COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:The fault of a featherless chicken

It's always something. As if our city, county, country and the Middle East don't have enough problems, now there emerges the coming worldwide schmaltz shortage just as Passover and Easter approach.

For those who have not yet savored schmaltz, it is made from frying chicken fat with other — to be named later — delicacies. Connoisseurs save the darker fat, skin cracklings and onions for making chopped liver. In Europe, rendered chicken fat is prized as a spread for bread. It also can be used in potato pancakes to enhance the flavor.

BACKGROUND

In May 2002, an Israeli geneticist developed a cost-effective, featherless chicken. Avigdor Cahaner of Hebrew University maintained that these chickens would grow faster in hot weather because they would not be prone to overheating like normal chickens, whose growth rate drops when they get too warm.

While some reveled in the discovery, other people had a very different opinion of this latest deception of nature. Dr. Ian Duncan, chairman of Animal Welfare in the Department of Animal and Poultry Sciences at the University of Guelph, Ontario — and the foremost domestic fowl expert in North America — has stated that feathers are meant to cool as much as to heat, and that they are also designed to protect the skin surface.

One American observer, an inhabitant of Machipongo, Va., proclaimed on May 23, 2002, "The featherless chicken is cruel, obscene and absurd."

There were similar carping memos from SCAM (Schmaltz Consumers Assn. of Maryland), SICK (Schmaltz Importers Cooperative of Kansas) and CLUCK (The Chicken Liver Underwriters Council of Kalamazoo).

CHICKENS NOT INTERVIEWED

But no one consulted with the chickens. It seems that they liked the bare-bikini look in the summer. Why wouldn't they? How would you like to play in the Negev at 110 degrees while wearing a fur coat?

And so it came to pass that within the group of surviving featherless chickens, another miracle took place in the Jerusalem hills. There was an unexpected adaptation in the chicken schmaltz chromosome (CSC) adjacent to the chicken feather chromosome (CFC). These birds stopped laying down subcutaneous fat. Word spread rapidly on the chicken website www.coolchick.edu.

When the rest of the world's chickens heard about the cool chicks, they developed an anxiety-precipitated fat depletion throughout their entire body. Weight psychiatrists, of course, remain puzzled and skeptical.