While I am a city dweller, I’m not ignorant of where my food comes from. However, I can honestly say that until I saw this story today, it had never occurred to me what happened to the millions of chicken feet that Americans refuse to eat. It’s not one of the agricultural oddities that shows up on the stock exchange ticker the way pork belly futures do, so if I had thought about it I probably would have assumed that they went into the broth pot. Nope.

$280 million dollars worth of chicken feet, and that’s got to be a lot of feet, go to China every year. That is until trade negotiations got difficult recently.  And apparently American chicken feet are the best ever, as they’re usually bigger (who studies that?) And marketing once again proves that words change the way food tastes, because Phoenix Paws does sound a lot more appetizing than chicken feet.