Experiment completed. I now see what you are referring to. It’s subtle, though.
Recently I had a carton of large eggs which 11 out of 12 were double, it was surreal.
My dad spent some of his childhood summers on a farm and part of his chores was to get the eggs each morning from one of the chicken coupes. He would also keep records of egg production (the farmer kept all these records for every coupe). He was instructed to keep the chickens calm because if they get excited they mis-lay, have yolkless eggs and double yolks which made the eggs unsalable/less saleable. Don’t know if excited chicken actually lead to double yolks but that was evidently this farmer’s take.
Also a aside on the above an egg story from my dad, one year his chickens were not producing well and he started to yell at the chickens, it worked, egg production came back up, the farmer caught him yelling at the chickens and told him to stop, shortly after egg production dropped again.
A UK twist on the brown / white eggs business: there’s a British farming undertaking which specialises in eggs from a rather uncommon breed of chicken, the Old Cotswold Legbar; whose eggs the firm describes as “with pastel coloured shells” – very pale green / blue. They emphasise that their chickens live in free-range conditions: certainly the yolks are usually a beautiful deep yellow. This speciality in the egg line is quite easy to come by in the more up-market supermarket chains in the UK.
My favorite are the “cage-free vegetarian fed” eggs. Dude. If your chickens were out of a cage for even a second - and even if they were in a cage - they were eating bugs. I guarantee it. It’s what chickens do, when they’re not busy being the stupidest creatures on the farm.
(There was a farmer in a thread here once who ordered the intelligence of his critters something like this: pigs, farmer, dogs, horses, corn, chickens… Still cracks me up.)
I agree that dark meat is becoming more popular, at least in the U.S., in recent years. I believe past generations preferred a more bland diet than than what we prefer today (e.g. meatloaf & mashed potatoes vs. habanero chili)—and white meat is more *bland *than dark.
The one nice thing about breast meat is that it offers a large chunk of solid meat and you don’t have to fight the chicken so much to get at it. It’s also more aesthetically pleasing in that you don’t have to contend with as many tendons, ligaments and blood vessels which squinks some people out (not me, I like sucking on bones and sinew).
I’m a wing and thigh guy myself. Wings are overpriced and thighs are under-priced, so it balances out.
That’s really the answer to the OP’s question.
For the TL;DR version, historically white meat used to be more tender and less strongly flavored than dark meat, and there was less of it per chicken, making it the “high status” part of the chicken.
Since then, chickens have been bred to be larger as well as have a lot more breast meat than they used to for the same size bird. And since for the most part they’re no longer free range, the meat is more or less all equally tender, so that’s why we get the question of why breast meat is considered preferable.
Thighs rule.
Breast require too much care to be done right. They are, however, easy to carve and divide into similar-sized chunks.
Guilt is the only logical reason anyone can prefer a drier, leaner, less tasty cut.
:D:D
Yeah, it’s closer to comparing tan and beige than comparing black and white.
McNuggets were a lot better when they were mixes of dark and white meat.
But if I’m just eating chicken as chicken and not mcnuggeted, I’d much rather have white meat. I find thighs to be pretty nasty most of the time.
I prefer to buy a whole chicken and part it out myself, if I buy anything as a package of just parts I prefer bone in skin on thighs and debone/skin it myself. [toss the bones into one zippy bag and the skins into another one and freeze. I wait til I have enough bones to add to a whole chicken to make stock, and we deep fry the skin into ‘cracklings’ as a snack when we get a bag full.]
Costco sells 3-5 pound bags of skinless boneless thighs (cant remember the size) I cook them on the smoker and use them in damn near everything.
I would love a chicken with thighs the size of a normal chicken breast!
My dad was from Russia and when his mom came over for dinner on Friday night they both would fight who would get the rear end . There is a lot fat in rear end
and big deal in Russia to get the rear end .
By “rear end”, do you mean the tail? I love the tail on a roast chicken.
This is a pretty long thread already, but I think you have all missed something. Dark meat is more likely to have connective tissue – the gelatinous remains of those bone coverings. The whole “white meat only” advertisement is just saying “99% GRISTLE FREE.”
Of course when you’re ordering chicken, you might order dark meat, if its your preference. Maybe you pick the meat free like I do. Maybe like my friends, you put the drumstick in your mouth, and it comes out a clean bone. But that’s your choice. No one wants to open a package of processed meat, and find its 1/3 fat and collagen.
Heck, that’s why McD’s invented pink slime – high pressure ammonia making collagen disappear so our nuggets can just be popped in the mouth. Not to feed us ammonia gas.
[nitpick] Pink slime is actually from beef, not chicken, and the ammonia doesn’t make collagen disappear, it’s used to destroy pathogens that might be in the product. And before you say “eww”, bacteria and such are in ALL animal flesh that we eat. [/nitpick]
Interesting. So, I guess the nuggets were made from “mechanically separated chicken”, or some such foo. Still, I remember, back in the’80’s, when I bit into a McNugget, and then looked at what I’d bitten into, I wasn’t pleased at the visual appearance. Nowadays, when I peeked, I was shocked at how homogeneous it was. No problem looking at it now.
Sometimes, the 100% white meat chicken will and a disclaimer, (x% rib meat.) Which is likely darker meat, which is likely tastier, but doesn’t have that chicken salad guarantee of “go ahead, bite in without looking.”
Yep. “Mechanically separated chicken” is sort of but not exactly the chicken equivalent of “pink slime”. According to my research “mechanically separated chicken” is more “high pressure water jet separated chicken”. First the carcass is pureed (yes, that includes things like bones, skin, and tendons) then it’s forced through a sieve (by, for example, high pressure water) which is supposed to catch all the bony and unground bits.
Mechanically separated beef is no longer allowed in the food chain in most places due to the very small risk of mad cow disease, which no one wants to take any chance of getting. Mechanically separated almost everything else, though, is still allowed.
Mechanically separated meat (MSM) is not supposed to comprise more than 20% of a food product. So chicken McNuggets are at least 80% regular chicken meat, but might be up to 20% MSM, all of it ground up and formed into the nugget shape.
My favorite unintentionally hilarious moment on a reality show ever: Jamie Oliver trying to gross kids out with knee slappingly over the top loaded language and theatrics about the horrors of mechanically separated chicken…and the kids aren’t buying it. 
(Generally speaking, I adore Jamie Oliver, but he and I part ways on the topic of mechanically separated chicken.)
Aka “the pope’s nose.” It’s not just a Russian thing. I know of a good number of folks who consider it a prized part of the chicken. It seems exactly like something I’d love, but I am indifferent to it. I will save the oysters on a roast chicken for myself, though. 
Or… just cut portion size. I’d rather have half as much chicken thigh than chicken breast. But breast can be pretty good if it’s not overcooked. Check out sous vide. I’m on my phone but I will post a link later.