A few years ago, we were told the millennial demographic consisted of thousands of urban farmers who kept chickens in their backyards until they abandoned their personal fowl when the responsibility of bird rearing got to be too much. “Hipsters are ditching their pet chickens,” ran a headline in the Atlantic in 2013. “Backyard chickens may have jumped the shark,” ran another, in CityLab.Today, youngish people are no longer making news for shoddy chicken farming — we are making news because we are apparently too squeamish to cook our feathery friends, let alone live with them. This squeamishness has nothing to do with a vegan moral imperative. A lot of us simply just don’t like touching raw meat, whether it was butchered at a big factory or in our own backyards.According to a 2016 survey conducted by market research firm Mintel, 37 per cent of cooks in the U.K. aged 16 to 34 “prefer not to handle raw meat when cooking.” It’s with this research in mind that U.K. supermarket Sainsbury’s announced this month plans to roll out special, “touch-free” packaging for raw chicken cutlets aimed at younger customers who don’t want to handle their dinner before they cook it.Read more:McMaster researchers develop transparent patch to detect pathogens like E. coli in packaged foodsDebunking six classic cooking myths that seem like must-follow rulesU.S. issues recall of more than 200 million eggs over salmonella contaminationAccording to a Sainsbury’s spokesperson speaking to the Sunday Times, “Customers, particularly younger ones, are quite scared of touching raw meat. These bags allow people, especially those who are time-poor, to just ‘rip and tip’ the meat straight into the frying pan.” Rip and tip. It doesn’t sound particularly appetizing, but then again, I’m not paid to advertise chicken to people who are afraid of it. Needless to say, not everyone is thr ...
|
