We do chicken right

A new Safeway opened near my house shortly after Thanksgiving last year. Up until recently, I hadn't stepped inside a Safeway for quite some time. I usually do my grocery shopping on Saturdays, when I go to the farmers' market, the butcher, the fishmonger, the bakery, Monterey Market/Berkeley Bowl/Whole Foods, etc. If I need anything during the week, I'm lucky enough to have a Thursday farmers' market across the street from my office, and sometimes, I go to the Trader Joe's that opened a few years ago in the same shopping center as the Safeway, or the natural grocery store down the street. I guess you could say I have pretty discriminating requirements when it comes to my groceries. Once in a great while, there's a late night TP or paper towel run to Safeway, but buying such sundries in as huge of a bulk mass as possible from Target has saved me from these nocturnal sojourns recently. The new Safeway, however, is hard to resist, especially since we received a thick book of coupons that promised over 50 dollars in savings. Roughly modeled in a craftman style, with high, high ceilings, exposed beams and a faux hardwood floor, it's huge - probably twice the square footage of the old one - and it unabashedly caters to a more upscale customer. They sell le Creuset cookware, Williams-Sonoma cookbooks and those (quite frankly, silly) stemless Riedel wineglasses (no Scharffenberger chocolate, though!). In addition to the pharmacy, florist, bakery, butcher, deli, bank and Starbucks, there's also a panini grill, a sushi counter, a carving station, an olive bar and a selection of about 4 - 6 hot soups. With the opening of this new Safeway, a new line of organic Safeway Select products debuted - the "O" line. In addition, the produce department boasted of carrying an expanded selection of organics.

A few weeks ago, after we ran out of paper towels, razor cartridges and needing to pick up some chicken for a curry dish, I decided to just buy everything from Safeway. It's been a while since I've purchased meat from Safeway (except for the whole cooked dungeness crabs that were $3.99 a pound - combined with the aforementioned $2.00 off coupon, that worked out to be 4-5 bucks per one and a half pound crab!). Since reading Fast Food Nation and with the whole BSE and bird flu scare, I've been very careful about where I purchase my meat - I want to know where and how the animal was raised, when it was slaughtered, and when it arrived at the place I'm purchasing it from. Also, driving down Highway 5 and seeing (and smelling) the conditions of Harris Ranch (which is marketed as a higher-quality product) really turns my stomach. I'm not averse seeing an animal alive before I eat it. I have yet to meet a crustacean that gives me pause before throwing in a boiling pot, and I still remember going to poultry sellers with my mother as I was growing up to pick out a chicken to be butchered for the night's dinner... I'm fairly certain it wasn't organic, nor was it free range, but that had to be the best tasting chicken we got. These local "boutique" meats I usually purchase (after giving the butcher the third degree about it) - Hoffman chickens, Liberty Farms duck, Meyer Ranch pork, Western Grasslands lamb, Prather Ranch beef, Niman Ranch anything, etc. - are considerably more expensive than going to Costco or an average supermarket, but I justify it to myself by buying very little of it (smaller servings), plus we only eat eat meat for four days of the week. (if we eat out, I'm not so stringent... and popeye's chicken is the shiznit!) It also tastes better. I was surprised though, to discover that Safeway did carry organic chicken. However, none of the organic chicken was available whole. Nor was it available as whole thighs, whole legs, whole or split breasts... in fact, it was all pre-skinned, pre-boned, wet little cryovac'd pink blobs on styrofoam trays. It was extremely unappetizing. "Who buys this stuff?" I wondered. But I guess I'm an unusual consumer. I know more than a few people who are grossed out by a whole uncooked chicken. And eating out with others at Chinese restaurants has shown me how disturbed people get when they are served a whole fish, chicken or duck with its head still on. ("I don't like it when my food is looking at me," I've heard more than once) One finicky eater I know refuses to touch any meat on his plate if there's any signs of bone, skin, fat or cartilage. I don't think that such habits are unusual. But how disassociated are we from the animals we consume if people are buying prepackaged organic boneless skinless chicken tenders (not the whole breast - just the tenders!)? It's as though people don't want to acknowledge that the meat they eat was once a living, breathing creature. It saddens me a little, because (I think) it seems displays a lack of respect for the life an animal gives up in order to feed and nourish us. I don't want to seem like I'm judging those who buy these products. After all, I (reluctantly) wound up purchasing some skinned and boned organic thighs (I think Foster Farms chicken is really gross... besides, what the hell am a gonna do with 6 pounds of chickens thighs that I dislike?), and there is the convenience factor to consider. But such processing winds up doubling or tripling the financial cost to the consumer, ($6.99 a pound for the tenders! Hoffman's organic free range whole chickens are $2.89 an pound). You may as well forgo the meat and have something vegetarian for dinner instead. Sigh. I guess I've turned into a real Alice Waters worshipping/farmer's market junkie/Bay Area food snob.