It's a common experience, when eating a strange meat for the first time, to remark that it "tastes like chicken." Sometimes we say this when it isn't even true, just because the audience expects it and we want to be funny. But if you think about it, a lot of things do taste like chicken, at least a little bit: turkey, quail, pigeon, rabbit, frog legs, crocodile, snake, lizard, field rat (all of which I have tried personally). Why is this?

Joe Staton, now a professor at the University of South Carolina, but formerly a research fellow at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, published a paper in 1998 entitled "Tastes Like Chicken?" that took a serious scientific look at the conundrum. Though Staton's research was tongue-in-cheek (it was published in the Annals of Improbable Research, a satirical journal that awards Ig Nobel Prizes each year), he did treat the subject with respect and scientific rigour.

Staton's conclusion was that taste was an evolutionary trait, and animals that tasted similar to each other were likely to be more closely related on the evolutionary tree than animals with more distinct flavours. He also asserted that "tastes like chicken" should be replaced by "tastes like tetrapod" — his term for four-limbed vertebrates like mammals, birds (counting wings), reptiles (including limbless snakes) and amphibians. In his theory, the ancestral tetrapods (dinosaurs?) bequeathed the "original" flavour of meat to their descendants, and offshoots like beef and pork developed much later in the evolutionary timeline.

This makes some intuitive sense, at least when we're talking about reptiles, amphibians and other birds. They're almost certainly more closely related to chickens than to cows or pigs, so it makes sense that they taste similar. But there are some holes in this analysis. For example, ostriches — though they're birds — taste a lot more like beef than chicken. Rodents and lagomorphs (rabbits) — though they're four-legged mammals — usually taste more like chicken than beef or pork.

Another possibility, one that fits in nicely with Staton's theory, is that things taste like chicken because chicken is so bland. Fat carries more flavour than muscle, and chicken is lean meat. Thus, the "default" flavour of meat (akin to the flavour of Staton's ancestral tetrapod) is chicken-like. Anything that doesn't taste like chicken — pork, buffalo, goat, kangaroo — is the result of random evolutionary changes that added flavouring agents to the flesh of the animals. In other words, beef flavour = chicken flavour + "something." And simpler animals (small mammals and non-mammals) are less likely to have that "something" that changes their flavour.

Of course, there's also the very real possibility that exotic meats don't taste like chicken, but we are just too linguistically impoverished to think of any other way to describe them. The English language is very good at describing the way things look, but we have a dearth of adjectives that are specifically related to taste: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, hot... not a whole lot out there, really. (Try it yourself: Can you describe, in words, the difference between the tastes of pork and beef?)

Without a rich source of basic words to describe a new taste, we must resort to comparing the taste to something we've eaten before: nutty, buttery, chocolatey, fruity, "like chicken." And even here, our vocabulary in terms of meat flavours is extremely limited. Many North American meat-eaters rarely stray beyond the three basics: beef, pork and chicken. Sure, they'll probably recognize turkey, fish, seafood and maybe lamb, but they're unfamiliar with goat, camel, rabbit, reindeer, guinea pig, ostrich and any number of other meats that are commonly eaten around the world. This puts us at a serious disadvantage in communication. When you eat your first porcupine*, maybe the most accurate description of its taste would be, "It tastes like hedgehog." But since you don't know what hedgehog tastes like — and even if you do, the listener probably doesn't — you have to find some common ground... which comes down to beef, pork or chicken. And the most likely match is usually "chicken."

[* I've eaten porcupine in Vietnam (or at least something they told me was porcupine — it's best not to ask too many questions) and it tasted more like pork than chicken.]

Sources: Tastes Like Chicken? - Joe Staton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, MetaFilter, Wikipedia: Tastes like chicken