Occasionally someone offers me an unusual food. To entice me to eat it, they say, “It tastes like chicken.”

My gold standard for chicken developed from a family experience. One year we bought two batches of baby chicks — one batch to grow into laying hens, the others, a hybrid meaty breed, were destined for Sunday dinners and picnics featuring fried chicken.

This butcher flock, noted to be fast-growing birds, were big eaters. It seemed as though they guzzled down a semi-load of grain and a day later they looked like small turkeys. When butchered, the meat birds averaged 13 pounds. Drumsticks looked like the kind of muscle one expects to see on a professional bodybuilder. We suspected the chickens spent their nights pumping iron and their days eating.

After the meaty birds were dressed out, we roasted, baked, fried and turned some into rich-bodied soup laced with homemade noodles — the egg noodles courtesy of laying hens. The meat turned out lean, moist and full of flavor — our gold standard chickens.

When someone say a food “tastes like chicken,” I haven’t found they are speaking about our gold standard chickens. It seems more likely they are referring to a 10-year-old rooster with a terminal case of shingles.

Now when someone fixes me food that “tastes like chicken,” I know I’m offered something that tastes somewhere between pan-fried dog food and a diced and chopped tractor tire boiled in a cream sauce.

The list goes on as to what some people invite others to eat: alligator, beetles, locusts, wooly mammoth, snake, etc. — all reported to have “chicken-like flavor.” A cook reports the snake stinks during the frying process, which should be a clue to diners about its palatability.

These chicken-flavored foodies don’t malign beef. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Crocodile tastes like Angus beef steaks.”

A club titled Friends of Poultry united to curb the “like chicken” movement. Fear had risen that this practice unchecked could spread to other foods like lava washing over sugar cane fields. Someone could make a claim about a vegetable. “Boiled cabbage tastes like carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.” Or “mashed rutabagas taste like Marionberry pie.”

To combat this, a Truth in Flavors bill has been drafted which includes notice that one cannot claim something tastes like chicken — unless it is chicken. Public discussion to follow.