The Yogi Bear Graveyard was a short-lived accidental tourist attraction in North Carolina. After Yogi Bear's Honey-Fried Chicken restaurant chain dwindled to just one location, the owners sold all the fiberglass statues of Yogi, Boo-Boo, Cindy, and Ranger Smith to a local Jellystone Park campground. After that failed, the statues were dumped behind a truckstop.
Travelers who find themselves in Hartsville South Carolina can still visit that last location standing. The beginning of the end for the chain came when Hardee's bought the honey-flavored chicken additive they used in their chicken. Via The Post and Courier:
From its first location in Myrtle Beach, Yogi Bear expanded to Charlotte, Rocky Mount and Hartsville, among other cities. The franchise was about six stores strong when Hardee’s expressed interest in the honey technology; the Rocky Mount-based chain purchased the method for $1 million, according to Davis.
But once Yogi Bear belonged to Hardee’s, the branded stores were largely neglected.
“It was mismanagement,” says Yogi Bear’s current owner, George Atkins. “All the rest of them just didn’t control their costs.”
Anyone who finds themselves in Hartsville can still stop by Yogi Bear's and enjoy some batter fried corn, liver, or even the original honey-fried chicken.
• The Yogi Bear Graveyard Read the rest
If you've ever seen what a poultry farm looks like you would not believe chicken that has been slaughtered, frozen, shipped to China for processing, and then shipped back to the US to be sold to consumers was still edible.
I can believe it is cheap, or no one would have thought to put other people at risk to make it happen.
Real Farmacy:
“Chinese chicken” will soon have a whole new meaning, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently gave the green-light to four chicken processing plants in China, allowing chicken raised and slaughtered in the U.S. to be exported to China for processing, and then shipped back to the U.S. and sold on grocery shelves here. Furthermore, the imported processed poultry will not require a country-of-origin label nor will U.S. inspectors be on site at processing plants in China before it is shipped to the United States for human consumption.
Food safety experts worry about the quality of chicken processed in a country notorious for avian influenza and food-borne illnesses. And they predict that China will eventually seek to broaden the export rules to allow chickens born and raised in China.
“Economically, it doesn’t make much sense,” said Tom Super, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, in a recent interview with the Houston Chronicle. “Think about it: A Chinese company would have to purchase frozen chicken in the U.S., pay to ship it 7,000 miles, unload it, transport it to a processing plant, unpack it, cut it up, process/cook it, freeze it, repack it, transport it back to a port, then ship it another 7,000 miles.
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How birds get oxygen inside their eggs. File this great explainer under "questions previously unconsidered that have interesting answers." Read the rest
DHL has been shipping and losing packages for close to 50 years. Read the rest
Jokgu is a Brahma Bantam chicken who can peck her way through an operatic aria on a piano keyboard.
Yes, she follows the red light on the keyboard to do so but, hush now, it's still impressive. More importantly, it's entertaining. Impressive and entertaining enough to earn a spot on America's Got Talent.
Here's that performance, from 2017:
(Viral Viral Videos) Read the rest
A Bronx restaurant has one less chicken today, according to reports from ABC News in New York, with the pollo purloiner also making off with a tray of biscuits.
Employees are reportedly "crying foul."
After taking the food, the suspect flew the coop.
The suspect is described as a man with long braids. He was last seen wearing a black and pink shirt, blue jeans and blue sneakers. He also had a white towel over his head.
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I needed kitchen shears, so I might spatchcock a chicken. These do the job nicely.
This fantastic video from America's Test Kitchen has kept me busy. It involves fun uses of cast iron.
I'm eager to try the 500F heated cast iron steak searing method, the chicken was fantastic. I also just like saying spatchcock.
KitchenAid Shears with Soft Grip Handles, Black via Amazon Read the rest
A video making the rounds shows fertilized chicken eggs incubated outside their shells. It's fascinating, but not a first. Read the rest
People who work in chicken and turkey processing plants run by America's biggest poultry producers are routinely denied bathroom breaks. Because of this, some resort to wearing diapers while they're at work on the processing line, Oxfam America said in a report released Wednesday.
`They are in danger of serious health problems,' says the report.
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In America, chicken has better health care than you.
Announced on Twitter, the Colonel's Adventures will be offered exclusively at the San Diego Comic Con (and therefore eBay within minutes of the doors opening.) You can have it signed at any branch of KFC by rubbing it on a greasy mass of their finest poultryform crude protein.
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Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Silly question. But if you're talking about chicken as we know it today — barbecued, boneless and skinless, served as sausages, bologna, nuggets, and burgers — the answer is actually "neither". What came first was Robert C. Baker, a Cornell University food scientist who is credited with popularizing chicken as a convenient, everyday meat.
At Slate, Maryn McKenna has a really interesting piece about Baker's role in the invention of the chicken nugget. Although you've probably heard that the nugget was invented by McDonald's research and development staff, Baker actually beat them to the punch by a couple decades, turning out "chicken sticks" in 1963. The catch is that, as a researcher at a publicly funded university whose primary goal was to increase the profitability of family-operated chicken farms in upstate New York, Baker never patented his own ideas.
Baker’s prototype nugget, developed with student Joseph Marshall, mastered two food-engineering challenges: keeping ground meat together without putting a skin around it, and keeping batter attached to the meat despite the shrinkage caused by freezing and the explosive heat of frying. They solved the first problem by grinding raw chicken with salt and vinegar to draw out moisture, and then adding a binder of powdered milk and pulverized grains. They solved the second by shaping the sticks, freezing them, coating them in an eggy batter and cornflake crumbs, and then freezing them a second time to -10 degrees. With trial and error, the sticks stayed intact.
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In Salon, an article about series of lawsuits against Chick-Fil-A by former employees who claim managers "have wielded their authority over workers in ways that break the law: firing a Muslim for refusing to pray to Jesus; firing a manager so that she’d become a stay at home mom; and punishing workers for objecting to sexual harassment." In one incident, a supervisor is alleged to have phoned immigration authorities to have immigrant workers deported as punishment for complaining about sexual harassment. Kiss 'em goodbye today. Read the rest
The New York Times photography department is really on a roll with this deliciously absurd photo of a chicken. Read the rest
