How chicken became the rich world’s most popular meat | Hacker News Reader

How chicken became the rich world’s most popular meat

economist.com

43 pointshvo18 comments

"the chicken now count for 23bn of the 30bn land animals living on farms." - it's not fair to compare count rather than mass. Single pig weights 20x more than single chicken according to google search.

https://outline.com/57eHyc - I'll pay if you let me pay per article!

The Economist is also on blendle.com where you can pay per article.

I just came back from Japan and couldn’t get over how much more delicious the eggs were over there than in the U.S. Even at 7-11 you could buy these peeled hard boiled eggs in soy sauce with a slightly soft, dark orange yolk that were amazing.

It's difficult to appreciate how freakish industrially farmed chicken is until you have a comparison point. I'm typing this in Fiji, and yesterday purchased three local chicken breasts: the total weight including skin and some cartilage/bone was around 500g, which is about the same as a single factory-farmed, boneless, skinless breast fillet in Australia.

500g is about weight of 3 boneless chicken breasts with no skin, at most grocery stores in BC Canada.

It is farmed chicken.

Australia must have some really bad chicken.

I was skeptical and looked it up,200g for 1/2 a breast fillet, that was surprising heavy

https://www.chicken.org.au/chicken-cuts/

Modern farms didn't supersized chicken. We are comparing a yorkshire terrier with a St. Bernard.

As with dogs, There are many types of chicken for different purposes. Some are good egglayers, other are selected for its meat. Red junglefowl roosters range around 2-3 Kg, whereas purely ornamental Serama can reach 340g and are a little bigger than a blackbird.

On the other hand, anybody could grow huge chicken in their backyard, bigger than any industrially farmed bird. You can breed easily 6Kg `Giant Jersey' or `Brahma' roosters if you want. There are even 10Kg roosters (bigger than a turkey). Is just that they eat a lot and take its time to grow, so the rate conversion between grain and meat is poor. Industry does not breed it. Biggest chicken are farmed organically by a few farmers.

Fiji chicken are probaby a landrace, a genetic mix of multipurpose bantam, egglayers and game fowl that are much more easy to keep (being active, healthy and smart birds able to free-range and care for themselves). Nothing bad with that. Meat of those would be definitely harder (more muscle and less fat) but tasty, top quality and from chicken living much happier lifes probably.

Free range chickens in Asia are similar - the ones you would see wandering the local village. Freshly killed and the taste is amazing like you somehow marinated the meat in chicken stock to get a strong, almost gamey taste.

Nothing like your standard supermarket frozen chook.

> strong, almost gamey taste

Many people don't like that so farmers spent quite awhile breeding out the gamey taste. Only recently is it coming back into favor.

The organic chicken from the local butcher is the only sort that comes close and it usually far less stringy.

>As raising a single big bird is more efficient than raising two smaller ones, it now takes farmers just 1.3kg of grain to produce 1kg of chicken,

The 1.3 kg of grain for 1kg of chicken statistic is amazing. Chicken is really the closest thing we have to “lab grown meat”.

That doesn't include the needed protein, fats, vitamins and so on. And it is even completely wrong unit, it is the calories in food that matters not its weight.

That reminds me of Mike the Headless Chicken. I wonder if it would be doable to run a chicken farm with brainless chickens. In the end I'm unsure that people would find it more ethical to scoop out their brains.

Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth "the space merchants" (1952) has chicken little...

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