The Meat Of The Matter

Today is the Super Bowl, and while I have a healthy interest in the game and a fairly personal interest in the commercials, there is room for other intrigue in the day. Looming large for many is the food. I myself have opted to make some jalapeno poppers, and God willing they will be well-received. It's a little more emotional investment than if I were bringing beer or chips. Anyway, that's what I'm doing today.

What others are doing presumably includes chicken wings, or as they are commonly known, Buffalo wings. This is awfully interesting to me. The Buffalo wing is one of those really ingenious creations, on par with the meatball or or the sausage. All three are devised to make use of what would otherwise be regarded as waste. The meatball and the sausage both neutralize low-grade meat with the connivance of potent spice and other distractions.

This is also what the Buffalo wing does. It takes the wing of a chicken, previously the least-loved meat on the entire animal and not only makes it acceptable but incredibly desirable. There are now annual panics over a wing shortage around the time of the Super Bowl. The chicken wing, once a lemon to be made into lemonade, is now the highest-priced portion of the chicken. That sounds insane to me, that people now pay more for the wing than the breast or the drumstick.

That's how it is, though. While I find that fact unpleasant, I must admit that I prefer it to the development in recent years of buffalo wings that aren't wings. The wing is tough to eat, getting around the bone as you do in order to get at the shreds of meat. You now can just get what is essentially an all-white meat nugget spiced and doused in sauce as a wing would be, and that's not right. I hope we can agree on that much if nothing else this Super Bowl Sunday.