Food - Drink
The White Stripes On Chicken Breasts Explained
By LAUREN ROTHMAN
If you're a fan of cooking up chicken breasts at home — whether bone-in or boneless — you may have noticed those white stripes running through the raw chicken meat. According to Allrecipes, the white stripes commonly found running through chicken breasts are actually small pockets of fat that are similar to the "marbling" you'd find in red meat.
As the National Chicken Council (NCC) puts it, "White striping is a quality factor in chicken breast meat caused by deposits of fat in the muscle during the bird's growth and development." The white stripes are extremely common, and the phenomenon is found in about 12 to 43% of commercial chicken flocks.
Although a report by The Humane League states, "White stripes show up because the chicken's body can't keep up with the unnaturally fast muscle growth," a 2016 study by Poultry Science disputes the idea. It states that the striping "is observed regardless of how these breeds are raised and are more prominent at older ages on some but not all breast filets."