Chicken

Today while I was eating my lunch (Cobb salad with chicken breast on it) I was thinking about the chicken on my salad (it is grilled) and how much I like “crispy” chicken on salad. Thinking about this took me to dinner last night. After assisting a family friend with taking pictures of her daughter she invited us to stay for dinner. While the adults grubbed on Rubio’s my friends’ young 3 year old daughter had leftovers from her lunch earlier that day which was popcorn chicken from KFC. I didn’t think about it until just now; how interesting as a society we’ve moved from making our children eat the drumsticks to giving them the breast or chicken stripes. When I was a kid the only type of white meat chicken the kids received were Chicken McNuggets from McDonald’s, and the type of meat there is definetly in question.
In my family (and by family I mean extended family; grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins) when we had Fried chicken (and it was always fried – lets be honesty there was little in my families meat cooking repartee that wasn’t fried) the kids were always stuck with the drumsticks. In family we had a chauvinistic approach to meal time:

The women cooked the meal and waited on the men.
The men sat around bullshitting and yelled for the women to bring them another drink.
The kids played far away from the men and were seen but not heard.

Once the meal was prepared – there was a prayer (of course) by the leading patriarch of the family – usually my grandfather. And then the organized chaos began. The men folk always ate first, taking the juiciest and biggest pieces of chicken for themselves. After having their pick, the adult women got in there and took the next best pieces. Finally like buzzards around a fresh carcass the kids were allowed to swoop. Their swooping was done in the same sexist manner – boys first then girls.
I was actually pretty luck I very rarely had to wait until the end, mostly because I was the baby of the family and 1 of 2 granddaughters. This meant that usually either my mother gave me some of her food or one of my older male cousins would make the other boys let me go first (I was cute – what can I say).
Aw but I digress – back to the main topic, what in our society has changed that makes the drumstick no longer the king of the kids?