This post is on Healthwise
JULY 26, 2015
BY CHRIS CHAN
Due to the combination of selective breeding and diet, flavour has been practically sucked out of the modern chicken – which is why almost all commercially-produced chicken now tastes a little like soaked kitchen paper. Even more expensive or premium free-range or organic chickens would not taste like the chickens of past years as their provenance would be from chickens designed to grow as quickly as possible – and very probably they are also fed the same high-carb diet as battery chickens.
The only difference is that these premium chickens are raised in slightly different environments. It’s a subjective opinion (shared by many) that good-quality free-range chickens do taste significantly better – they would be from older or more original breeds and especially if they are fed a more traditional diet with grass and other greens.
But this lineage and practice of providing green diets is being eroded each year as the demand for chicken increases and farmers resort to using faster-growing breeds and more convenient, cheaper feeds. In the end, the chicken business is mainly about money, like most things in modern society.
In any case, the food industry initially did not really care about the lack of taste in chicken as it was so delighted at the increased meat productivity of the new birds, meaning that they can still sell chicken at prices which made them cost-attractive compared to other meats.
MORE: The story of a superchicken
Regarding taste, the simple solution was to promote the use of sauces, stock cubes and other seasonings which made chicken more palatable. Famous chefs around the middle of the 20th century were often commenting about the delightful taste of chicken and how little needed to be done to make an outstanding meal from it – but by the 1990s, modern cooks usually derided chicken as banal and at best, a “blank slate” devoid of any inherent flavour.
In fact, these days, when we taste some bland meat which we cannot quite identify, we tend to say that it “tastes like chicken”. It is a little sad but chicken has become almost a generic way to express blandness in other meats.
We seldom notice the background activity which induces us to pick up a prety packet of frozen chicken at the supermarket.
The lack of flavour in chicken started to become a problem in the last few decades as people started demanding more quality and better tasting food, while at the same time wanting everything to be as cheap as possible. This conundrum was addressed in several ways, for example, by repackaging chicken as sausages, strips, kievs, burgers, nuggets or coating it with seasoned batter for baking/frying.
Some suppliers even inject plain chicken meat with liquid flavouring to make it tastier and juicier. These techniques are called flavour solutions and creating flavour solutions is now a far more complicated business than raising chickens.
At a basic level, a flavour solution usually involves recognisable seasonings such as herbs and spices (garlic, pepper, tarragon, etc), hidden compounds (monosodium glutamate, disodium guanylate, etc) and secret proprietary additives such as blends of “natural” and synthetic seasonings.
Combine bits of chicken with flavour solutions, add in a few preservatives such as nitrates and you are now looking at the frozen chicken meals section of any modern-day supermarket.
Actually, none of these processes actually improve the inherent quality of the chicken meat, even though most sensible people would demand or prefer such an improvement.
In fact, the unspeakably crowded conditions in which battery chickens are kept meant that they often caught and spread diseases which can wipe out millions of birds at a time. The solution was to add antibiotics into the feed – and as some of these antibiotics are the same as those used for people, it promoted the resistance of germs to antibiotics, which became a rather serious human health issue.
According to the UK’s Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (2013), currently around 700,000 people around the world die each year due to diseases which have become resistant to antibiotics and this number is projected to increase to 10 million by the year 2050.
To be fair, antibiotics are used not only for chickens but also for sheep, cattle and pigs and the problem is now so huge with chickens that some major chicken producers in the United States have begun restricting usage to only a class of antibiotics called ionophores, which are not used for humans.
The lack of flavour in chicken is addressed by repackaging chicken as sausages, strips, kiev or nuggets. Filepic
What we don’t know
But despite all the news, we don’t tend to notice that we are actually eating stuff of rather poor quality and in fact, we notice it less and less each year. This is because of something the food industry calls the “dilution effect”.
It’s the explanation why frozen supermarket pizza tastes much better than it did 10 years ago, and why we often buy and eat food that we know is probably not great for health. And it is simply because the food industry never stops research into means of making processed foods taste better and presented better.
The modern food industry now spans vast areas of the scientific world – covering diverse fields such as advanced organic and inorganic chemistry, engineering, molecular biology, botany, biophysics, physiology, osmology, etc.
Additionally, there are other food teams working on why and how we consume what we do – working in areas such as psychography, psychophysics, ethnography, demography, economics, psychology, statistics, and even social media management.
In the old days, it would all be done by a marketing department – nowadays, the marketing departments not only get told what to market but how to do it using metrics to determine pricing points, performance measurement, cost ratios and other such stuff.
It all makes things a whole lot slicker and cost-effective, and we seldom really notice all the background activity which induces us to pick up a pretty packet of frozen chicken kievs at the supermarket or order a red box of nuggets at a fast food joint.
The dilution effect lessens our expectation of quality by replacing it with flavours that are desirable or even practically irresistible – and the food industry clearly proves that it works.
Even though this article may sound a little critical of the food industry, in truth I have no real complaints about it – as what it is doing is providing affordable tasty food choices for ordinary people, sold in the most effective way to make a profit.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this and it would be ridiculous and unfair to look down at commercial food, provided that it is safe and nutritious. When I started looking into the supply of chickens in Britain, I found that there are farms which still sell old breeds of chickens, raised on traditional diets – so people do have a choice if they genuinely want real chicken, albeit at three to four times the price of normal premium chickens (as they take so long to grow).
There is some sort of an organic real meat movement going on in Europe too – an example is beef, where a few (expensive) London restaurants serve beef from specially reared traditional herds which number only a few hundred or even just a few dozen animals – and the quality and taste are exceptional compared to regular Angus or Charolais.
And of course, there is always Icelandic sheep, which is now also bred in Britain but regrettably only for the wool (and not for meat) so it now involves a three-hour flight to Iceland to eat it again. Of course, eating such expensive food is not what anyone would choose to do every day – but at least the chance to experience and taste real meat is always available, at a price.
It tastes better all the time
The pace and convenience of modern society has a huge downside – to match the momentum and volume of food consumption, most things now need to be homogenised and mass-produced while remaining desirable or preferably, becoming more desirable over time.
So it means that if you want to be an oddball and hop off the conveyor belt of mass-produced food, it is going to cost, and possibly cost quite a lot, especially if you want real meat.
Based on a little review of chicken production over the last century, it has become apparent that a lot of modern food is becoming more a collection of chemical formulas applied to ingredients which make the end products taste better each year, even as the quality of the primary ingredients goes down or becomes less relevant.
The inescapable conclusion is that, in many ways, much of modern food is a sweet white lie – it’s not unlike telling a child that a loved pet has gone to heaven and is playing happily there.
It doesn’t hurt and it’s probably a very kind thing to say, but it is still not quite the truth.
And sometimes, I do wonder if it is worth knowing the truth when things are quantifiably getting tastier and often also cheaper all the time – provided as stated, if the food remains safe and nutritious as well. And food safety and nutrition are rather complex subjects which might be worth bringing up later.
http://www.star2.com/food/food-news/2015/07/26/curious-cook-the-vanishing-taste-of-chicken/
