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Chicken Mania

The Source

I’ll be honest. I’ve never given much thought to chickens. In fact, I’ve gone entire days without the idea of a chicken even crossing my road…er…mind. Then I went to a conference on President Lincoln. How and why the subject even came up is a long and not very interesting story, but one of the speakers who preceded me was a bird expert. Tucked somewhere in her hour-long presentation was the fact that the there are more chickens in the world than any other species of bird. Really? More chickens that sparrows? More chickens than starlings? She said there are 25 billion chickens in the world and their numbers are growing. The nice naturalist’s survey was surely not based on the residents of my back yard. She said that the whole concept of eating chicken is relatively modern. In fact, we domesticated the little cluckers for cock fighting long before it ever occurred to us to eat them or make omelets. It Egypt it’s known as “the bird that lays every day,” but I really don’t care. Nor, I expect, do you. She also mentioned that the world’s oldest living chicken walked the earth for sixteen years. That didn’t excite me, either. I sat there wondering how long I could sit through a speech on chickens. The presenter was one of these wild-eyed botanists who’d spent her entire life researching this single, feathered subject and it would have astounded her to know that the majority of her audience had an interest in chickens that extended only to how many McNuggets you could get for two bucks. She said that if you removed a hen or rooster from a flock, the birds would be confused and disoriented until a new “pecking order” can be established. Adding young hens can cause violence and mayhem. I’ve taught teenagers for forty years and was way ahead of her. A cute girl transfers in to a typical high school and there will be feathers flying within hours. When a rooster wants to mate with a hen, he’ll do a curious dance around his intended beau and this will turn on a biological response in the female. Again, this was no news to those of us who’d spent time in the hormonal jungle of adolescence. Once a hen lays her eggs she will “go broody,” becoming highly protective. This behavior can also be observed at basketball games and dance auditions. I recently auditioned young girls at the Hoogland Fine Arts Center in Springfield. I was the new kid on the block and had no idea how auditions were conducted. My producer told me that they had one hard and fast rule when it came to auditioning children: “The mothers are put into a separate room.” This guy knew his chickens. All of this chicken blather at the conference was only vaguely interesting and frankly made me hungry, but it did get me wondering why poultry has become such a staple of our American diet. I can remember flying overseas on the heady days when such travel was actually pleasurable. The only downside was when you were seated in the rear of the plane. By the time they got to you, only chicken was available. The hungry souls in rows 1-52 had already consumed the beef and fish. Today it’s the chickens that fly the cook’s coop first. The average traveler considers it a healthier choice, no matter how richly it may be lathered in fried breading. We have it on our collective minds that eating chicken will somehow nullify the fatty salad and cholesterol-rich potatoes. Many consider the chicken breast to be a caloric sponge that somehow sucks up the fat in our chocolate cake. I used to work with a lady who’d bring her lunch. The dear gal was forever on a diet and she’d carefully unwrap her three sticks of celery, her four carrots, her lettuce leaves, then after consuming this boredom-inducing meal she’d finish it all off with a huge Three Musketeers candy bar. She felt as if the lettuce would somehow pull the calories out of the chocolate. Like chicken. If eating chicken is the key to weight loss, it’s not working on the hens themselves. The weight of the average broiler has doubled since the 1930’s, which obviously means that the chickens need to eat more chicken. The chicken expert ended her speech with a breathless announcement that poultry is quickly gaining ground of beef consumption in the U.S. I kept thinking, “If the lady loves chickens so much, why is she on the verge of wetting her drawers at the prospect of us eating her beloved birds?” I was next up, gave my speech, then the conference broke for lunch…roast beef.