No matter how serious a foodie you may be, it’s hard not to get impatient with all the buzzwords that typically pop up in food discussions these days. Dryaged, well-marbled, day boat, line-caught, free-range, grass-fed, grain-finished, heritage breed, heirloom, all-natural, organic, cultured – enough already!

Fortunately, I have the antidote to all this fussy verbiage. It turns out the true secret to gastronomic happiness couldn’t be simpler. In a word: skin.

I’ve been a serious skin devotee since I was a kid. I’d gleefully eat the crunchy skin from roast chicken all at once, chewing it as long as possible to extract every last bit of marinade-saturated flavor.

I don’t think I’m alone. At Thanksgiving, you definitely want some of that turkey skin on your plate, right? And one of the chief pleasures of making a fresh ham is the plate of cracklins – that’s roasted skin – that you end up with. In all these cases, the skin is crunchy yet chewy – an unbeatable textural combination – and is just fatty enough to make you roll your eyes in sheer bliss.

Happily, skin lovers in the city now have more options than ever, chief among them an amazing preparation at Grand Sichuan International Eastern (1049 Second Ave. at 55th Street, 212-355-5855).The dish, which isn’t served at the city’s other Grand Sichuan outlets, is called crispy toothpick chicken skin ($11). As its name implies, it consists of a few dozen pieces of wok-fried skin, each one impaled on a toothpick. They’re served amidst a huge pile of red chilie peppers, which lend an aromatic smokiness to the sumptuous skin, while a scattering of Sichuan peppercorns provides the requisite effervescence so unique to Sichuan cooking. Ingenious and addictive, it’s one of the city’s most distinctive dishes.

Chicken skin is also featured at Japanese yakitori restaurants, which serve small skewers of grilled chicken. Each skewer typically features a particular part of the chicken, so you can get a skewer of thigh meat, a skewer of breast meat, a skewer of liver, a skewer of tails – or, best of all, a skewer of skin.

At Yakitori Totto (251 W. 55th St., between Eighth Avenue and Broadway, 212-245-4555), the skin is artfully spooled onto the wooden skewers in little spiral patterns and emerges with just enough charcoal-singed edges to give you that backyard-cookout feeling. Unlike the heavily spiced Grand Sichuan treatment, the only seasoning here is salt, so you can enjoy near unfettered communion between tastebuds and skin. At only $2.50 per skewer, it’s an irresistible treat. It’s even cheaper – $1.50 per stick – downtown at Village Yokocho (8 Stuyvesant St., between Third Avenue and 9th Street), where the skin is folded up onto the skewer, accordion-style. Here the skin is a bit chewier, not quite as crispy, and is sprinkled with teriyaki-ish sauce.

Beef, lamb, and pork skin are rarely if ever eaten, in part because they’re thick and tough, and also because they can more profitably be sent to the tannery and turned into leather. Pork cracklins, which come from the hog’s rear legs, are a wonderful exception to this rule, but the restaurant versions I’ve encountered are usually jawbreakingly solid.

There’s a better option, however: roast suckling pig. Because the hog is so young at slaughter, its skin is thin and offers just enough chewy resistance to keep you from eating it too quickly.

The best place to sample piglet skin is at the city’s Latin American restaurants. My favorite is Lechon Hornado Ecuatoriano (76-18 Roosevelt Ave., at 76th Street, Queens, 718-205-7357),a bustling Ecuadorian restaurant in Elmhurst. Each platter of suckling pig – listed on the menu as hornado ($11) – is topped by a gorgeously bronzed sheet of skin, which cleaves into shards as you take a bite of it.This dish is the house specialty, and almost everyone seems to order it, so if you look around the room you’ll customer after customer with a golden-brown wafer of skin on his plate, like a shared code signifying good eating.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: Yes, the pork meat is sensational too.

The most interesting skin trend I’ve noticed lately is the rise of fish skin. Salmon skin, of course, has been readily available at sushi restaurants for years, but now restaurateurs are wising up to the appeal of fish skin in other contexts. The newly opened Place on West Tenth (142 W. 10th St., between Greenwich Avenue and Waverly Place, 212-462-2880) is one of several restaurants around town serving sea bass topped with beautifully crisped skin ($27). And at Night and Day, a recent newcomer to Park Slope (230 Fifth Ave. at President Street, Brooklyn, 718-399-2161), the entree listing features a dish called crisped-skin striped bass – a promising example of skin actually being touted on the menu as an attraction. Sure enough, the fish’s exterior is so crispy that it retains its crunch despite being half-immersed in a bowl of scallop chowder ($19).

One final note: Those of us who appreciate skin must band together to quash the inexplicable trope toward saving calories with skinless chicken breasts and thighs. For starters, trying to save calories is usually a hopeless endeavor. But if you absolutely insist, at least get your priorities straight: Throw away the rest of the chicken, and just eat the skin.