I don’t know if anyone out there has actually had ‘Chicken in a Biscuit,’ but the little cracker is a stroke of genius. Not only does the thing actually taste remotely similar to ‘chicken,’ but it even looks and smells like ‘chicken’ (not a live chicken, they reek; I mean cooked chicken of course). Can you think of another food that says chicken on so many different levels. I can think of countless occasions when I just needed to have ‘chicken’... so I got a box of chicken in a biscuit, and granted I always thought they were a little bit on the salty side, that was all I needed. My urge satisfied, I was able to continue on with my life.
I am being a little facetious here, but, seriously, why does everything taste like chicken? The food industry has created a huge business in manipulation just to make money. Haden said: “That ‘chicken’ can be the taste of ‘everything else’ is but a reminder of how abstracted, statistical, and synthesizable ‘chicken’ has become: Figuring out what to make chicken taste like is just one aspect of the technical information-gathering needed to produce a growing range of chickenized products (pp. 354).” The processing of food has created a surreal world where there are tastes for everything (though it is not necessarily the actual thing itself) but the industry has tweaked the frame of reference just enough to sell their products. There is no longer an “original taste” but that’s not where the problem lies. The dilemma is in the fact that no one seems to notice: it is as if the food industry pulled a fast one all the consumers.
I want to eat real chicken. I want to know what ‘real’ chicken tastes like; however, this is not likely to happen. Chicken in a Biscuit is not the only thing that was made to taste like chicken. Now, chicken is grown to taste like chicken. They are grown on farms where they are fed hormones and corn, things to make them more meaty, and then the meat itself is injected with chemicals and such to 'improve' the taste. Now, everything tastes like chicken, and there have to be millions of different ‘tastes’ of chicken (chicken included). Which one, if any, is the right one, and will I ever find it?
