Tasting Like Chicken: Its Evolutionary Origins.
Tasting Like Chicken: Its Evolutionary Origins.
At least once a week, someone tells me that some food other than chicken “tastes like chicken.” People throw the analogy around constantly. Virtually any meat that is pale in color, firm in texture, and lacking a strong flavor is subjected to the chicken comparison.
Why chicken? It’s probably at least in part because most of us haven’t eaten very many types of meat. The meat universe of a typical American carnivore is limited to chicken, turkey, beef, pork, and perhaps lamb. That’s a pretty narrow selection in a world that includes more than 10,000 species of birds—let alone the rest of the vertebrate world. (And saying that things “taste like chicken,” it appears, is a distinctly American habit.)
The range of species I’ve heard compared to chicken, flavor-wise, is very broad across the evolutionary spectrum: various birds, of course, but also snakes, lizards, small mammals, certain fish. Which made me wonder: Can we trace the taste of chicken back down the evolutionary tree to a common ancestor? What was the first creature in evolutionary history that tasted like chicken? And for how long in the Earth’s history has life been tasting like chicken? Something had to come first, and I don’t think it was either the chicken or the egg.
In order to answer this question, we need to start with chickens and work our way back through the evolutionary family tree.
Does chicken taste like chicken? Don’t laugh—this is an important question. Even lifelong chicken eaters usually have a very narrow experience because the birds sold in grocery stores are usually one of a very few breeds that have been designed to grow a lot of breast meat very quickly in factory-farm settings. A Plymouth roasting hen slaughtered for market at 7 weeks does not make for the same eating experience as a 2-year-old Rhode Island Red. I once ate a bantam rooster that tasted more like iguana than a grocery