Backroads Miz Manners Keeps the Chicken in the Bag

Dear Backroads Miz Manners:

I am appalled at the shrinkage exhibited by my favorite gas station chicken pieces. For some time, I chose to consume my high fat high salt fast food from other establishments, using the poultry place only for 44 oz. Diet Cokes. Imagine my surprise when I heeded the pull of my fowl master, and returned for a meaty crunchy treat on my husband's bowling night.

Where once there were normal sized sections of bird, I found a thigh bigger than a breast. I know, Miz Manners, how shocking that must be. I, myself, thought, "Mary! That's akin to getting your beans above your frank! What a freak of nature that fryer must have been, tottering around on giant T. rex legs, flapping withered gnat wings to keep her balance. No breast development in that pullet. The tiny white meat morsel was like a mini gummi hamburger. Made to be cute. Not filling."

Miz Manners, the thigh was nothing to write home about. But rather, something to write YOU about. I remember during childhood, when my mother cut up a frying chicken for supper. And when my grandma caught a chicken in the sideyard, and spun it over her head by the neck until it popped loose and ran around for a minute. The thighs served on my girlhood plate were like chicken on a stick. Lots of meat, arranged with a bone through the middle. This mutant thigh from the gas station had a tiny bit of meat on one side of a two-inch bone. But the rest of it was fried skin over bone! Can you believe it? That thigh was a T shape. Only the top of the T was longer than the stem. And it was BACK. A BACK bone. A back is not a thigh.

I've a good mind to slaughter one of my yard chickens, drive it to town, and show the gas station cooks what a real breast and thigh look like. On the chicken, too. Is it not bad enough that Little Debbie Cherry Cordial Cakes are now the size of silver dollars? You remember the silver dollar, don't you Miz Manners? Every Christmas, these very special Little Debbies have been downsized. Before long, they will assume the size of Starlight Mints.

What do you think, Miz Manners? Should I show those gas house fry cooks the real deal? Or should I suffer in silence? Or market my leftover bones as a new kind of Rubik's Cube, to see if gifted children can reconstruct a chicken from that framework?

Signed,
Breastless in Backroads

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Dear Breastless,

Don't do anything rash, my dear. Teeny tiny gas station chicken pieces are better than NO gas station chicken pieces. People love tiny things. Just look at the new cars on the lots. Those itty bitty electric gadgets that can go a whole thirty miles on an overnight charge. People are eating those things up. People who don't drive more than thirty miles, and who can afford the hit to their electric bill, and who don't care about the environment, what with all the charging eating up more resources than a regular gasoline engine. Where do they think the electricity comes from, huh? The electricity fairy? The power plants that operate on coal or nuclear power must work harder to fill the hungry grid. But I digress.

By no means would Miz Manners advise showing the convenience store workers your breast and thigh. That just is not done in polite society. Nor should you voice a complaint. Next time you might find a neck and a butt in your take-away bag. And some unappetizing chicken pieces as well. Suffer in silence, sister. Consider it a reducing plan. Recycle. I hear that giants are always on the lookout for a bone bargain to help defray the costs of their homemade bread business. 

I hope you will accept the fact that this is not one of those things you can change. And next time, please clean your fingers of grease, either by soap or saliva, before you write to Miz Manners.

Sincerely, 
Backroads Miz Manners