There's a good chance that you'll eat a Buffalo wing (or 28) while watching this year's Super Bowl. According to the National Chicken Council, Americans consume around 1.42 billion wings on Super Bowl Sunday. For a visual, that's enough poultry to stretch from the Panthers' home field at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte to Empower Field at Mile High in Denver more than 53 times. And that's an almost 14% increase in wing consumption since 2015, when our nation supposedly only ate 1.25 billion wings during the big game.
There are two generally accepted Buffalo wing origin stories and they both involve Teressa Bellissimo, co-owner of the original Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York. The Italian restaurant and bar was founded in 1939 by Bellissimo and her husband, Frank, but it would take two decades before Anchor Bar would make its mark in food lore. The first story comes courtesy of Frank Bellissimo and takes place on an undetermined date in the 1960s. According to Frank, the culinary innovation happened when the restaurant received an incorrect shipment. Instead of getting the typical chicken backs and necks for use in Teressa's famous spaghetti sauce, they got wings. "[The wings] were looking at you, like saying, 'I don't belong in the sauce,'" Frank recalled in a 1980 New Yorker article. Not wanting to waste perfectly good chicken, Frank asked Teressa to try to make something new with the unwanted ingredient. She cut them in half, deep-fried them, and dunked them in hot sauce. The famed appetizer was born.
Either way, Buffalo wings' popularity exploded over the next 50 years. In 1977, the city of Buffalo declared July 29 Chicken Wing Day, while crediting Mr. Bellissimo as the inventor. In the 1980 New Yorker article, author Calvin Trillin points out, "The City of Buffalo's proclamation would have been more exact if it had named as the inventor Teressa Bellissimo. The inventor of the airplane, after all, was not the person who told Wilbur and Orville Wright that it might be nice to have a machine that could fly."
Today, there are wing throwdowns and wing festivals. The Wing Bowl wing-eating contest finished its 26-year run in 2018. This spicy, greasy finger food permeates every part of our culture, from Victoria's Secret models on late-night television to the White House. But the ultimate sign that the Buffalo wing has taken over America? There was even an Anchor Bar franchise in Las Vegas for a time.