chicken

I think we can all agree: meat on the bone tastes better. Or it’s more fun to eat, anyway. I know a lot of people who won’t eat meat off the bone because it reminds them it’s an animal (…what?) but I’m not one of them.

I was in Jamaica earlier this month and I noticed something. Every time I ordered meat (jerk chicken, curried goat, or chicken in brown sauce for breakfast — pictured above), I spent most of my meal picking small bones from it. I mean, bones in whole fish are sometimes inevitable (they’re just so small and hard to see), but I really don’t want to be eating bone fragments, especially when they can be sharp.

In Jamaica, it seems that to make the meat a more manageable size…they don’t take it off the bone, or even cut the bone at a place where it’d make sense (like the joint). The meat, bone and all, is just chopped up into bite size pieces. But who the hell cares if it’s bite-size if there are bone shards and shit in my food? Instead of eating meat off one, large, smooth and normally shaped bone, I’m sitting there with these little bite-size pieces of meat, and even smaller bones everywhere in them. And since there’s no rhyme or reason to the cutting, it’s impossible to predict where the bone/fat/ligament will be on each piece.

It was a scavenger hunt I never signed up to play, and after I got halfway through each bone hunt, I just gave up and ate what else was on my plate. I wasted so much food. And even if I DID spend the time picking through the bones, I just couldn’t get all the meat off that I would normally, given the sharp bone edges and fragments that were present.

Am I missing something? Is there a method to this madness? Is this a way to get people to eat less meat?