Wings v tenders: the choice says more about you than you think

PICTURE the scene. You are perched on a stool at a bar. A sport – basketball, say, or baseball – is playing on a screen above. A beer sits in front of you, its icy base adhering to the paper mat. And then a basket appears, lined with some kind of grease-resistant paper, celery sticks sprouting from one end next to a pot of blue-cheese dip. The main event will be one of two things, buffalo chicken wings or buffalo chicken tenders. Which you choose says more about you than you might think: do you want to fight your food or inhale it?

Cheap, salty and popular, chicken wings and tenders are now the quintessential bar snacks. But poultry’s popularity in America is relatively recent. Chicken production boomed during the second world war. In the 1940s the US Department of Agriculture launched the “Chicken of Tomorrow”, a contest to develop fatter and faster-growing birds. Production became more industrialised and efficient. By the 1950s what had been one of the most expensive meats was the cheapest.

For years Americans preferred white meat and sent their chicken wings to China. The invention of buffalo chicken wings in upstate New York in the 1960s single-handedly changed the structure of the global chicken trade, argues Emelyn Rude in Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favourite Bird. America began keeping its wings and sent China only the feet.