Chicken at the supermarket: are you a breast, thigh or leg, uh, eater? Does bone-in wreck your appetite? I practically grew up on chicken drumsticks (usually Shake-and-Baked or drenched in homemade barbecue sauce and cooked oh-so-slowly), but my own children won’t even look at them. Nor will they eat boneless dark meat. I prefer dark poultry, always have — turkey thigh on my Christmas dinner plate, please. And I don’t have to fight anyone else for it, which, ya know, is good, because fighting with family at Christmas is unseemly. (No gathered family ever bickers, after all.)

But did you ever wonder what happened to the legs of the bird whose enormous breast (40% of a chicken’s body weight these days) you eat? Chicken legs have become a form of currency, a tool of international relations. Great article here by Nadia Arumugam  at Slate: “The Dark Side of the Bird.”