|
Salon Magazine January 26,
2014
Read the whole story here:
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/26/americas_chicken_wing_disgrace_why_you_should_skip_this_snack_on_super_bowl_sunday/
America’s chicken-wing
disgrace: Why you should skip
this snack on Super Bowl
Sunday
Revealing the horrific
practices behind the official
finger food of Super Bowl
Sunday
By Lindsay Abrams
Just in time for Superbowl
XLVIII – that high holiday
of chicken wing consumption
– the National Chicken
Council has come out with its
2014 Wing Report. Among its many
exciting findings (51 percent of
wing-consuming adults prefer
ranch dressing over blue cheese;
women are just as likely as men
to prefer Buffalo-style
flavoring), the report touts this
mind-boggling stat: During the
course of Sunday’s game,
American consumers will devour a
total of 1.25 billions wings.
That’s up from last
year’s estimate, of 1.23
billion, and evidence that
“The Great Chicken Wing
Shortage of 2013” is
officially over.
Ironically, all this
industry-promoted fuss is being
made over what used to be one of
the least desirable parts of the
chicken. Wings, the unwanted
byproduct of poultry’s
choice cuts, began to appear on
bar menus precisely because they
were so cheap and readily
available. Now, according to the
NCC, they’re second in price
only to the boneless, skinless
meat of the breast. In the United
States, the chicken wing
franchise industry is growing at
a faster rate than frozen yogurt
chains. At some point in the past
50 years, chicken wings became
synonymous not just with Super
Bowl Sunday, but with American
food culture as a whole.
That should be our first
warning sign. Chicken wings
don’t just represent a
quintessentially American way of
eating. In many ways, they
epitomize the ways in which
American eating is broken.
To begin with, some basic
math: Chicken wings are divided
into three parts, two of which we
consume as “wings”
— the “drummette,”
a mini-drumstick that attaches
the wing to the body, and the
flat, two-boned middle segment.
The wing tips, unpopular in the
U.S., are usually shipped to
Asia. Every four wings in your
typical bucket, then, are
equivalent to one fully grown
chicken.
Those in the wing industry
like to quip that, until science
finds a way to invent a
six-winged chicken, that’s
all we’ll be able to get out
of them. Wings are, however,
getting bigger – the result
of efforts to raise fatter, more
profitable birds. This ends up
being problematic for sellers,
who are suddenly serving more
meat on the same number of wings.
In some cases, restaurants have
begun serving wings by size
instead of by number in order to
keep the price down. But until
that becomes common practice,
more wing consumption will
require more dead chickens —
a particularly cringe-worthy
calculation for those for
advocate abstaining from meat
altogether (and who, when
contacted by Salon, were quick to
recommend vegan substitutes).
Even those who are OK with
eating some meat might want to
pay attention to just how many
dead animals Sunday’s wing
binge requires: about 312.5
million dead chickens, if the
NCC’s figures are correct.
The rest of the bird will be
eaten or otherwise put to use,
too (more on that later), but
animal rights advocates argue
that thinking of chickens only in
terms of their parts obscures
that massive death toll. Andrew
Gunther, the program director for
Animal Welfare Approved, an NGO
that independently audits and
certifies family farms that meet
its high standards for animal
welfare and environmental
sustainability, put it this way:
“We’re almost at a
tipping point where we use an
animal for its bits and forget,
in theory, the whole
animal.”
So when the NCC boasts that
the number of wings eaten this
year will be “enough to put
572 wings on every seat in all 32
NFL stadiums,” we could
easily adapt their example and
visualize, instead, 143 chickens
crammed onto each and every one
of those seats. Contrast that to
all that can be done with the
purchase of one, whole chicken:
Its prime cuts can be enjoyed as
the centerpiece of a meal (and
its four wing segments eaten
while the game plays); the
less-great parts can be added to
dishes that require chicken; and
the rest can be tossed in a pot
to make stock.
In order to meet the rabid
demand touted by the NCC, poultry
plants need to be extremely
efficient. And efficiency, for
the meat industry, often comes at
a tremendous cost to human
health, the environment and
animal welfare. Antibiotic
resistance, arising in part from
the widespread use of the drugs
in commercial livestock, is a
growing problem that’s yet
to be properly addressed. The
USDA’s plans to roll out a
new, sped-up poultry inspection
process is only the most recent
example of what can end up being
missed in the interest of
speeding up processing lines by
20 percent: namely,
“tremendous” chunks of
feces left on the meat headed to
grocery stores, and birds
inadvertently boiled alive.
Selling chickens by the wing
— or the breast, or the
drumstick — only magnifies
the worst aspects of these bad
practices, said Gunther. There
are a number of factors
increasing the odds that a
chicken will be unsuitable to
being sold whole, and all stem
from the nasty practices
associated with factory farms.
Improper catching and handling
methods lead to broken legs and
wings; lesions and pustules
develop from the birds’
being crammed into tiny cages;
and crowded conditions promote
the spread of disease.
When farmers slow down their
production enough to ensure
animal welfare, downgrades are
far less likely to occur —
meaning any wings you buy on game
day are unlikely to have come
from such a place. Will Harris,
the president of White Oaks, a
fifth-generation farm certified
by AWA, boasts that it slaughters
only 500 chickens per day,
instead of the hundreds of
thousands that pass through
industrial facilities. And
raising the birds to size without
the benefit of selective breeding
or the use of hormones also takes
longer. When the industry is at
its most efficient, it can raise
a 5-pound broiler in just five
weeks. In contrast, Harris said,
“it consistently takes us 12
weeks to raise a 3- to 4-pound
bird.” He explained to Salon
that the farm only sells whole
birds, both because it’s
more profitable, and also because
their slowed-down practices
enable them to.
“I would go broke trying
to raise enough birds to just
sell the wings to everybody that
wanted them,” Harris added.
“What would I do with all of
those legs?” Wings from
White Oaks, and other farms like
it, therefore are very unlikely
to end up in buckets on game
day.
Industrial farms, of course,
aren’t just raising birds
for their wings and then throwing
out the rest. “We like to
say nothing of a chicken is
wasted except for the
cock-a-doodle-doo,” NCC
economist William Roegnik told
Salon. Bones are sent to plants
that separate off the remaining
flesh; that “mechanically
separated chicken” goes on
to fill hotdogs. Chicken feet
used to be sent to rendering;
more recently, the industry has
discovered a market for them,
also in Asia. But this kind of
waste-not distribution only works
for the big guys.
The NCC also has its own set
of animal welfare guidelines for
poultry processors, but
they’re completely
voluntary. Roegnik explained that
the council relies on consumers
interested in best practices to
demand that companies adhere to
them. But those demands —
for both more wings and more
sustainable practices — seem
irrevocably at odds with one
another. Creating a market in
which the individual parts are
prized over whole birds, Gunther
worries, destroys the economic
incentive for not allowing such
things to happen.
Perhaps Super Bowl Sunday
isn’t the best opportunity
to point out the wholly
unsustainable nature of this type
of consumption. We are, after
all, talking about a free-for-all
feast of excess rivaled only by
Thanksgiving, and an event during
which advertisers are willing to
pay $4 million for 30 seconds of
consumers’ attention. But
those 1.25 billion wings should
make anyone who cares about
creating a more ethical,
sustainable meat system take
pause.
And those vegan wings?
They’re really not so
bad.
Lindsay Abrams is an assistant
editor at Salon, focusing on all
things sustainable.
|
