For a while, I got into the habit of buying the store deli fried chicken and eating it in my truck before going into the store to buy groceries. You do not spend nearly as much on food if you kill the hungries first.
Starting about six months ago, one by one, all the stores started to switch from real, normal sized fryer chickens to what I call scam cut chickens.
Apparently the processing industry that specializes in chickens have come up with a way to increase profits and have got all the in store deli sections to go along with it.
I am a dark meat person. I always bought thighs and legs which were easy to eat in the car and then dump the bones in the trash container at the entry to the store when going in to get my groceries.
They started selling little bitty, almost half sized chickens instead of the normal sized birds that we all grew up eating.
To hide this, they take these very small chickens and cut them creatively such that a section of the bird that includes one half sized thigh and a bunch of rib bones gives more or less the look and shape of a full sized thigh. To add to the illusion, they take a bunch of skin and fat that originally covered the breast and mold it around these fake thighs and then add the breading. The result is something the size and shape of a real, normal sized thigh. Only, half of it is not only not thigh meat but is not edible. They make certain that one end of the thigh bone sticks out so that the customer will assume that this mass of skin, fat, and bones is a normal sized thigh.
They have been very careful how they label this product because they know it is a scam.
When they start out switching to this concoction, they normally sell it along with legs from a normal sized chicken. Eventually, after switching to per piece pricing rather than weight, they also start using the tiny legs from these undersized birds. Then they quit even pretending that these are legs from a normal sized bird. But, first they increase the amount of breading on them.
It has reached the point where you can not even find anyone selling real, normal sized pre-cooked legs and thighs.
To add to the scam, the normal 8 piece box of "dark meat" now include at least two very small but very breaded wings. Most of which is inedible.
The net result of this is that you can not buy legs and thighs and eat them in your car. Trying to eat one of these fake thighs while picking out the rib bones so that you do not choke to death is a very messy operation. And, of course, half of what you just paid for is garbage that you can not eat which you now have to dispose of somehow.
Needless to say, I rarely buy store cooked chicken anymore.
To add insult to injury, all the stores that sell this scam pre-cooked dark meat also sell bags of leg quarters consisting of normal sized (as in large) legs and thighs in their meat section.
I keep waiting for a class action lawsuit after some child is sent to the hospital after choking on a piece of rib bone buried in the mass of one of one of these fake thighs.
Sorry about the rant, it is just that slowly all the normal things that have been part of my diet are disappearing due to greed. Why can't they just leave the product alone and raise the price if they need to?
