Wings Go This Way. Breasts, Over There.

I’m a big fan of Meatpaper, a print magazine dedicated to art and ideas about meat. After a couple of days spent being whooped by some sort of cold-like-flu-like writhing on the couch, sipping broth, and watching bad movies, I figured I should turn my thoughts back to the Portland Meat Collective website and the words I wanted to use to describe the entire endeavor on the site. In a meandering search for relevant words and phrases that might inspire me, I came across this article in an old Meatpaper issue: “Migration, on Ice
How globalization kills chickens for their parts” by Malia Wollan. The story is about “leg quarter countries” versus “whole chicken countries,” some of which is determined by a culture’s taste preferences and cooking traditions, but much of which is determined in large part by economic preferences. Major poultry producers in America–like Tyson–have managed to find a way to get rid of the darker meat that consumers in western European countries and the United States tend not to want by selling the “other” parts to places like Ghana, Cuba, and Iraq. Getting protein to countries in need seems to be the party line of Tyson, but their global dark meat marketing scheme is putting local producers–you know the people raising chickens in the same town that Tyson is importing to–out of business all together.  Wollan writes that inside the meat shops she visited in Ghana, Tyson leg quarters, per pound, were being sold  for approximately one-sixth the price of Ghana-grown chicken.

“In a country where more than 30 percent of the population lives in poverty,” writes Wollan, “cheap protein is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it provides affordable nutrition. On the other, it eliminates livelihoods.”

Some choice pullquotes:

“A woman eating a salad at a Wendy’s in Maine could be ingesting the breast of the same chicken whose gizzard flavors a chicken stew in Togo and whose thigh is served with borscht in Moscow and whose excess fat will soon go to a ConocoPhillips refinery in Texas to make synthetic diesel fuel.”

“Globalization and the rising demand for animal protein have turned the chicken into the world’s most mobile and abundant migratory bird. This modern migration isn’t one of whole birds, but rather of dismembered parts — wings in one direction, breasts in another.”

“In America, poultry farmers get corn and soybeans for below the cost of production. Here, humans are competing with chickens for corn. How can Ghana possibly compete?”