Posh nosh? Chook won't do

A survey of what diners ordered in Wellington and Auckland restaurants this week shows that chicken ranks with vegetarian dishes among the least popular choices on the dining-out menu.

Only 8 per cent of us order chicken as our main dish when we visit upper-end restaurants.

The survey was based on figures supplied by Sails, Prego, Molten, Soul, Vinnies and O'Connell St Bistro restaurants in Auckland, and Wellington's Dockside, Arbitrageur, Capitol, Boulcott St Bistro and Logan Brown.

The favourite dish at these restaurants was seafood, which commanded a 41 per cent share.

Beef was the next most-liked dish, attracting 26 per cent of orders, and lamb was third with 14 per cent.

Chicken was ahead of vegetarian meals (6 per cent), duck (2 per cent), pork (2 per cent) and others, including rabbit (1 per cent).

Restaurant Association president Michael Egan said that because chicken was a staple of home-cooked meals, it was probably low on the list of priorities when people went out to treat themselves to a restaurant meal.

"In the past two or three decades, poultry has changed from a treat, enjoyed as a Sunday roast, to a protein staple that is affordable, easily available, versatile, seemingly healthy and liked by most - and probably consumed in the home at least once or twice a week," Mr Egan said.

Despite its poor showing in restaurants, chicken rules the overall meat market.

Every New Zealander ate an average 37kg of it last year, and it dominates the household dining-room table and the takeaway market.

The meat has been under the spotlight this week after connections were made between the handling of raw chicken and New Zealand's soaring campylobacter rates.

The poultry industry told people to cook the meat properly and be careful when handling it, while academics and politicians castigated the industry for allowing infected chicken to be sold.

Poultry's success story has left its red-meat counterpart green with envy.

The Beef and Lamb Marketing Bureau has been fighting back with a television advertising campaign in which Olympic champions Sarah Ulmer and the Evers-Swindell twins extol the virtues of a diet high in iron.

Their message is "eat more red meat", and the aim of the campaign is to get New Zealanders back to eating a red meat dish three to four times a week.

Massey University professor Allan Rae told the Weekend Herald the emergence of chicken as a staple of the New Zealand diet was not unique.

"Every country looks to have swung to poultry, there's nothing new in it. It's driven by the perceived health benefits and cost."

White meat is seen as being more healthy than red meat, a view bolstered by the theory of some health experts and scientists that eating large quantities of red meat is a reason for New Zealand's high bowel cancer rate.

Other experts dispute this, saying any link has more to do with the way red meat is cooked rather than its consumption.

Another health benefit is that chicken has lower levels of fat than its rivals, provided the skin is removed.

But Professor Rae said the main driver behind poultry's emergence as the staple of our diet was cost.

"Poultry production is just like a factory," he said. "With beef you might need 100 acres [40ha] of farmland and a high annual rainfall."

Because the costs of poultry production were relatively low, the industry had a big price advantage in supermarkets.