Apparently, the American consumer is killing the Filipino chicken farmer. If the Philippines can be said to have a national dish, most people familiar with the nation's food culture would probably say adobo. Adobo can also be made with pork, but it is usually chicken cooked for a long time in a mix of vinegar and soy sauce. You might add some peppercorns and potatoes to that mix. The end result is a rather greasy, mostly meat dish (a description that fits most dishes in the Philippines).
I once tried to make adobo with a recipe from the internet. I cooked it for four hours as directed, making my apartment at the time reek. It turns out, with more research, that the long cooking time is for dealing with less than perfect cuts of meat, which one is more likely to encounter in the Philippines. Chicken available in the U.S. can be cooked for an hour and be okay.
Adobo is made with chicken thigh meat. You can also toss in drumsticks and wings. Filipinos prefer dark meat. Contrast that to the increasingly health-conscious American taste for breast meat. The trend for white meat has led to the breeding of chickens with disproportionately huge breasts. (I met am American ex-pat in the Philippines who suggested that artificial hormones were being used to plump up chicken breasts and that these additives were causing earlier puberty and larger breast development in American girls.)
If you've ever shopped in the meat department, you may have noticed that chicken thighs are ludicrously cheaper than chicken breasts, per pound. So much so that I often opt for thigh meat when shopping on a budget.
But Americans, by and large, don't consume anything other than the breast. The rest of the chicken gets dumped to other markets, including the Philippines. The Filipino chicken farmer, who still breeds a normally proportioned bird, is undercut by probably about 10% or so by what is more or less scrap meat in the eyes of American companies.
(10:57 AM)
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