That wasn’t always the case, though. In fairness, the wings in question arrived at a tumultuous time for the chicken wing industrial complex. The massive demand for the things has taxed the already disgustingly overworked factory poultry industry to the brink. The explosion of wing-forward chain concepts, Uncle Titty-Liker’s Wing Moat and the like, and local restaurants like this one feeling obligated to have them on the menu as a loss-leader, has led to a steep increase in cost per pound, as much as 60%, some restaurants have complained.

Last summer, The Washington Post reported on the wingpocalypse, noting that Buffalo Wild Wings’ stock had dropped 63% in one quarter, owing to rising costs. It’s somehow become the single most expensive part of the chicken, which is quite the Horatio Alger story for the humble wing, once thought of as the least desirable throw-away.

A few decades ago, families would regularly cook an entire bird, saving the wings for stock. Around the 1980s, once people became more health conscious, super markets began selling deboned, wingless, and skinless chicken breasts. The wing was much too fatty in the dawn of the dieting era, but today, we can’t get enough of that garbage. Americans alone eat well well more than 20 billion of them a year. We’re surrounded by mountains of garbage. We slather it in spicy sauce and coat our faces with it. It doesn’t feel like garbage to us anymore, though, because someone convinced us it wasn’t.

There’s no other day that we devour chicken wings at a more gluttonous rate than the Super Bowl—there was an estimated 1.35 billion alone that weekend that the Eagles were embarrassing my erstwhile beloved Patriots. They embarrassed the president, too, officially making them America’s Team. Here’s what he said about them:

“They disagree with their President because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country. The Eagles wanted to send a smaller delegation, but the 1,000 fans planning to attend the event deserve better.”

They abandoned their fans, the White House said.

No single Eagle this year, you may not be surprised to hear, protested during the anthem at any game. And yet here was the president spinning them into a traitorous lot out of whole-cloth, simply because he found their reluctance to appear with him embarrassing. He lied about them, in other words. He made them appear as something they are not.