Chicken Of Wall Street

Did you know that in the financial world of Manhattan, the chicken is the only animal politically correct? In almost all the important meetings in Wall Street, the business lunches served are usually chicken - fried, marinated, barbecued, curried, stuffed and roasted - in all ways and combinations you can think of and including a few you would never have thought of. Marti Saballs, journalist for several years in New York, recalled in his book 'Stories of a correspondent of economy' how he was surprised that chicken was always in the menu in the financial circles, be it a meeting with the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia, or a lunch with the vice president of the International Monetary Funds. So he ended up one day asking a civil servant of the Foreign Press Centre about this. The reply he got was: "There are several explanations: gastronomical, health and religion. It's the only animal politically correct." Saball investigated this intriguing definition of the chicken. He soon discovered that chicken meat is white, so people of all religion can eat it. Red meat (of beef, lamb, goat, veal) has bad reputation in question of health. Hindus are prohibited to eat it. Jews (there are 2 million in New York) and Muslins are not allowed to eat pork, and turkey is reserved for special occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fish is never featured because of the smell that lingers even long afterwards in the room. Curiously, not only is chicken eaten avidly and very popular, they even nickname a type of investors with it: those who do not take risks, keeping their money in bank deposit accounts, in money markets or government guaranteed security certificates. On the other hand, the investors who gamble and take great risks are denominated 'pigs', that for the nature of the game, often end up in gutters. It is not in his book, but one of the known electoral slogans of the republican candidate in the election of 1928, Herbert C. Hoover, was: 'A chicken in each casserole and a car in each garage'. This one phrase manifested the will and wish to strengthen agriculture and the industry of automobiles. At the same time, the intention of forming a middle class society, with acquisitive power to put food on the table and personal transport to illustrate it's social standing. Hoover took up office in 1929, the year of the black Thursday in the stock market, that announced the catastrophic collapse of the stork market, a historical disaster, leaving all garages as empty as the casseroles. Tags:chicken,wallstreet

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