Why millennials have washed their hands of raw chicken

A few years ago, we were told the millennial demographic consisted of thousands of urban farmers who kept chickens in their backyards until they abandoned their personal fowl when the responsibility of bird rearing got to be too much. “Hipsters are ditching their pet chickens,” ran a headline in the Atlantic in 2013. “Backyard chickens may have jumped the shark,” ran another, in CityLab.

Today, youngish people are no longer making news for shoddy chicken farming — we are making news because we are apparently too squeamish to cook our feathery friends, let alone live with them. This squeamishness has nothing to do with a vegan moral imperative. A lot of us simply just don’t like touching raw meat, whether it was butchered at a big factory or in our own backyards. According to a 2016 survey conducted by market research firm Mintel, 37 per cent of cooks in the U.K. aged 16 to 34 “prefer not to handle raw meat when cooking.” It’s with this research in mind that U.K. supermarket Sainsbury’s announced this month plans to roll out special, “touch-free” packaging for raw chicken cutlets aimed at younger customers who don’t want to handle their dinner before they cook it.

According to a Sainsbury’s spokesperson speaking to the Sunday Times, “Customers, particularly younger ones, are quite scared of touching raw meat. These bags allow people, especially those who are timepoor, to just ‘rip and tip’ the meat straight into the frying pan.” Rip and tip. It doesn’t sound particularly appetizing, but then again, I’m not paid to advertise chicken to people who are afraid of it.

Needless to say, not everyone is thrilled with Sainsbury’s announced rollout of touch-free meat technology. Many commenters, including permanently vexed broadcaster Piers Morgan, are incensed with a consumer initiative they believe coddles members of the millennial demographic; a group often referred to by cantankerous people everywhere as “snowflakes” (or “whiny snowflakes”).

One cantankerous individual on Twitter even went so far as to dub this particular case of alleged millennial entitlement “Snowflake Chicken.” Morgan meanwhile, had a hissy fit on TV, suggesting raw-meataverse millennials are “destroying the planet” with their “weak-willed behaviour.”

Though I don’t count myself among the chicken-scared 37 per cent, I think Mr. Morgan is in need of a reminder that 37 per cent does not a majority make. Yes, a lot of millennials in the U.K. have an aversion to touching raw chicken. But so do many other people.

According to the same Mintel survey, 27 per cent of the average population (U.K. residents of all ages) expressed an aversion to handling raw meat. In other words, this phobia is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an exclusively millennial problem.

If we’re going to play the blame game, I’d wager the source of raw-meat phobia among younger people is not a “weak-willed” nature, as Morgan suggests, but fear-mongering by baby boomer parents who were freaked out by salmonella in the 1980s and ’90s. Fear of food infection is by no means a thing of the past, but boy was it alive and well when millennials were kids.

The ’80s and ’90s were also a time of acute fear of E. coli and mad cow disease. Of course, no responsible food agency of the day recommended human beings cease handling raw meat, but it’s reasonable to assume that any parent paranoid about salmonella might give their kid the impression that an uncooked chicken cutlet is an extremely dangerous thing.

Yet this fearful attitude is the exception, not the rule. The interesting thing is that, despite Morgan’s railing against weak-willed “snowflakes,” it may be millennial parents who are leading the charge against outsized paranoia around infection and germs.

Thanks to increasingly popular theories about kids benefiting from exposure to some bacteria (for example, Jack Gilbert and Rob Knight’s book Dirt Is Good: The Advantage of Germs for Your Child’s Developing Immune System), many new parents are less anxious about their kids playing in the dirt and eating weird stuff off the ground.

Of course, this attitude doesn’t apply to eating raw chicken (which most parents obviously do not advocate). But it suggests that this new generation of parents may be more willing to let their kids explore the kitchen and learn safe and appropriate food prep, rather than do what many of their own parents did: chase their kids away from the uncooked chicken breast on the counter like it was going to explode.