Rubber chicken

The phrase is also used as a description for food served at speeches, conventions, and other large meetings, and as a metaphor for speechmaking.

[citation needed] A rubber chicken is an imitation plucked fowl made in a latex injection mold.

The origin of the rubber chicken is obscure, but it is possibly based on the use of inflated pig bladders attached to sticks and used as props or mock weapons by jesters in the days before the development of plastic and latex.

[1] One account attributes the first use of a prop chicken to John Holmberg, the Swedish blackface clown of the early 1900s.

Someone who "travels the 'rubber chicken circuit'" is said to do so by attending or making speeches at many such gatherings, often as part of political campaigning.