I was reading some Weird News today and found the story of a chicken who was going to be receiving a prosthetic leg made from a 3 D printer. The operation will cost around $2,500. That must be a really special chicken. Possibly it lays golden eggs? Another story advertised next to the bionic-legged chicken was all about the new Pumpkin-Spiced Peeps that will be coming to a store near you very soon, so you can add fluffy baby marshmallow chicks to your Pumpkin Spiced Everything list.
I started thinking about how lucky the chicken is that, out of all the world’s chickens, it ended up being someone’s beloved pet instead of someone else’s beloved dinner. I then thought about how delicious those peeps will be and how they will not “taste like chicken”. And then, as my thoughts tend to do, I began to wonder why so many things taste like chicken. What does fried alligator taste like? Tastes like chicken. What does rattle snake taste like? Tastes like chicken. Turkeys are just very large juicy, delicious chickens. Not really….but…..they taste like chicken. Here is a very professional graph that shows what all tastes like chicken:
So how long have people been using the phrase “Tastes like chicken”? According to Howie Reith, who is not a historian but likes to answer questions on Quora.com:
“The earliest known documentation of the phrase ‘Tastes like chicken’ is in The Log of Christopher Columbus, describing the first time he and his group tried eating a serpent.
‘The people eat them and the meat is white and tastes like chicken.'”
Since we know that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue…. the phrase has been around for a while.
Quora.com looks like a good website for people with questions. One such question related to chicken-ness asked was, “How close are we to discovering Colonel Sanders 11 secret herbs and spices?” Well curious person… the answer to that is: “They could tell you, but then they’d have to kill you.” Some things are better left a secret.
All The World's a Stage 