We eat a lot of it
September 9, 2010 (Thursday)
“Tastes like chicken.” Ever hear that? Ever say that? I heard a stand-up comic ask, “When people first tasted chicken, what did they say it tasted like?”
Chicken can be prepared in thousands of ways, and we eat a lot of chicken. We require 23.4 million chickens per day in the U.S.A. That’s 8.5 billion per year. And that’s only in our country. I don’t know how many are consumed throughout the world, but almost every ethnic group in the world has its chicken specialties. That means we need a huge supply of chickens.
Fortunately, new chicken factories are everywhere. Chickens lay lots of eggs and the incubation period is only 21 days. When I was a Seminary student, I worked for a while in a place where there was a giant incubator. It resembled a giant oven that was used for baking pies in one of the restaurants owned by my parents in the late forties. From the outside it looked like a small silo lying on its side. There were shelves inside that remained level as they went around and around like a ferris wheel. The pies were heated enough to cook them, and the eggs were heated and humidified in just the right amounts to simulate the natural “setting hen.”
One day when I was working there in Fort Worth, I took a truck to Henderson County in East Texas and transported a load of pullets back to the Metroplex. My trail was marked by little feathers.
Not only do we depend on the chickens themselves for our diets, but we use the eggs in countless ways in other foods.
The chicken, therefore, deserves a little respect, don’t you think? What would we do without it?
This little article should prompt you to look upon the lowly chicken as one more great blessing from the Lord. “Count your blessings:” 23.4 million per day in the U.S.A.
If this tittilates your curiosity about the critters, you can find much more information online in Wikipedia.