Chicken Origins

I hate to take issue with the scientists who report that the modern chicken is the direct descendant of fowl first domesticated by Vietnamese farmers 10,000 years ago (“Discovery Gives Researcher Something to Crow About,” Dec. 26). But my mother, who’s also something of a maven on the subject, says the last chicken worthy of the name that she ever bought was in a kosher butcher shop on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx in 1953.

She is now 94, and since that time she’s searched far and wide, patting and prodding, poking and sniffing, in quest of another good chicken, and all she has found, she complains, are specimens with bluish gray skins, no flavor and no aroma.

Conceivably, science is correct and the DNA of these chickens is related to the DNA of Vietnamese chickens in some mist-shrouded Golden Age of the Pullet. But surely flavor, aroma and a nice yellow skin also count, and by that standard you couldn’t convince my mom that the cold, waxy stuff sitting on the supermarket shelves, pumped full of chemicals and synthetic hormones, are anything but a bunch of pathetic turkeys.

AL RAMRUS

Pacific Palisades