foodperson.com

There’s a relatively new bird on the block, the Smart Chicken. Smart Chicken, produced by MBA Poultry of Nebraska, first caught my eye at the supermarket a year or two ago because (a) it wasn’t produced by Tyson and (b) it’s label reported a couple of very positive attributes:

• it was fed only vegetable feed; no animal byproducts.
• it wasn’t dosed with antibiotics and hormones.

Those were very good things, to my way of thinking. The label also made much of its being air-chilled, rather than water-chilled, as is the norm for big chicken processors in the United States.

Best of all, though, the chicken tasted great. It was the juiciest, best-tasting chicken I’d eaten, apart from a (significantly more expensive) local organic chicken.

An article in 2005 in Meat & Deli Retailer magazine debated whether air-chilled chicken would become widely accepted in the marketplace. I would bet on it. The taste is markedly better, and the price, though higher than most industrial chicken, is reasonable to anyone who cares about how his or her food tastes. What is more, who wouldn’t rather get a chicken that, in essense, is slaughtered then refrigerated versus one that’s slaughtered and dumped in a vat of water with scores of other dead chickens to cool-and to soak up whatever dreck is in the chilling water?

Meanwhile, MBA Poultry, which introduced air-chilled chicken to the U.S. market with its Smart Chicken, has competition from Bell & Evans, an outfit in Pennsylvania, and a couple of smaller producers.

I say more power them both. I hope the consumers of America show them (and the other guys) that, given a choice, we will choose food that tastes better and that is prepared more healthfully.