Posted April 26, 2015 8:15 PM ET; Last updated May 13, 2015 8:20 AM ET
[Excerpted from The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor, by Mark Schatzker, out now, published by Simon & Schuster.]
Chicken of the 1940s was nothing like it is today. It was expensive by modern standards, and since chickens were often the by-product of the egg industry, they came in a range of sizes. There were broiler chickens, which were young and tiny — some weighed in at just a pound and a half — and so tender you could cook them under a scorching-hot broiler. Next came fryers, which were a bit bigger and less tender, but still small. After fryers came roasters, and last came “fowl” — old hens that were so tough they could be used only in soups and stews.
[. . .]
In 1946 and 1947, regional Chicken of Tomorrow contests were held. The cream of that group was invited to compete in the national event in 1948, which is how 31,680 eggs from 25 different states found their way to a hatchery in Maryland. Once hatched, the chicks were raised in identical pens and fed a secret diet that contained a minimum of 20% protein, 3.5% fat and 7% fiber.
[. . .]
The very principle demonstrated at the Chicken of Tomorrow contest would go on to doom the flavor of chicken and dumplings for decades to come: Chickens can be changed through breeding.
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By 1967, Americans were eating twice as much chicken as they had in 1948, and by 2006, chicken had become so cheap and so abundant that Americans were eating nearly five times as much as they had in 1948.
The dream of Doc Pierce, in other words, has been gloriously realized. Chicken is number one. The country that formerly preferred beef now eats 26 billion pounds of chicken every year.
[. . .]
they are all broilers now. Words like “fryer” and “roaster” still appear in cookbooks, but they don’t exist anymore. We eat gigantic babies. As a paper in the journal Poultry Science puts it, if humans grew as fast as broilers, “a 6.6 lbs. newborn baby would weigh 660 lbs. after 2 months.”
[. . .]
We paid in flavor for this “improvement.” In 1961, Julia Child and her co-authors of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” stated that chicken “should be so good in itself that it is an absolute delight to eat as a perfectly plain, buttery roast, sauté or grill.”
Thirty-seven years later, Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” described chicken as “downright bland” and “essentially a blank slate.”
For the first 99.9925% of their domesticated careers, chickens ate all sorts of stuff: blades of grass, leaves, seeds, bugs, mice, frogs, meat scraps, dead rabbits, even snakes. Without green treats and outdoor foraging, chickens got sick and died. No one knew why.
[. . .]
A few years later, a Polish biochemist by the superb name of Casimir Funk took the stuff that makes brown rice brown — rice bran — and treated it with alcohol and phosphotungstic acid and was left with a tiny amount of an almost magical substance that could cure a pigeon just hours away from death by beriberi. Funk called this revolutionary substance a “vitamine.” (It was, in fact, vitamin B1, properly known today as thiamin, and which, over the past 50 years, has been depleted by half in vegetables such as cauliflower and collards.)
The study of nutrition would never be the same. Thanks to vitamins, deadly diseases like rickets, scurvy, beriberi and pellagra would become not only treatable but preventable. Eijkman was awarded a Nobel Prize. (Funk got bupkis.)
[. . .]
The taste of animal flesh is strongly influenced by what an animal eats. Flavor compounds in the food birds eat find their way into bird tissue. Scientists refer to this as biodistribution — it’s the same reason a dairy cow that eats onion grass produces milk that tastes like onions. And the food we feed chicken today has no flavor at all.
[. . .]
When you stop to consider that nearly half of all chicken sold is “further processed” — chicken nuggets, chicken sausage, chicken patties, chicken burgers, chicken strips, chicken cutlets, chicken Kiev — that adds up to a lot of “preflavoring.”
[. . .]
So much of the food we now eat is not only a lie, it is a very good lie. Modern food may be the most compelling lie humans have ever told.
http://nypost.com/2015/04/26/why-nothing-especially-chicken-tastes-like-it-used-to/
Why nothing, especially chicken, tastes like it used to
By Mark Schatzker
New York Post
April 26, 2015 | 6:00am
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See also PBS Frontline, The Trouble With Chicken at this link
http://enoughroom.blogspot.com/2015/05/pbs-frontline-trouble-with-chicken.html
