margaret Atwood about a dystopian future run by evil corporations that genetically modify pretty much anything they can. So there are iridescent green rabbits hopping around, thanks to DNA borrowed from jellyfish; scent-free docile raccoon-skunk hybrids called rakunks; and ChickieNobs.
ChickieNobs are bulb-shaped hunks of flesh with a mouth on top and a bunch of fleshy limbs with chicken parts growing on the end of each of them. Some grew only breasts; some specialized in drumsticks.
I guess that’s what came to mind when I said chickens were bred to have large breasts, but it’s not what I meant.
It was a good illustration of where some people’s minds go when they start hearing about what they think is adulterated food.
Scandals, such as the latest one about horsemeat disguised as other meat in Europe, don’t help matters. But even without them, more people are asking questions about where their food comes from.
And regardless of where it comes from, it makes sense for restaurateurs to have ready answers.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @FoodWriterDiary.
