There's no question that Americans overwhelmingly prefer white chicken meat to dark. We eat chicken almost 10 times a month on average—according to data from 2007— but on less than two of those occasions do we choose chicken legs, thighs, or drumsticks. At the household level, this isn't problematic; families can buy prepackaged white meat instead of whole birds. But magnify this preference millions of times over on a national scale, and the imbalance could, theoretically, lead to canyons of perfectly edible chicken going to waste.
Historically, Russia has helped keep this hypothetical from becoming a reality. Through a miracle of yin-and-yang cultural predilections, Russians actually like gamier dark meat. And since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, they have imported it in stunningly large quantities. In 2009 alone Russia doled out $800 million for 1.6 billion pounds of U.S. leg quarters.
Recently, however, the Russian appetite for our chicken legs has waned. Last January, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin barred U.S. chicken from Russian shores, supposedly because it's treated with "unsafe" antimicrobial chlorine. Although Russia subsequently lifted that ban, in November it prohibited the use of frozen poultry in processed products (again citing safety concerns), effectively preventing the use of American chicken in Russian nuggets—since it's shipped frozen. There's no scientific evidence that chlorination, much less freezing, poses any danger to health, so it's doubtful that safety is the real impetus for the bans. It's far more likely that Putin simply wants Russia to become less reliant on imports. (In fact, he's said publicly that he intends for Russia to be fully self-sufficient in chicken production by 2012.) Assuming Putin gets his way, American poultry companies will have to rely on alternative outlets for its dark meat.
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