Just us (little) chickens

I don't eat a ton of meat, and most of the meat I do eat is chicken. Even then, I don't eat nearly as much chicken as the average American consumer, who scarfs down 93.5 pounds of chicken per year. I have no idea what my consumption is, but I do know there's no way I eat nearly eight pounds of chicken per month. Two pounds a month? Maybe three?

I do consume chicken in the home, and have two excellent recipes (sesame chicken, and a spicy, peppery chicken dish). I also have a pretty darned good recipe for chicken salad, but it's a big pain in the butt to make - and isn't all that discernibly better than the pre-fab chicken salad from Roche Brothers. So...

One of my favorite dishes is chicken paprikash, a soup known in our family as goulash. I rely on my sister Trish to make this, and she does an excellent job. Her approach is superior to that of my mother in that she doesn't add in any of the yucky chicken bits. Goulash features farina dumplings which I think are delish, but which have been compared to lead weights.

So, I'm a chicken lover.

I've never had Popeye's and, sadly, the nearby Popeye's (near Fenway Park) closed recently. There is a Popeye's at Northeastern University, so maybe I'll pop there for a sandwich on one of my walks.

There are no Chick-Fil-A's nearby. Boston has resisted them because of their stance on gay rights - and donations to organizations seen as anti-gay. But the company has backed off a bit, and I think that one will be opening somewhere around here pretty soon. (A few years back, the company also went after an organic kale farmer in Vermont for using "Eat More Kale" as their motto. I can't remember how that was resolved. Nothing could get me to eat more kale, but I did buy a tee-shirt.) I once tried a Chick-Fil-A sandwich in the Dallas Airport. It was pretty damned tasty.

Whether the sandwich comes from Popeye's or Chick-Fil-A, there's a looming shortage of the prime ingredient.

Little chickens, whose quarter-pound breasts fit perfectly inside a bun, are proving essential to the war effort. In the process, they’re getting harder to come by.

A shortage of the smaller birds derailed the Popeyes challenge to reigning champion Chick-fil-A last summer, and most petite poultry are sold in grocery stores, not in chain restaurants. Now the supply will be further tested as more competitors jump into the fray. McDonald’s Corp., the world’s biggest restaurant chain, is testing new fried-chicken sandwiches in four U.S. cities with the added pop of MSG, a controversial flavor enhancer it says it doesn’t use in its national menu. Wendy’s Co. is going all in, spending $30 million to beef up its chicken supply chain. (Source: Boston Globe)

As anyone who's bought a chicken in a grocery store in the last couple of decades knows, chickens have been supersized. In 1925 - admittedly before I was buying chickens - the average broiler was a scrawny 2.5 pounds. Today, the average broiler weighs in at 6 pounds.

But consumers, it seems, want the tastier, more tender, smaller birds. And the chicken sandwich folks want them because they fit better on a bun. But with the shortage, all this is coming at a cost. Little chicken breasts "recently reached triple the cost of breasts from a “jumbo” nine-pounder, a historically wide difference, according to Russ Whitman of commodity researcher Urner Barry."

So, while Popeye's and Chick-Fil-A, McDonald's and Wendy's, play chicken sandwich war with each other, you may be asking where KFC fits in all this.

Last year, they introduced something called the Cheeto Chicken Sandwich. Much as I love Cheetos, the thought of eating a sandwich where fried chicken, drenched in Cheeto sauce, sits on a bed of Cheetos is, well, just the opposite of the KRC parent brand's name. That's Yum. To me, the Cheeto sandwich sounds Yuck. 

Anyway, looks like it's about time for the chicken producers to stop fattening up their stock and downsize a bit.