Bitterness becomes no one, dear friends, and I promise that I am not bitter. What I am is sad, and puzzled, and puzzled because I am sad and should not be. Of all the problems facing the world today, the ubiquity of takeout roast chicken is pretty small potatoes, so to speak. After all, isn't it better to have roast chicken for a week's worth of meals than to rely on a week's worth of fast food? If the price gap between a raw chicken and a rotisseried home-meal-replacement chicken is closing, where is the harm in spending a few extra cents? And didn't Laurie Colwin once write that while you want to procure the best chicken that you can, ultimately any roast chicken is better than no roast chicken?
Well, yes, except that she then followed it up with directions on how to roast your chicken yourself, and according to Julia Moskin's New York Times article, roasting a chicken is another one of those things that we fabulous urbanites are supposed to be too busy to learn how to do:
"I consider the perfect roast chicken my own Holy Grail," said Ly Phan, a Vietnamese-American living in Brentwood, Calif. But, she said: "I don't want to learn to make it. I just want to be able to buy it."
A reliable place to buy a good roast chicken has become an important quality-of-life matter for those too busy to cook. "I buy a chicken here every Sunday, and I eat it all week," Paul Griscom said at the Whole Foods Market at Columbus Circle. "I used to live close to Fairway, and I was nervous about moving away from those chickens. But the ones here are even better." At Whole Foods and elsewhere, the price of a whole roasted organic chicken is almost the same as a raw one.
Roasting a chicken at home may become a domestic throwback, like darning socks or putting up peaches.
Mr. Griscom said that he doesn't know how to roast a chicken. "I know, it's supposed to be so easy," he said. "But how would I know when it was done?"
Now, I know that two anecdotes do not a social movement make, and it's entirely possible that I am not a relic. From where I sit tonight, though, I'm not so sure.