DADDY'S GUIDE

I have often wondered why it is that Americans eat so many chicken wings, given that wings aren’t actually good to eat. You will notice I titled this “why YOU eat wings” not “why WE eat wings”, because I don’t.

So I did some in-depth research on the topic, by which I mean I pondered the question one day while I was preparing to make chicken tacos. Specifically, I was dismembering a roast chicken, the kind you buy from Safeway in a large plastic clamshell inside a cardboard carrier. Have you noticed those cardboard carriers were designed by some sociopath to be loose and slippery? So that if the shopper is insouciantly trundling home with her chicken carrier dangling from one hand, and let’s say the chicken carrier is a little off-level due to the grocery bag with which it was sharing the hand, the clamshell is able to do a Houdini on the carrier and leap to the street, eliminating dinner while creating a smeary mess that will fester on the street until it gets cleaned off by the next rainstorm, which if you happen to be in San Francisco might not happen for several months.

And while I am on the topic, Susan objects to my describing the chicken preparation process as “dismembering” the chicken, possibly because it conjures up disturbing images from crime shows, but I have not been able to come up with a better one. I even tried a thesaurus, but the best it could suggest was “dissect”, which reminds me too much of a high school experience involving formaldehyde and a frog.

While I dismembered, it occurred to me that the rise of chicken wings had to be driven by marketing geniuses. The ones who manage to get hipsters to pay top dollar for a particular brand of vodka on the theory that the consumer can tell one vodka from another, even though vodka is literally gin with the flavor removed. The ones who convinced the same set of hipsters that Pabst Blue Ribbon beer—PBR—is distinguishable from Budweiser, Miller, or any other kind of beer that self-respecting union members would drink.

I figure it went like this. There was a chicken grower convention, probably somewhere not known for growing chickens, like San Francisco or Miami, and the chicken executives were musing over their martinis. (Mind you, these guys are old, rich, and fat and they drink proper martinis, with gin, not Blue Goose vodka.) They were talking about how they practically have to throw away the wings from the chickens, because there is no meat on them, and they are all stringy and nobody wants to eat them. About how they their breeders have managed to produce chickens with breasts so gargantuan that they (the chickens) can barely walk upright, but they still have not quite produced chickens without wings. Though they’ve gotten pretty close.

On about the third round, a marketing type gets a brilliant idea: do a PBR on wings. Yep, turn a product that hardly anybody wants into a Special Treat. He says, first we need hook for marketing them. A location. Corona beer already nabbed Mexico and the beach, and let’s face it, nobody associates chickens with Mexico or with beaches anyway. We could try California, which actually produces a lot of chickens, but nobody really thinks of chickens in California. They tend to think of bears and happy cows. We could try a farm state, like Iowa or Wisconsin, but again, you’ve got cows and corn. Maybe a city is what we need. You know, we could associate chickens with something that literally has nothing to do with chickens.

This caught everybody’s attention. But you couldn’t use a New York or a Chicago: chickens, never wind chicken wings, are just too downscale, too pedestrian, too boring, to have a tie-in to Chicago. You would need a different kind of city. A city that needs a shot in the arm. A city that is so downtrodden that it is willing—nay, anxious!—to make wings its contribution to global cuisine.

Voila: Buffalo! A city whose greatest claim to sports fame is that the Bills have the most consecutive trips to the Super Bowl—four losses—and no wins. (In fact, the Bills’ four losses are only exceeded by the Broncos and the Patriots, the latter of which would be much more satisfying for fans outside the Boston area if not paired with six annoying wins.) A city whose population peaked in 1950 and has since dropped by half. (You might be surprised to know that Manhattan’s population peaked in 1910, but Manhattan’s reputation has been saved by the inexplicable anointing of Brooklyn as the hippest place on the planet.)

The other insight that powered the Great Wing Scam involved context and presentation. As wings don’t taste good (as previously noted), in order to take off, so to speak, they need to be wrapped in something that effectively masks the bad taste. What could be better than hot sauce? Well, it turns out, the only thing better is hot sauce dipped in blue cheese dressing. Anybody who can sense the actual taste of a chicken wing under that assault ought to be a sommelier.

And finally, the wings need to be presented in the right environment. The perfect location is a sports bar. Where they can be eaten primarily by sports fans who: 1) have already had several beers (probably PBR), 2) are not paying attention to what they eat, only to the TV, and 3) might very well have started off with nachos, the only known food group that makes wings seem tasty. (My next installment will be about how nachos became a thing.)

So by the time the fourth round was polished off, a phenomenon was in the cards. The rest is gustatorial history.

The city mothers and fathers of Buffalo went all in for the idea, and an industry was born. Chicken wings are flying off the shelves. Buffalo chicken wings are so popular that people have started working up a whole universe of unfortunate new recipes for wings. The only thing they have in common is an intense focus on ensuring that the actual wing flavor does not come through.

But the triumph of the wing hides a sad truth: Buffalo has lost control of the wing. In fact, many people don’t even remember that Buffalo chicken wings come from Buffalo. The ever-popular Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant logo features a bison, not a mid-size, down-in-the mouth city on a chilly grey lake. Which is very sad for a city that, let’s face it, does not have a lot more going for it. (Although you should know, besides the Bills, Buffalo also has a professional lacrosse team called the Bandits. Which inevitably prompts the question: Is there really a professional lacrosse league? And the follow up question: how do they find enough aging prep school lacrosse players who are not working for investment banks to staff a league?)

Anyway, a local radio station recently solicited suggestions for a city motto (which I personally think is a brilliant idea) and a lot of them involved—you guessed it—chicken wings. I am not making this up. I think they are fighting the last marketing war. The city motto should revolve around the city’s second greatest claim to fame: it is the place where President McKinley was shot. The possibilities are endless.