MOSCOW — Bush legs are back, if you can find them. Once, long ago, U.S. chicken imports were at the top of the market here, plump and yellowish at a time when Russian chicken tended to be scrawny, bluish and scarce. That was the early 1990s.
Back then, nearly a million tons of leg quarters flowed across the Atlantic every year — chicken parts that didn’t command very high prices in the breast-meat-craving United States, but that nicely filled a Russian preference for dark meat. And they were cheap. Russians liked them so much that they took to calling them “Bush legs,” after President George H.W. Bush.
But in the new pecking order, they come in close to the bottom. For the first nine months of this year, they were banned outright, on the grounds that the chlorine disinfectant used by U.S. producers is unhealthy. Now, after a relentless full-court press by the U.S. industry, and hard-nosed bargaining over Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization, they’re coming in again, washed with a different antimicrobial solution. But Russian shoppers complain about their water content, and worry, after a campaign in the Russian media, about hormones and antibiotics.
You won’t find Bush legs in markets in Moscow or almost any other major city. Who gets them? Poor people in the boondocks, schoolkid and patrons of fast-food restaurants that sell chicken. A lot end up as processed ingredients in other foods.
