Chickens are News

Lots of Chickens in the News! On one hand, the public is clamoring for more cheap chicken, which means more birds raised in crowded confinement. The following story is from The Economist:

ROASTED, fried or served with noodles, chicken is on its way to becoming the world’s favourite meat. Diners currently chomp through more pork—some 114m tonnes a year compared with 106m tonnes for poultry. But chicken consumption is growing faster—by 2.5% a year compared with 1.5% for pig meat—and is on track to overtake pork before 2020. And much more chicken is traded across borders: some 13.3m tonnes a year compared with 8.6m tonnes of beef and 7.2m tonnes of pork, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Chicken is on a roll.
The growing taste for fowl is a result of increasing prosperity in emerging markets, meaning that people can afford to put more meat on the table. Chicken tops the pecking order as the most affordable. It takes far less feed to produce a kilo of chicken than the equivalent amount of pork or beef. And religious strictures that bar beef and pork from cooking pots around the world do not apply to poultry.

The taste for chicken will boost production to 128m tonnes a year by 2020, according to Rabobank, a Dutch bank. The proportion hitting global markets will grow too, from around 14% to 17% of total output. The main impediments to faster cross-border growth are consumers’ preferences for fresh chicken and government policies to protect domestic agriculture, but rising food prices should stoke the appetite for cheaper, imported meat.
The business of raising chicken is generally concentrated in countries where grain is plentiful. Canny chicken farmers have also focused on places like Brazil where poor infrastructure makes it harder for grain producers to get their goods to market and to fetch global prices. That suppresses feed prices, which make up 50-70% of total costs. Production costs in America and Brazil, the world’s biggest producers, which between them provide two-thirds of chicken exports, are 30% below those in Europe and China, according to Nan-Dirk Mulder of Rabobank.
Trading chicken is far more complicated than merely plucking, freezing and dispatching the birds. Chickens don’t get sold whole; exporters have to optimise the “break-up value” of their fowl. The Western palate much prefers white breast meat. Asian consumers prize the more flavoursome brown meat from the thigh and leg. White meat may fetch four times more than brown in the West but costs much the same in China. Europe, a net exporter of chicken, sends legs and feet to Asia but imports white meat.
Wings, irritatingly limited by evolution to two per bird, are in short supply worldwide and prices are high. McDonald’s is rumoured to have been stockpiling them in preparation for the roll-out, which began this week, of its “Mighty Wings” range in America. But the dynamics of the global market is good news for rich-world consumers. The growth in Asian demand for chicken should mean a glut of white meat and lower prices in years to come.

But the NY Times is looking at a special program to raise heritage breed chickens on more interesting food for a longer time to produce better flavor for high-end chefs. Although the breeds involved are not mentioned, they must have some Buff Brahma influence. The article calls  them Green Circle and refers to "a heritage-breed chicken (in this case, one common to Gascony, the region of southwestern France" and "a heritage crossbreed." This could be the beginning of better understanding of the difference between heritage chickens raised on pasture and industrial chickens.

By JEFF GORDINIER

Published: September 16, 2013 151 Comments

EPHRATA, Pa. — They may be the most pampered chickens on the planet.

The chickens live on property owned by Leon Zimmerman, an Amish farmer and father of 12.

On certain days, a truck pulls up alongside their quiet, spacious coop on an Amish farm here and delivers a feast that seems tailored to a flock of two-legged aristocrats. Before long, the rust-colored birds are pecking away at vegetable peelings and day-old bread from some of Manhattan’s most elegant restaurants, like Per Se, Daniel, Gramercy Tavern, the Modern and David Burke Townhouse.

It is all part of an experiment that is bringing together elite chefs, preindustrial farming practices and a breed of French poultry that is rarely found in the United States. The goal: to see whether American restaurants can turn back the culinary clock and rediscover “what a chicken should taste like,” said Ariane Daguin, the pioneering businesswoman who is behind the idea.

Can scraps from acclaimed restaurants, where the best ingredients are used, create the table-to-farm-to-table chicken of the future — and the past?

New York diners will get to nibble on the results this week. After having been fattened up in Pennsylvania, about 220 of what the D’Artagnan company is calling Green Circle chickens will start showing up (usually roasted) on dinner plates at the same restaurants that helped feed them. For high-end chefs, who engage in a perpetual contest to track down the purest and most rarefied ingredients, it is a tantalizing prospect.

“When I tasted it, I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” said Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who plans to start incorporating the chickens into his ever-evolving menus. Witnesses say that after his first bite, Mr. Vongerichten was on the verge of tears; Daniel Humm, the chef at Eleven Madison Park, consumed an entire chicken in one sitting.

Still, a few raised eyebrows are to be expected. The image of chickens gorging on four-star ingredients can seem a rather operatic manifestation of today’s obsessions over food.

“I do think in some ways it’s a wonderful reaction to corporate poultry and corporate farming in general,” said Matthew Mills, a creator of “Fodder,” a satirical online show from the Cooking Channel. “But at the same time, it swings so far to the other side that it’s almost an Onion headline.” He cited a well-known episode of “Portlandia,” in which two diners aggressively interrogate a waiter about the provenance of a chicken.

Clark Wolf, a prominent restaurant consultant, agreed. “On one side, it sounds kind of wonderful and magical, and on the other side it sounds like the biggest stunt I’ve ever heard,” he said. “I mean, you know — let them eat zucchini?”

Ms. Daguin, the French-born founder and chief executive of D’Artagnan, a company that has played a major role in bringing ingredients like foie gras, game birds and Berkshire pork into the broader American marketplace, said that it was not a stunt, but part of a continuing mission to change the world by changing its palates.

Ms. Daguin, 55, recalled moving to Greenwich, Conn., from France in 1977 to work as an au pair and getting her first bite of mass-produced American chicken. “It was a crime,” she said.

For Ms. Daguin (as for Gallic chefs like Mr. Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud), a distaste for chicken that was “mushy and full of water,” as she put it, was intensified by nostalgic memories of chickens back home that wandered around the yard nibbling on carrot tops, onion skins and old baguettes — and ended up tasting rich and meaty, with an almost chewy texture.

What would happen, she wondered, if you took a heritage-breed chicken (in this case, one common to Gascony, the region of southwestern France where she grew up) and fed it scraps from fine restaurants?

For chefs like Michael Anthony at Gramercy Tavern, there is a philosophical appeal in finding uses for those scraps — and in supporting a fresh but old-school alternative to factory farming. “We know the horror of the caged birds,” Mr. Anthony said.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. In restaurant circles, a chicken that tastes like chicken is something of a holy grail. About half a dozen chefs have signed up so far, though the roster of restaurants is still in flux.

When Ms. Daguin approached Mr. Boulud with her proposal, he grasped it instantly, having grown up with similarly pastoral experiences. “For me it was not a foreign idea,” he said. (He contributed scraps from his restaurants as the food supply for a test run.)

Of course, these chickens are not dining on stale loaves from grandmother’s breadbox. On a recent afternoon at the farm, where a few hundred creatures inhabit a peaceful, 15,000-square-foot coop that would dwarf the size of most New York apartments, they clucked and ambled around pans of bread soaked in fresh milk, and white buckets full of leafy trimmings that would make a tremendous tossed salad.

“Some of this is nicer stuff than I have to eat when I get home,” said Mike Charles, a local poultry expert involved in the project.

The birds live on property owned by Leon Zimmerman, an Amish farmer and father of 12 who passed through New York City just once. “We’re not used to quite that much traffic,” he said. He has been raising chickens for decades, but never quite this way.

“We explained the concept,” Ms. Daguin said, “but for him it’s like: ‘What? You’re driving two and a half hours to give me vegetable scraps? I have them right here.’ ”

D’Artagnan poured more than $250,000 into research and start-up costs. Using the expensive hatchlings of a heritage crossbreed, and feeding them for longer than usual, has more than doubled the normal cost of raising chickens.

Mr. Anthony plans to serve a dish with breast and thigh meat from the chicken, as well as sausage fashioned from it, as a $22 lunch item at Gramercy Tavern. At some spots, the chicken will simply be incorporated into existing multicourse menus.

In spite of the expense, Ms. Daguin intends to take the experiment a step further, creating separate pens and roaming yards for the chickens that belong to each restaurant group. The Per Se chickens will eat only Per Se peelings and bread; the diet of the Gramercy Tavern chickens will come only from Gramercy Tavern.

The theory, anyway, is that each cluster of birds will have its own taste. (To get enough calories and protein, the chickens also feed on pellets made from corn and soybeans.)

“It’s kind of like a weird competition,” the chef David Burke said. “It’s like, ‘My chicken eats better than yours.’ At least that’s how I’m looking at it. I’m going to spoil my chicken like a pet.”

He spoke of trying to influence the flavor of the meat by throwing in mushrooms, celery root, pumpkin seeds, pretzel bread and maybe figs for sweetness. “Listen, if the chickens ate ginger and lemon, you would have a gingery, lemony chicken, I think,” Mr. Burke said. “You are what you eat.” (Alas, advance word has it that they avoid citrus.) Mr. Boulud wants to try garlic.

No matter what they eat, all these one-percenters of the poultry realm will meet the same fate. After 60 days, almost double the life span of a regular commercial bird, they’ll be trucked off to be slaughtered and air-chilled.

If the flavor of the birds and the spirit of the idea catch on with consumers, Ms. Daguin may add more Amish farms to the project. She sees it as a growth opportunity for her company, as well as an experiment in consciousness-raising that could influence cooks and diners around the country.

For chefs, the chicken is an experiment in creating an echo chamber of flavor. Or as Mr. Burke mused, “Maybe we’ll poach it in the same peelings that it ate.”