I can not think of anything more bland than chicken. It is today the ubiquitous meat in today’s cuisine. Versatile, relatively inexpensive, it far more prevalent than beef, pork or fish. At one time, chicken was a far more expensive meat product but mass production by farmers today that can produce a grocery ready bird in six weeks from the time the chick hatches has driven the cost as low as it can go.

Yet in the rush to provide the ready for the table meat, producers seem to have left out the most important quality of all and that is taste. Sure, chicken tastes great when gussied up with seasonings or sauces or coated with fat soaked breading which appears to be the most popular way of preparing it but when it comes to the ultimate test of taste, the roasted whole bird, it comes out pretty flat.

I remember when I lived in Germany, the chicken I ate there was a revelation in taste from much I was used to in living in Canada and the United States. A much tastier bird but it was also much more expensive as well. So I wonder if it was ever possible to get chicken as good as it was before it became an assembly line product. This is not to say that the latest trend of organic natural chickens is the solution. While free of the noxious additions to the birds’ diets to get them ready, the breeding stock is generally the same as the mass producers which means that the birds are breed for quick growth to market and have a high proportion of white meat to dark meat.

There has been a bit of movement in the direction of providing such birds once again. As part of the Slow Food movement, there has been a trend to return to the heirloom breeds of chickens that have not been engineered to remove taste from the bird along with more naturalistic growing methods that remove birds from the stressful confines of the chicken barns and place them in the natural settings that they belong. It is still a minuscule portion of the overall business and certainly not one to replace the current industry practice of raising poultry. The birds themselves are much more expensive than the grocery variety and while I have not tasted such a chicken I can draw on my memories of eating wild game like grouse, seabirds, ducks and other fowl and know what a flavorful bird can be had. Sites like Heritage Foods can readily supply poultry along with other farm products for a certain price and if you are someone who wants to sample what you have been missing out in your life, it may be worth your time and money to splurge once in a while on such items.

Update: Locally renowned blogger and all around great person Esbee, clued me in to a news article in today’s Journal about a local farmer who is growing chickens much in the way that I wished in my post. How about that? Perhaps it is time for I to head downtown and check it out at the Farmers’ Market.