Chicken Backs are very popular in the American south: even though there is little meat on them, they offer lots of area to be coated with batter and deep-fried. Cooked in this way, they are often sold in restaurants as “Chicken Ribs.” They are also good barbequed with lots of tasty sauce on them. In this, they are really no different from chicken wings, which also have no meat on them, but which fly off the menu because people buy them for the tasty coatings.
Cooks elsewhere tend just to use Chicken Backs to make stock from. They are good for stock because they have a lot of bones with flavourful marrow inside them. And the bonus is that, with the Chicken Back holding just a fiddly small amount of meat, you don’t need to feel wasteful about just using it for stock.