Airs STORRS AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 
advantages in the original composition. Very often, too, the 
price of different birds varies enough to offset the slight dif- 
ferences in composition. 
There area great many interesting theories as to the especial 
worth or worthlessness of different parts of the flesh of poultry. 
For example, it is often held that while the breast of duck is 
very nutritious and wholesome the rest of the bird is hardly fit 
to eat. This may be partly due to the old prejudice against 
duck-meat, but there is a small grain of truth in it. In the 
figures in Table 27 it appears that the breast-meat of duck con- 
tains 4.7 per cent. more protein and 22.6 per cent. less fat than 
the other edible parts. If, as is commonly supposed, cooked 
fat is less digestible than the other nutrients of food, meat from 
the breast would of course need less labor of digestion than 
the other parts, and would also furnish more protein from the 
same weight of food, and would really be a better food, espe- 
cially for persons with weak digestions. 
One often hears it said that the light meat of fowl, turkey, 
etc., is more nutritious or more easily digested than the dark. 
Table 27 shows that the light portions of these meats do con- 
tain a little more protein and less fat than the dark, and may 
therefore yield more nourishment for the same amount of di- 
gestive effort. But this difference, as far as it may be defi- 
nitely stated, seems to depend on the chemical composition of 
the different parts, and not, as many have maintained, on the 
texture of the meat fibres. Light meat is surely more tender to 
the teeth, and one may reason that it must therefore be more 
easily acted upon by the digestive juices; but it is equally prob- 
able that the fibres of light meat are more closely set than those 
in the dark meat, and it may be argued with equal plausibility 
that the dark meat is therefore more easily affected by the 
juices. ‘There is very little definitely known upon this point, 
save that the differences are too small to be of importance to 
any but the weakest digestions. It has been shown by experi- 
ment that boiled chicken leaves the stomach more quickly than 
roasted; hence it seems probable that the mode of cooking makes 
more difference in the digestibility than the very slight differ- 
ences of composition or textures. 




