Chicken!

I don’t cook or eat a ton of meat, but when I do, 95% of the time, it’s chicken. I like other meats just fine, too. I like steak. I like hamburger. I like lamb chops. I like pork chops. I like ham. I like bacon. I like veal. Etc.

All that said, I could pretty easily become a vegetarian.

But I would miss bacon. And I would miss hamburger. And I would miss chicken.

While I’m writing this post, I’m thinking about what I’m going to have for dinner. And what I’m going to have for dinner is the leftover roast chicken and mushroom risotto that I doggy-bagged out of Toscano’s last night. My mouth is watering.

Tomorrow night? I’m planning on popping a frozen chicken pot pie in the oven and getting a few meals out of it.

My mouth is watering because I’m not letting myself think about poultry farms and chicken factories, and congratulate myself that, when I do buy chicken it’s 100% organic and humanely raised. Supposedly.

Anyway, I’m not the only chicken lover out there.

In the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, pork and beef consumption has remained unchanged since 1990. Chicken consumption has grown by 70%.

Humans gobble so many chickens that the birds now count for 23bn of the 30bn land animals living on farms. According to a recent paper by Carys Bennett at the University of Leicester and colleagues, the total mass of farmed chickens exceeds that of all other birds on the planet combined. (Source: The Economist)

Over the years, chicken has gotten both cheaper and bigger.

This is courtesy of an American competition from the 1940’s, in which farmers were encouraged to produce the “Chicken of Tomorrow.” Farmers apparently like a good competition, and chickens have been growing like Topsy for decades now. Thus we have made the journey from the scrawny pullet, good mainly for soup-making, to today’s robust, big-breasted bird that’s the size of a small turkey.

A study of chickens showed that, in 1957, the average 56 day old chicken weighed 0.9kg. By 1978, that bird had doubled in size. And in 2005, it weighed in at 4.2kg. (C.f., small turkey.)

This doesn’t come for free. Fattened up chickens are typically fattened up in close quarters. Not being able to move around means they have to consume less chickenfeed in order to get their weight up. Not to mention the antibiotics that are poured into the chickens, which are, at close quarters, more susceptible to a number of chicken-type diseases.  (Coop cough?)

People also like chicken because eating it is reputedly healthier than eating other types of meat. So there’s that benefit…

While the OECD countries are big chicken-eaters, as incomes rise in poor countries, folks start looking for foods that are finger lickin’ good.

There are regional differences in chicken preferences, however.

The west likes white; Asia and Africa go for dark.

These preferences are reflected in local prices: in America breasts are 88% more expensive than legs; in Indonesia they are 12% cheaper. Differences in the price of chicken feet are even starker. The thought of eating talons is abhorrent to many Westerners, but they often feature in Cantonese recipes. China now imports 300,000 tonnes of “phoenix claws” every year.

Talons, huh?

Years ago, my husband and I went to a restaurant in Chinatown that was frequented by a lot of Chinese folks, thus we knew that the food was more authentic than not. Anyway, there was something on the menu that caught my eye, and I asked the waiter about it.

His response – complete with a wave-off gesture – was, “Oh, no. For Chinese people only.”

He didn’t have to tell us twice. I’m guessing it was phoenix claws.

The global chicken-industrial complex is rife with issues.

Chicken has been a flashpoint in trade negotiations. China imposed tariffs on American birds in 2010 and then banned all imports in 2015, shortly after an outbreak of avian flu. Industry observers are pessimistic the ban will be lifted, much to the dismay of American farmers who would love to be paid more for the 20bn chicken feet they produce every year, which currently become animal feed.

Then there was the EU’s ban on chlorinated American chicken way back in 1997.

Arguments over chlorinated chickens also proved a big stumbling block in negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a now-failed trade deal between America and the EU. Some Britons fear that if they leave the EU any trade deal signed with America would require them to accept imports of such chickens.

Chlorinated chicken sure sounds ghastly. Fortunately, Bell & Evans, my chicken of choice, is not chlorinated. The only chlorination that gets near my chickens is the bleachy Lysol I use to spray the sink and counters after I cut chicken up. (I pour boiling water over the cutting board.)

By the way, chicken obesity is also a problem.

Those big-breasted chickens-as-turkeys?

Broilers have breast muscles which are too big for their bones to support, leading to lameness. In Colchester the chickens are so unresponsive to humans that they resemble zombies.

I don’t know how much difference it makes if a chicken headed for slaughter is lame, but it doesn’t seem all that fair for the free range, pumped up chickens to be stumbling around while they are living the life.

Indeed, modern chickens have become so big that their muscles prevent them from getting on top of each other to mate (meaning they have to be starved before they are able to consider romance).

Okay, that is TMI.

Time to take the same posture toward chicken that I take towards veal. If I think about veal, I won’t eat it. From here on out, I’m not going to be doing any thinking about chickens, either.