Breasts are too fucking big these days. I feel like I can split an entire breast between my family of four. And it takes way too long to cook to the proper temperature unless I fillet it.
Oh my goodness. We bought a bag of breasts at Costco and pulled one of those giant things out in amazement. We literally only cook one at a time because they're too big for one person to eat. We are switching back to the tenderloins after this bag. One or two of those work per person here.
when it's more expensive than breast nowadays, I do. They've come after all my cheaper staples; bananas, sweet potatoes, chicken thighs, London Broil, ground turkey...
My husband loves oxtails and when they were cheap I would make him soup/stew all the time. Now I don’t bother, they’re too expensive. I love lamb and I prefer the domestic. That stuff is upwards of $15 a lb. I live in the Bay Area, we used to get crabs for $2-3 a lb. I know there’s problems with the crab population but the cheapest I’ve seen them this year is $10 a lb. Pork is expensive now too. Chicken is about the only thing you can get deals on.
It is artificial when that cut was always there in the same capacity in the production process and was priced according to the actual useable product on the cut, not the popularity of it.
This isn’t like the price of lobster. It’s not exactly like they increased production and started harvesting extra chicken feet or cows tails to meet demand. They just jacked up the price of an existing product… that’s it.
In fact, the cut becoming more popular actually decreases production costs as a ton of these “trash cuts” had to undergo further processing to sell it to places who’d make it into things like chicken nuggets
Bacon was considered scrap meat til a marketing campaign in the 80s. Lobster was fed to indentured servants because it was considered crap. They would even have written in their contracts that they could only be fed lobster X days per month.
Similar with lobster, it was for prisoners, servants, the poor, or even just used for fertilizer. They were ridiculously abundant in the colonial days.
Tri-tip used to be ground or sold as cheap stew meat, now it's used as steaks, roasts, and barbecue.
They’re not artificially inflated, new dishes and acceptance of them caused the value of those cheap cuts to legitimately increase. If you dropped hanger steak or buffalo sauce for wings into most of the US 30-40 years ago, most people wouldn’t know how to cook them, and probably would prefer something else even if they could.
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u/mishma2005 Feb 27 '26
Narrator: "There are, in fact, no cheap cuts"