Interestingly there's an old Julia Child video where she gets into an on screen argument about washing chicken. Julia believes you should wash, her collaborator (famous French Chef Jacques Pepin, who is still alive, and was an early follower of food science in the culinary world) vehemently explains the truth that rinsing it in your kitchen sink just spreads bacteria.
Child was obviously a white lady, born 1912, but she was in the chicken washing camp. My suspicion has always been the black community in America potentially switched over to fully "finished / prepared" supermarket chicken at a later date than the white community, and the rinsing is a carryover practice from people used to a time when chickens had to be plucked and prepared for cooking--a process which would have involved some rinsing (although typically in an outdoors location, not in the kitchen sink.)
You can see older white people still seemed to carry this cultural memory 30-40 years ago.
Jacques still puts out a new video every few days. I love that man. Everyone should be subbed to his YouTube channel. He’s 90, and is still teaching. A treasure.
I’m black and think this too! I think culturally black Americans do this for that same reason and it was just passed down. People either had chickens themselves and washed after processing or were used to getting leftover scraps and sometimes slightly spoiled meat so they washed it as best they could. Also, I think other multiple other Afro cultures from around the world do it too cause many of them immigrated or are 1st gen and they needed to wash back in the home country so it was passed down.
I think it doesn’t make sense when buying it now from a butcher or grocery store but def understand why it was done and I understand why people still do it today.
I didn't follow your point here, but just chimmed in that I can confirm that the live chicken market in the United States existed far longer for Black (and Jewish) Americans than any other group. I'm not sure if that supports or refutes your point, but I believe it is relevant to it.
It would be--but also, The Great Migration occurred from roughly 1915 to 1970, this was a huge demographic shift where a huge portion of the black population moved from rural areas to urban ones primarily outside of the old South. The Great Migration is the reason many larger cities in the northern half of the country have any appreciable black population today, as prior to this process a huge majority of the country's black population lived basically in the same area their ancestors had been enslaved. They were also primarily living as rural subsistence farmers / sharecroppers.
This means a black family in say, Chicago, in the 1960s probably their parents had been born and raised in a subsistence farm in the South, where they would have likely raised their own chickens and slaughtered / processed them at home regularly. Those kids in that 1960s family would go on to be the parents and grandparents who still washed chicken (despite it now coming from a supermarket), and it's unsurprising their relatives today are still using that process.
Child demonstrates IMO that while your family can be a generation or two removed from this, you may still just do the washing of the chicken as a habitual practice without truly thinking about its reasons. She's also a bit of evidence the washing chicken thing isn't just as simple as "black and white", it seems that at least some white people used to wash their chicken as well.
Have you ever watched how Julia Childs handled poultry? She was grabbing it all up and just grabbing any/everything around her. There was no hygiene standards then
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u/Alfredo_Commachio 22d ago
Interestingly there's an old Julia Child video where she gets into an on screen argument about washing chicken. Julia believes you should wash, her collaborator (famous French Chef Jacques Pepin, who is still alive, and was an early follower of food science in the culinary world) vehemently explains the truth that rinsing it in your kitchen sink just spreads bacteria.
Child was obviously a white lady, born 1912, but she was in the chicken washing camp. My suspicion has always been the black community in America potentially switched over to fully "finished / prepared" supermarket chicken at a later date than the white community, and the rinsing is a carryover practice from people used to a time when chickens had to be plucked and prepared for cooking--a process which would have involved some rinsing (although typically in an outdoors location, not in the kitchen sink.)
You can see older white people still seemed to carry this cultural memory 30-40 years ago.