Chicken Wars: Incoming Cans!

Canned chicken in the supermarket: right next to the other canned meats.

Chicken may be the most hotly contested food item at fast food chains, but the recent innovation of chicken packaged tuna-style, canned in brine or mayonnaise, has caused way more collateral damage.

Two brands – Heinz and the New Zealand brand Chop Chop! – are fighting it out in supermarket aisles with a range of shredded and chunked chicken with various flavourings and sauces. Public reaction has been intense, with many people repulsed by the very idea of chicken in a can.

Ben Birchall, formerly sacked advertising copywriter, is one of these haters. Now one-third of the Breakfasters team on Melbourne community radio station 3RRR-FM, he lobbed a grenade at canned chicken on-air.

“We did a live road-test of canned chicken on the show, tasting the Heinz ‘Smoked’ and ‘Springwater and Sea-salt’ versions. We thought we’d stay flavour-free at 7:15 AM,” Birchall told The Enthusiast.

“The general consensus was that it was okay – basically the same as canned tuna or salmon, but without the fishiness. Actually, I think Fee found it a bit gross. That may come down to eating it unaccompanied before normal people have breakfast.”

There is nothing objectively wrong with chicken in a can. While it has an unearthly pinkish tinge you’re unlikely to see in other kinds of cooked chicken, this is nothing worse than the difference between the appearance and texture of tinned tuna or salmon, as opposed to tuna and salmon steaks cooked from fresh.

It’s also quite handy if you only use a small amount of chicken in a particular dish and don’t want to buy large quantities of the meat, or for fast meals such as sandwiches, salads and pasta.

Birchall can see these benefits. “But that’s speaking objectively. And I’m afraid that when canned chicken is involved, objectivity flies out the window.”

So why is that? Come on, it can’t possibly be worse than chicken nuggets made of mechanically reclaimed meat – which Jamie Oliver recently tried, and failed, to convince American schoolchildren not to eat.

“You know what it looks like? That really dodgy crab meat in a can,” says videoblogger Cath, who made her kids try it first. Her sentiment is echoed by various online forums, whose users’ reservations about canned poultry also include its associations with pet food.

“It’s the way you can spot the person at the grocery next to you is a pensioner!” agreed comedian Mikey Robins on Good News Week.

What’s interesting about what we could call the ‘canned chicken kneejerk dislike’ is that it foregrounds a food technology that we just don’t associate with chicken. Oddly, consumers are happy to accept smoked chicken, chunks of chicken in canned soups, compressed chicken loaf, or chicken seasonings that have nothing to do with the bird itself.

However, the meats widely available in canned form – Spam and other sliceable luncheon meats, braised steak and onion casseroles, spreads and pastes such as liverwurst – openly foreground their technological distance from fresh meat products, and thus their manufacturing processes draw suspicion from the general public. These suspicions are founded on actual problems in the food industry: animal cruelty, low-quality ingredients of uncertain provenance, and public health risks including salmonella, botulism and mad cow disease.

We are no longer in the golden age of food processing – the 1950s and 1960s – when canned and frozen foods were associated with modernity, abundance and the superior preservation of freshness.

America, in particular, was saturated in a food culture of shop-bought canned goods. “I Googled ‘canned chicken’ and got a page with about 24 American recipes using canned chicken, including some sort of tortilla soup and some deep fried chilli dipping balls,” says Ben Birchall. “They’re used to the idea of their chicken being served in a can of brine. We’re not. Maybe my kids will happily spread some canned chicken in seeded mustard mayo on their Vita-Weets, but it’s too late for me.”

Advertising for processed foods has presented them as tools to strengthen and nourish the family unit and – later on – as adults’ links between the support and approval of their families and their busy professional lives. (“You can’t serve my parents canned soup!” “Yes, Dad, I am looking after myself.”)

The TVC for Heinz canned chicken, by contrast, “shows cans growing chicken legs and dancing around a bench,” says Birchall. “Just saying that made me vom a little.”

“The slogan is, ‘Chicken just got interesting again’? It’s like, no – chicken just got disgusting!” protested Josh Thomas on Good News Week. “Chicken has been interesting for a very long time; I am very interested in chicken.”

“It’s hypocritical I know, but it’s far easier to eat the dirty bird without thinking of feathers, feet, gristle and beaks,” says Birchall. “It should be delicious, clean, white meat. Reminding us that they’re beady-eyed birds scratching around in their own filth doesn’t make you want to add them to your tortilla soup.

“‘Appetite appeal’ is something that marketing managers at FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) companies have tattooed on themselves like Guy Pearce in Memento,” he adds. “No matter how clever, charming and memorable your ad is, if the consumer doesn’t want to consume, the ad has failed. And this ad made me feel nauseous.”

Rest easy, soldier. You’re being repatriated now.

Meanwhile, the Chicken Wars rage unabated. Be assured that your humble war correspondent The Enthusiast will continue to bring you the latest intelligence from the field.

Next in Chicken Wars: The Organic Offensive. Red Rooster boldly sells organic chicken… How will its fellow combatants respond to this grain-fed atrocity?

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