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UGA poultry and food scientist Daniel
Fletcher can make "a silk purse" if he wants to. In his research,
he's turning dark meat, the underused "sow's ear" of chicken, into
something more valuable: white meat.
"Americans prefer the breast meat," said Fletcher, who was recently
named a Fellow of the Poultry Science Association, the highest honor the PSA
bestows. "Dark meat evolved into being a by-product of the chicken industry."
Dark meat gets its color from myoglobin, which plays a key role in transporting
oxygen and shows up in the muscles an animal uses most often. Chickens walk,
but rarely fly. That's why leg meat is dark and wing and breast meat is white.
Through centrifuge and other extraction methods, Fletcher is "creating" white
meat. Dark meat's disadvantages are its fat content and color. And that's what
he removes.
"We grind the meat up, add excess water and make essentially meat slurry," he
said. "We then centrifuge it at a high speed, which breaks up the meat.
What settles out are the raw, extracted layers."
The result is three distinct layers: fat, water and extracted meat.
"The dark-meat project is partly a training project for students," Fletcher
said. "We use it to teach students how to take apart and create new foods."
When the modified dark meat – in this case, thigh – is cooked,
it looks incredibly similar to breast meat. Out of the skillet, unmodified
thigh meat is much darker.
This prepackaged grilled chicken, which can also top salads, is made specifically
for restaurants. If average consumers took it home and let it thaw before cooking,
they'd be left with a puddle of water and meat.
"Food is an extremely dynamic portion of life," he said. "A
lot of foods we now consider good foods were yesterday's by-products."
Yesterday's scraps that demand high prices now are ribs, Buffalo wings and
hamburger meat. Today's leftovers are the dark-meat portions of a chicken,
at least in the United States.
The market opportunity for the dark-meat project "is probably not now," he
said. "But it could be a hot product tomorrow. Food shortages will occur
again. It's a political issue, not an agricultural issue. It's always nice
to have potential ways to keep the food market healthy and nutritious. This
project gives us a better way to utilize dark meat, instead of just sending
it to other countries," he said.
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"Americans
prefer the breast meat," said Fletcher, who was recently named a Fellow
of the Poultry Science Association, the highest honor the PSA bestows. "Dark
meat evolved into being a by-product of the chicken industry."
