Charlotte dad gets free chicken for a year

Hey, P.J. Mullen of Charlotte -- stay-at-home dad, blogger (www.realmendriveminivans.com), air-guitar player and football fanatic - nice job on that video for the Perdue Verifiably Good Chicken Contest.

P.J. won the grand prize, $500 and coupons for a year's worth of free chicken, for his entry, Bracilo di Pollo with Polenta. See the video here.

Nice touches by P.J.: Good knife-skills, excellent hand-washing, and staying cool under fire when a small child screamed a couple of times. (Maybe that was just a scream of delight because Daddy was cooking dinner.)

Judges included my colleague Andrea Weigl of the Raleigh News & Observer, and Priscilla Tsai of Creative Loafing in Charlotte.

Perdue hatches a new product

I needed to grab a package of skinless, boneless chicken breasts last week to test the Garlic Lime Chicken recipe. Pawing over the packages, I noticed a new label on the Perdue chicken:

"USDA Process Verified: All Vegetarian Diet, No Animal By-Products, Humanely Raised, Raised Cage Free." Since the chicken breasts were reasonably priced, at around the $5 or so I'd expect to pay for three big pieces, I grabbed a pack. It was good, although it's hard to say whether it was noticeably better, since it was swimming in lime-butter sauce.

This morning, Jim Perdue dropped by The Observer to explain that label, the Verifiably Good program. "We're going back to basics," he said. Perdue spent three years working with the USDA to come up with a program for raising their chickens that meets the federal standards for all of those claims.

Perdue made it clear that what he was really interested in was chicken quality. Good feed and better conditions result in chicken that is more tender.

But he also understood that we consumers want some things, too. We want labels with claims that mean something, rather than "fresh" describing chicken that's so close to frozen you can rap on it with your knuckles. We want our chickens raised in conditions that don't break our hearts or turn our stomaches. And yes, we want a reliable product that doesn't cost so much we have to choose between buying chicken and making a house payment.

Besides reading the label, you can go to http://www.perdueverifiablygood.com/ and find definitions for all the standards on the label.

Keeping the price the same as their old "All-Natural" labeled chicken was important to him, he said. "You know, with this economy . . . " Yes, I know. I really do know.

North Carolina is the site for the new product's rollout. Why here? Well, it's the largest state where Maryland-based Perdue has operations. There's a Perdue cooking plant in Concord, processing facilities in Lewiston and Rockingham, and plenty of chicken farms that are under contract to Perdue.

"And my wife is from here," he said. She's a native of Rocky Mount, and they both went to Wake Forest. (Yes, he has a sister named Beverly Perdue, he's not related to the Beverly Perdue in the governor's mansion.)

To mark the rollout, the company is holding a contest, open to N.C. residents only. Make a video of yourself cooking Perdue chicken and you could win $500 in cash and $520 in coupons for the product. Get details on that at Verifiably Good Web site, too.