Thread by @opinion

Dark chicken meat generally tastes better than white, yet it’s far cheaper.

In April, the wholesale price of boneless thigh meat was about two-thirds that of boneless breast meat in April trib.al/8TweobL

The modern chicken era dawned in 1923 when farmer Cecily Steele of Ocean View, Delaware, ordered 50 chicks and was sent 500 by mistake.

She decided to raise them for meat and sell them as soon as they were big enough trib.al/8TweobL

At the time, Americans ate about one-seventh as much chicken meat per capita as they do now, and almost all of that came from mature hens.

Simmering a chicken for hours was one way to make it tender enough to eat trib.al/8TweobL

Steele’s young chickens were different, and proved a big success.

By 1926 she was raising 10,000 birds at a time, and by 1952 such mass-produced young “broilers” had replaced egg-laying farm chickens as America’s main source of chicken meat trib.al/8TweobL

Generations of breeding have resulted in broiler chickens that take less than seven weeks to reach an average weight of 6.4 pounds, an unnatural amount of which is breast meat.

Chicken has supplanted beef and pork as Americans’ main source of meat, period trib.al/8TweobL

The notion that red meat is worse for you than white meat has come under a lot of fire recently.

Researchers made headlines in 2019 with their conclusion that, after decades of studies, there isn’t persuasive evidence for it trib.al/8TweobL

There’s even less evidence that dark chicken meat is worse than white meat: it has more calories and fat per ounce, but that means it’s also more filling and less in need of, say, a cream sauce trib.al/8TweobL

But the belief that white chicken was a superior, healthier product was still very much on the rise in the 1980s, which is when the fast-food industry began to fully embrace chicken:

🐔Kentucky Fried Chicken
🐔McDonald’s
🐔Chik-fil-A
trib.al/8TweobL

The original McNugget was not all white meat; it was an amalgam of breast meat and other bits of chicken.

When Burger King unveiled its rival Chicken Tenders in 1986, it emphasized that they were “real filets of all-white-meat chicken breasts” trib.al/8TweobL

McDonald’s didn’t switch the McNugget to all white meat until 2003.

Burger King’s version served as the template for the chicken fingers and strips that became the fall-back food for picky eaters across the nation trib.al/8TweobL

So as U.S. chicken consumption rose and rose, the imbalance in demand for white meat versus dark grew as well.

What to do with all that excess dark meat? Well, sell it to foreigners who hadn’t yet been talked into preferring white meat trib.al/8TweobL

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia became the first big overseas customer of cheap U.S. chicken.

China has since stepped in as the top importer of American chicken meat, buying not just legs and thighs but also huge quantities of chicken feet trib.al/8TweobL

Happily for the domestic chicken industry, Americans have begun buying more dark meat.

This shift may have begun with the spicy Buffalo wing, which was invented in 1964 but went mainstream in the 1990s trib.al/8TweobL

Wings are technically white meat but served with the skin on they’ve got lots of fat, which is part of what makes them taste good.

Thanks to the Buffalo wing, they have gone from cheap byproduct to the most valuable part of the chicken trib.al/8TweobL

Deboned thighs became widely available in the 2000s, and in 2008/09 usually sold at a 40% discount to deboned breasts.

That gap has since narrowed, with boneless thigh prices briefly exceeding boneless breast prices at several times over the past year trib.al/8TweobL