Tasting Like Chicken
Its evolutionary origins.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
At least once a week, someone tells me that some food other than
chicken “tastes like chicken.” People throw the analogy around
constantly. Virtually any meat that is pale in color, firm in texture,
and lacking a strong flavor is subjected to the chicken comparison.
Why chicken? It’s probably at least in part because most of us
haven’t eaten very many types of meat. The meat universe of a typical
American carnivore is limited to chicken, turkey, beef, pork, and
perhaps lamb. That’s a pretty narrow selection in a world that includes
more than 10,000 species of birds—let alone the rest of the vertebrate
world. (And saying that things “taste like chicken,” it appears, is a
distinctly American habit.)
The range of species I’ve heard compared to chicken, flavor-wise, is
very broad across the evolutionary spectrum: various birds, of course,
but also snakes, lizards, small mammals, certain fish. Which made me
wonder: Can we trace the taste of chicken back down the evolutionary
tree to a common ancestor? What was the first creature in evolutionary
history that tasted like chicken? And for how long in the Earth’s
history has life been tasting like chicken? Something had to come first,
and I don’t think it was either the chicken or the egg.
In order to answer this question, we need to start with chickens and work our way back through the evolutionary family tree.
Does chicken taste like chicken? Don’t laugh—this is an important
question. Even lifelong chicken eaters usually have a very narrow
experience because the birds sold in grocery stores are usually one of a
very few breeds that have been designed to grow a lot of breast meat
very quickly in factory-farm settings. A Plymouth roasting hen
slaughtered for market at 7 weeks does not make for the same eating
experience as a 2-year-old Rhode Island Red. I once ate a bantam rooster
that tasted more like iguana than a grocery store chicken.
I posed a question for a group of friends on Facebook, asking them
whether they thought Cornish game hens taste like chicken. Some of the
respondents were adamant that the little birds have their own flavor and
texture that hardly resembles chicken. What I didn’t mention when I
asked the question was the fact that Cornish game hens are simply
ordinary chickens slaughtered at a younger age. Our idea of what chicken
tastes like seems to be as informed by our expectations as by our
palate.
A consensus has emerged in the scientific community that chickens and
other birds are probably the direct descendants of dinosaurs. I have
lost many good nights of sleep wondering what various species of
dinosaurs tasted like, but the fact is that we don’t have any left to
eat. Other than birds, the closest living relatives that we have to eat
are the crocodilians, which date back to at least 250 million years ago.
I have eaten alligators on several occasions and have found that they
can have a lot in common with chicken. Like chickens, their muscles are
primarily light meat, which is made of muscle fibers that are
well-suited for short-term bursts of speed and power. Tail meat tends to
be somewhat tough (except in a very young animal), while the limbs are
more tender. The best alligator meat I have ever eaten was in a bar on
the Gulf Coast of Florida, where the bartender brought out a tray of
“gator wings.” These alligator limbs had been prepared identically to
conventional Buffalo wings, and they tasted exactly like enormous
Buffalo wings, with the most noticeable difference being that the bones
were less delicate. I figure this similarity dates the taste of chicken
back at least 250 million years right there. (This is assuming, of
course, that the crocodilians of yesteryear didn’t taste terribly
dissimilar from the alligators of today.)
Looking back even further on the evolutionary tree, modern reptiles
are related to chickens through a group of animals known as diapsids,
which originated around 300 million years ago. Modern snakes and lizards
are both descended from the diapsids—and as it happens, I have had the
pleasure of eating a nice assortment of them: black spiny-tailed
iguanas, green iguanas, and various snakes. What all of them had in
common was a taste and a color after cooking that was like chicken,
coupled with a texture reminiscent of crab meat. You wouldn’t mistake
the texture of snake for chicken, but run it through a meat-grinder, and
you wouldn’t know the difference.
Another group of animals related to diapsids are the testudines:
turtles and tortoises. Their exact evolutionary origins are murky, but
what’s clear is that they taste like chicken. Raw snapping turtle meat
is multicolored, with individual chunks mottled either red or white. But
cooked, snapping turtle is indistinguishable from chicken to most
palates. My 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son have enjoyed
battered, deep-fried “turtle tenders,” and they have deemed the meat
identical to chicken. (I agree.) If it passes the taste test of a fussy
8-year-old, it probably really does taste like chicken. (Maybe the ranch
dressing helped.)
What chicken-reminiscent beasts existed before the diapsids? Now we
must go way back in time to the first vertebrates that lived on land:
the early amphibians. We don’t have any good fossils of these earliest
land-dwellers, but there have been some well-preserved amphibian
footprints dating back roughly 395 million years.
The only amphibians still around today split off from the early
amphibians around 300 million years ago. Frogs, the prototypical
modern-day amphibian, taste definitively like chicken. Their texture is
even like chicken. In a blind taste test, I couldn’t tell the
difference. White meat, intermediate texture, mild flavor: It’s all
there. This, along with the taste of snakes, lizards, and turtles,
implies that tasting like chicken has been around for at least 300
million years.
Looking further back in time to before the amphibians, we arrive at
the fish. I’ve been told that many kinds of fish taste like chicken, but
in practice I have never found this to be the case unless the meat is
disguised in some way. Only last week I fried some fresh haddock in a
beer batter and refrigerated the leftovers. The next morning I found
that the cold fish tasted just like chicken—right up until I tried a
bite without the breading. Then it tasted like fish again. My brain had
been confused by an outer layer that reminded it of a chicken recipe.
If there is one group of fish that can be considered more closely
related to chicken than the others, it’s the lobed fish. Lobed fish are
the class of fish that are popularly thought of as a missing link—the
creatures that first became adapted to spending time on land and
eventually evolved into amphibians. These types of fish usually had
fleshy fins with articulated bones. They were very common during the Devonian period, but today lungfish and coelacanths are the only survivors.
Coelacanths have hardly changed at all in the last 400 million years,
but they are endangered today, which sadly takes them off the table.
However, fishermen from islands off the coast of Mozambique used to eat
coelacanths before scientists began paying them a premium for live
specimens. The fishermen described the fish as oily and said the texture
of the cooked flesh was unappetizingly soft unless it had first been
salted and dried. This doesn’t sound like chicken at all.
Lungfish are more appetizing to the Western palate than the
coelacanth but still distinctly fishy tasting. One might cook with them
interchangeably with cod or bass—but nobody will mistake the taste or
texture for chicken.
Why is this? Several barriers prevent fish from tasting like chicken.
A chemical called trimethylamine, which develops after a fish dies and
creates that distinctly fishy flavor and odor, is a big one. Texture
also plays a role: Fishes’ muscle structure is different from chickens’.
Fish muscles are typically arranged in bands along the sides of the
body and are separated by relatively less connective tissue than what is
found in the muscle of their evolutionary descendants. These bands of
muscle are what make cooked fish flaky. Fish muscles are relatively
simple because all they have to do to move through water is perform a
sort of sideways flopping motion. The muscles of land-dwellers like
chickens, lizards, and frogs are more specialized and are designed for
the more varied movement of individual limbs.
Neither the coelacanth nor the lungfish is the evolutionary missing
link per se, but both are solid living representatives of the group
of species that amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, and chickens are all
descended from. If the lungfish or the coelacanth’s meat is
representative of lobed fish in general, then we can surmise that meat
probably didn’t start to taste like chicken until the transition from
fish to amphibians occurred.
Pederpes finneyae.Illustration by DiBgd/Wikimedia Commons.
The first known species to make that transition from water to land was Pederpes finneyae. P. finneyae appeared
about 350 million years ago and was the earliest creature in the fossil
record to have the forward-facing feet of a fully terrestrial animal.
Assuming the transition from water to land necessitated the complicated
muscle structures we see in today’s land creatures, then P. finneyae
probably would have been an excellent candidate for marinating in lime
juice and cilantro and then cooking and shredding for tacos.
So roughly 350 million years ago is probably when life began to taste
like chicken, right when some lobed fishes had fully transformed into
the first terrestrial amphibians, like P. finneyae. It’s hard
to imagine that this trait has had any advantage for the animals that
exhibited it, given that the only situation in which flavor is expressed
is when the organism dies. (In fact, considering that we generally like
the taste of chicken and go out of our way to kill chickens in order to
taste them, you could say that tasting like chicken is a distinct
disadvantage.) But it would appear that the taste has nonetheless
persisted for hundreds of millions of years. So maybe instead of saying
that the next pale, firm, mild thing you eat tastes like chicken, you
should say it tastes like Pederpes finneyae.
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