Thanks, I put in some effort. Feedstock is used in the petrochemical and energy sectors and I think the term invokes the same massive sense of scale of a fungible commodity in food production.
And sometimes country of origin. “May contain ingredients from Vietnam, Philippines or India” on , for example) coconut milk or cheap coffee, nuts, preserved fruit and so on.
The only other contribution I had to the possible “whys” of chicken in pepperoni is more controllable fat content. Cheap cuts are often (by no means always) fatty cuts, so they may be using chicken as the “lean” variable in their protein stream. Especially (at least in the US) as not all cuts are equally popular - wings at a premium, then boneless chicken breast (for reasons?), then boneless thighs, then pretty much everything else.
Based on meat critter pricing, I’d say that chicken drumsticks are the one meat item that are consistently cheap / on sale. Personally I agree, because I tend to find them more prone to “woodiness,” tough, or otherwise less palatable. Everything else is more expensive, often twice as much, so if I had a plethora of otherwise low value drumsticks… well, it makes sense from a profit/loss POV to me at least.
As mentioned before, it originated in the US, in NYC, in 1919, so I doubt game meat has anything to do with it.
Gamey tasting boar hogs. Not game meat. It’s a great way to get rid of otherwise unsaleable meat.
That’s really it- pepperoni’s flavor is a mix of meat, smoke, lactic acid, and spices. It’s strongly flavored stuff, as evidenced by the fact that all-beef, all-pork, or the mix of meats all taste substantially the same.
So if you’re not bound to be all-beef or all pork, why not come up with a mix that is cheaper and tastest the same?
And @pulykamell is right; it’s not “Italiian” in the sense of some sort of Old-World salumi that’s been being made by old-timers in the hills outside Genoa for a thousand years. It’s something that was developed by Italian-Americans in 1919 in the Italian style. So Italian in the broad sense of made by Italians, but not traditionally Italian. Kind of like New Orleans Creole dishes being French, or Texas Kolaches/Klobasniky being Czech, etc…