With all the talk you hear from your trainers about eating more “Paleo”, you may wonder how different our food nowadays really is from how it used to be. I posted previously about the differences in fruit, but how about the animals? In my daily reading I came across this article that talks about how the chicken in our market has changed over the years.

Up until around the 1950s, farmers raised a variety of chicken breeds—mostly “dual-purpose birds” that produced both meat and eggs. Then breeders created an über-meat chicken called the White Rock that could reach a market weight of four and a half pounds in only eight weeks, the source of those giant breasts you now find in the meat cooler. It no longer made sense to raise the old varieties that took more than twice as long to fatten up and never grew as big. And so these older breeds faded away.

An interesting factoid I learned is that the Ameraucana hen (pictured in the bottom photo) lays blue colored eggs. If you read the article I linked, you’ll also see that the different breeds also feature wildly varying flavors.

Now perhaps your curiosity is piqued and you would like to try some of these exotic birds. I wouldn’t leave you hanging without letting you know where to get your fix. There’s an online retailer that sells these rare (or as they refer to them — heritage) chickens along with heritage pigs and cattle. You didn’t think the chicken was the only homogenized animal in our food supply, did you? Check out the options available at Heritage Foods USA. Be forewarned that they are not cheap, since there are so few farmers raising these animals. But hopefully things may change if the public shows enough interest!

WOD 2.11.10

Make Up Day