A few weeks ago, my mom called to tell me about a chicken dinner she made. She’d picked up a free-range organic chicken on clearance at Woodman’s for a good price, and she was raving about the fantastic flavor it had — so different than the usual supermarket chickens taste. Our family eats both organic and non-organic chicken (I’ll admit price is a huge factor in that) but I knew what she was talking about. There’s something different about the flavor of organic and free-range meats. I was thinking about this when I read the following article, “Modern chicken has no flavor,” at Salon.com earlier this week. Here’s an excerpt:
Wright urged me to try a taste test at home if I was so inclined. Take three different whole chickens, she said — an average, low-priced frozen one from the supermarket; a mass-produced organic version like Bell and Evans; and what she termed a “happy chicken.” This was a bird that had spent its life outside running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs and worms. Roast them in your kitchen and note the taste. The cheap chicken, she said, will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and monotonous diet of corn and soy. The Bell and Evans will have a few “roast notes and fatty notes,” and the happy chicken will be “incomparable,” with a deep, succulent, nutty taste… Modern chicken, he grumbled, has no flavor. “They grow them so fast, they don’t have time to develop flavor,”
The article goes on to discuss the myriad of soy-based flavorings that restaurants and prepacked meat manufacturers use to re-flavor chicken. This re-flavoring may actually be conditioning us to like the taste of restaurant-cooked and pre-packed food better, as it becomes nearly impossible to duplicate that kind of flavor at home. I found this interesting and thought you might too. The entire article is excerpted from the book, “Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal” by Melanie Warner.
coupondad says
the “natural magic” that Zaycon chickens goes through
in order to produce those “unnaturally” huge breasts.
Their breasts seem to be sized as from small turkey’s.
Perhaps they teamed up with Platex and their old
“Cross your Heart Line” to provide the needed support
so those birds are able to walk around once in a while.
We’ve purchased whole organic frozen chickens from
an egg farmer in Wisconsin, that were absolutely scrumptious
and never were the breasts abnormally large.
Go figure.
treydawgmt says
I try to eat only pasture raised, non-hormone meat products. I buy most of my beef, pork, chicken, turkey, and lamb direct from farmers mostly very local. (Within 10 miles of my home). There IS a price difference. Often times significant. But there is a HUGE taste difference, as well as health benefits.
Also, I usually purchase whole or half hogs and cows making it much more reasonable, and coupon to help save on the rest of my groceries to allow me to do this.
If anyone is interested on where they can get these products or purchasing a portion of a whole hog/cow, etc, let me know. I often purchase a whole cow and split it with others, and am always open to adding more people, reducing the cost more.
Outlander says
Everyone should watch the documentary called “Food, Inc”. It is very hard to watch.
I would love to buy farm fresh eggs if anyone knows where to get them..
nix12618 says
My mother, who is 89 years young, has been complaining for years that beef has no flavor any more and she is mostly right. We used to buy soup bones and the broth we made was very beefy flavored. Now you buy bones and have to use beef paste to get any flavor at all. Steaks are rarely full of flavor even when you buy the most expensive Angus. I sent away for grass-fed beef steaks and was very excited, thinking that they would be full of beef flavor. Unfortunately, they were very dry and just as tasteless as store bought.
This is probably why Wal-Mart adds a salt solution to all their beef and pork when packaging it. Sad….
Frugalista says
I was at a wedding reception once and one of our friends who has been living in China brought her Chinese boyfriend. As we ate the chicken dinner, he commented, “American chicken doesn’t taste like chicken.”
Our friend blamed the mass production and corn diet, which surprised me because I thought that in China they would be produced at least as badly. But maybe they were right.