ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050133
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MOSCOW
SOURCE: INGA SAFFRON KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
At 10 a.m., a tray of spindly, unwrapped Russian chickens appeared on the counter of a Moscow grocery.
At 4 p.m., the birds' anemic flesh was covered with a layer of dust. Dark bruises were starting to surface on the skin, and the chickens were leaching a pink brine.
At 4:07 p.m., retired music teacher Vera Shandrina entered the grocery in search of a good roaster. Approaching the counter, she recoiled as if she'd spotted a cockroach rather than a tray of theoretically edible poultry. ``My God! It's beyond description! Beyond description!'' she wailed, hurrying away.
Not long afterward, in a grocery store named Zeus at the opposite end of Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya Street, another tray of chickens was set out to attract customers. Plump, fleshy American thighs reclined on a snowy bed of ice in a glass-enclosed refrigerated case. The price was the equivalent of a little over $1 a pound, same as the moldering Russian poultry.
Little wonder that, when it comes to chicken, Russians prefer to buy American - if they can get it.
In the last month, the government of President Boris N. Yeltsin has twice banned and unbanned the import of American poultry, claiming that the birds failed to measure up to Russian sanitary standards. Russian health officials lifted the latest embargo on Monday only after U.S. producers agreed to test samples of each frozen chicken shipment for contamination. (The deal was negotiated with the help of Vice President Al Gore, and President Clinton himself pointedly told Yeltsin that about 40 percent of U.S. poultry is raised in Arkansas.)
But this reprieve is unlikely to end the squawking, known here as the Great Chicken War. Thursday, a new round of negotiations began, this time over tariffs on U.S. poultry. In this election year, when national pride is a big issue, most believe that Russian officials were concerned about competition, not cleanliness.
Since the first supplies of American thighs and drumsticks arrived in Russia five years ago as humanitarian aid - and were gratefully dubbed ``Bush's Legs'' after the president who sent them - imported chicken has taken over the Russian market.
Like Jack Sprat and his wife, it has been the perfect marriage: Americans like to eat no fat, Russians eat no lean. Russians crave the dark meat that health-conscious Americans eschew in favor of breasts.
So, what started as a charitable gesture is now big business. Russia has become the largest and most lucrative export market for American chickens, which arrive by the shipload from the poultry-producing belts of Arkansas and Maryland's Eastern Shore.
Russians eat 500,000 tons of Bush's Legs a year, a figure dangerously close to the annual domestic production of 720,000 tons. ``Americans are knocking the ground out from under Russian producers,'' complained Victor Gushchin, head of a Russian poultry research institute. ``Several farms have gone out of business.''
Bush's Legs are sold from the backs of trucks, at open-air markets and in the gleaming new Western-style supermarkets. They're hawked on street corners straight out of cardboard packing boxes without any protective packaging, a practice that hardly seems to encourage high sanitary standards. Nearly every Russian can tell of seeing grocery clerks heap frozen chickens on the floor so they could stomp on them to separate the carcasses.
``It's a barbaric way to sell chicken,'' Gushchin admitted. But no one seems to care as long as the American chicken is as cheap as and tastier than the Russian equivalent.
Even after five years, the novelty of buying American chicken parts hasn't worn off. Until Bush's Legs came onto the scene, there was only one way to buy chicken in Russia: whole.
This presented a major problem for the average cholesterol-loving Russian. What to do with that dry, unpopular white meat? One solution was Chicken Kiev, a dish in which slabs of butter are inserted under the skin of the breast and that was no doubt invented to get Russians to eat white meat. Being able to buy just the legs was as big a change for Russians as pulling down Lenin's statue.
``I bought bags of them,'' recalled Vera Shandrina, the music teacher, who cited George Bush as her preference in Russia's presidential election. For poverty-stricken pensioners, the cheap American chicken legs are often the only animal protein they can afford.
``I baked them in the oven and my guests loved them. But now they've made us afraid to buy Bush's Legs,'' Shandrina complained.
Although Russian officials cited sanitary concerns when they banned the chickens, they made strong hints that their generous size and plumpness were somehow unnatural.
``We had our reservations about the American side's ... antibiotic rates and hormone rates,'' said Vyacheslav Avilov, Russia's chief veterinarian and the man who imposed the ban on American poultry. Yet he acknowledged that his staff had never actually done any testing on American imports.
American chickens look so different from their Russian counterparts, they might as well be a different species. Russians produce long, bony birds with waxy, bluish skin; American chickens are pudgy and glowing fleshpots in comparison. Ever since imported chickens became available, ``we don't sell Russian ones,'' said Sasha Shlyakhov, the butcher at the Zeus grocery store. ``They're unappetizing.''
Gushchin, the poultry expert, acknowledged that most mass-produced Russian chickens are blue because they are anemic from underfeeding.
LENGTH: Medium: 100 linesby CNB