The healthiest way to cook chicken is to bake it in the oven or stir fry it with vegetables. Put the parts in a baking pan, rub some olive oil on them, and surround them with plenty of garlic, lemon, carrots, or whatever you like. Bake at 350° until brown.
Buy whole chickens so you aren't paying someone else to cut it up for you. Cutting a chicken is easy and YouTube has plenty of videos that explain how to do it.
The cheapest chicken is industrially produced, meaning that the chickens are raised in huge flocks indoors under crowded conditions, treated with antibiotics to prevent illness and promote rapid growth, and are ready to slaughter six weeks after hatching.
If you don't want to eat chicken raised this way, you should look for birds that were raised free-range without antibiotics and are Certified Organic, kosher, or halal -- if you value such things. You will have to pay more for such meat but it will taste better.
You will be supporting a food system that is healthier for chickens, people, and the planet.
This post originally appeared on Food Politics, an Atlantic partner site.
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Marion Nestle is a professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. She is the author of Food Politics, Safe Food, What to Eat, and Pet Food Politics.
