I have never seen the point of eating chicken wings. In fact, I’m not sure they actually qualify as food. Wings are more accurately described as breaded, seasoned, and deep-fried chicken bones with skin. Yes, there’s a little bit of meat on a wing, but it’s so minuscule and requires so much effort to ingest that it’s really not worthwhile. The increasing popularity of chicken wings is the result of a very successful marketing campaign on the part of the food service industry, which realized that you should never throw away your scraps if you can convince people to buy them. (That’s also the explanation for the breadsticks that pizza delivery places all sell now. Those used to be leftover dough that got thrown away, until some clever marketer realized that you could get people to pay for them.)
I don’t have any real problem with this; if some folks are willing to buy fried bones, that’s their own business. But now things are getting downright bizarre. Appliance maker Rival now offers the Wing-It, a deep-fryer whose only purpose is to enable you to make your own chicken wings. Why in God’s name would anyone want to do that? If you’re going to prepare your own chicken at home, would it not make more sense to buy the chicken parts that actually have meat on them? Why would you go out of your way to buy the most worthless part of the chicken and a special tool for cooking it? Someone please explain this to me.