Friday, January 8, 2010

National Chicken Cooking Contest

So there's thing called the National Chicken Cooking Contest.*

From what we've been able to determine, the contest was inaugurated in 1949 by a businesslike chicken who wanted to drum up support for chicken slaughter.

The chicken, who had a penchant for garish neckties (he was almost as interesting as an actual human person!), was frustrated at the glacial pace of poultry killing then occurring on the Delmarva Peninsula.

This was a chicken with initiative.



Here he is in his "Average Joe" outfit, pinning the blue ribbon on a golden-brown (that is, dead) bird of his acquaintance.





In the 60s, he went undercover as a free-love hippie fowl.

You can see that the live-and-let-live philosophy of the counterculture didn't come naturally to him. ("Make chicken casserole, not war"? To chickens, chicken casserole is war!) But for the cause, the wanton destruction of innocent birds, he would go to any lengths. He would sacrifice his life to this cause, which was convenient.







Finally, we see him in CEO mode, rallying the troops, pumping them up with bromides. The unspoken vision statement of the whole operation: The only good chicken is a dead chicken.

By only the most depraved any measure, the chicken is a success. And at the end of the career, he can expect to be richly rewarded with a 375° oven, an artful recipe, and the satisfied belches of his consumers.








*Or, there was something called the National Chicken Cooking Contest. In September, 2009 it was announced that the contest had been canceled.



6 comments:

argumentics said...

I know it's irritating when someone comments too very often on your blog (well, I hint actually, never been there...), but gotta say this tiny badass text made me giggle rather noisily

This being said, unless I have something to say (i.e. , something to really say), you should presume on my compliments quite often as I am not going to post them.

Anonymous said...

The Delmarva Peninsula is "the poultry capital of the world" (JS Foer, Eating Animals). Sussex County produces over 250 million broilers annually, nearly twice the production of any other county. So "the mystical land we call Delmarva" is magical indeed!

Desdemona said...

It's also the place frustrated mommy hens invoke to threaten naughty chicks - "Do you want to go to Camp Delmarva this summer? Well, that's where chicks go who won't stop pecking their brothers!"

Ben said...

Or is it that Delmarva is the place held out as a reward? "Keep studying and working hard, and one day you'll make it to Delmarva!"

Anonymous said...

...or maybe it's easier to think of him as acting in cynical self-defense than to contemplate what's really going on here.

KCinDC said...

If he was dressing like a hippie in 1960, he was truly a chicken ahead of his time.