Chickens Can’t Take a Yolk

Aside from the burning mystery of what really are chicken “McNuggets,” being a chicken in at a processing farm is a pretty nasty – can’t really move around – life. But ever wonder what the impact on the chicken population might be (or has been) from lots more people… and with countries like China and India able to afford more “animal protein”? While the world increased by 80% human-being-wise from 1970 to 2008, Mother Jones (August 2013), using United Nations and US Census data, tells us that the chicken population increased by 262%! During that time period, Americans virtually doubled their per capita chicken consumption.

Fast food patterns definitely accelerated that trend, but so has the cost of red meat and the decision of a lot of us to shift to less harmful protein. For those who care, Mother Jones tells us that while the purchase of whole birds has pretty much remained the same over the above period, virtually all the growth in consumption came in equal parts from the consumption of chicken parts and “further processing.” McNuggets?

The increases in pork and beef production barely moved the needle, but chicken became the global “protein of choice” for billions around the world. Breeding and feeding patterns have increased yield per bird, and the willingness to keep too many birds in horrifically confined spaces has increased efficiency well over anything that has occurred for these larger animals.

Americans also consume about 79 billion eggs per annum, and it takes a lot of hens to produce that incredible quantity. But hens really don’t remain sufficiently productive for that long, and what happens when they pass their peak productivity isn’t information for the squeamish: “[O]nce laying hens reach the age of about 18 months, their egg production slows, and it's no longer economically feasible for egg operations to keep them around. The result is that each plant has to get rid of thousands of ‘spent’ hens every year. What happens to those hens? In most cases, they don't end up in your chicken soup broth, or even in your cat or dog's food. That's because most slaughterhouses don't accept them—they have too little meat on their bones to turn a profit. Instead, egg producers often kill spent hens with highly concentrated carbon dioxide gas.” Mother Jones. Cheap death, but asphyxiation isn’t a pretty thought, no matter how you look at it.

None of this is particularly pleasant to think about, and non-withstanding former President Bill Clinton’s move to a vegan lifestyle after serious heart issues, most of us aren’t going to change our eating patterns any time soon. How to feed a growing global population with increasing demand for better quality protein is anything but easy, particularly as the availability of good land diminishes. But at least knowing where our food comes from and how it is processed might actually impact exactly how and where you buy your eggs and chicken.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this is what happens when you demand more cluck for the buck!