One man’s Plea to council: Rename Boneless Wings

LINCOLN, NEB. » Almost two hours in to Monday’s City Council meeting, a man walked to the lectern and addressed what he believed to be a matter of civic importance. The man declared a grievance that was so petty that video of the meeting could not help but go viral.

“Lincoln has the opportunity to be a social leader in this country,” the man, Ander Christensen, 27, said. “We have been casually ignoring a problem that has gotten so out of control that our children are throwing around names and words without even understanding their true meaning, treating things as though they’re normal.”

But the world was not normal, Christensen said.

“I go into nice family restaurants and I see people throwing this name around and pretending as though everything is just fine,” he said. “I’m talking about boneless chicken wings. I propose that we as a city, remove the ... ” Here laughter interrupted. Christensen had to plead, “Excuse me.”

He presented his proposal:

“That we as a city remove the name ‘ boneless wings’ from our menus and from our hearts.”

No one interrupted now. He started to rattle off his reasons, which were in line with the complaints of many, many commenters online.

“Nothing about boneless chicken wings actually comes from the wing of a chicken,” he said. “We would be disgusted if a butcher was mislabeling their cuts of meats, but then we go around pretending as though the breast of a chicken is its wing?”

He went further.

“Boneless chicken wings are just chicken tenders, which are already boneless. I don’t go to order boneless tacos. I don’t go and order boneless club sandwiches,” he said. “It’s just what’s expected.”

And he said that mislabeling the chicken product was a full- blown societal woe.

“Our children are raised being afraid of having bones attached to their meat,” he said. “That’s where meat comes from; it grows on bones. We need to teach them that the wing of a chicken is from a chicken, and it’s delicious.”

So rename the dish, Christensen suggested, at least in Lincoln.

“We can call them Buffalo- style chicken tenders,” he said. “We can call them ‘ wet tenders.’ We can call them ‘ saucy nugs,’ or ‘ trash.’ We can take these steps and show the country that’s where we stand and that we understand that we’ve been living a lie for far too long, and we know it, because we feel it in our bones.”

One person applauded loudly. A city councilman, Roy Christensen — who is Christensen’s father — spoke up. “I would like to just comment here, for the record, that’s my son,” he said, with good humor and maybe some pride.

The speech was a joke — but it also wasn’t a joke, the younger Christensen said. “I would love nothing more than to have boneless chicken wings removed from menus,” he said. “Don’t call it something it’s not.”