Have you ever thought about where the World would be if the chicken did not exist? What if the worlds' 22 billion chickens suddenly vanished, how would society and humanity cope?
Archaeologists believe that chickens were introduced to the New World at least a century before the voyages of Columbus by the Polynesians. Well into the 20th Century, chickens although popular as a source of eggs for family farms were still not a huge part of the Americans diet nor of our economy. Chickens came long after cattle and hogs entered the Industrial Age.
Until that point, chicken production was pretty much only a local enterprise for most farmers. The breakthrough that made the Poultry Industry the billion-dollar industry it is today was made possible with fortification of feed with vitamins that allowed chickens to be raised indoors. Like most animals, chickens needed sunlight to synthesize vitamin D on their own, and up until the 20th century, they spent their days wondering the backyards, pecking for food. Now they could be sheltered from weather and protected from predators and fed a balanced controlled diet in an environment designed to produce the best birds possible.
By the early 1990s, chicken has surpassed beef as Americans’ most popular meat (by consumption) with annual consumption being around nine billion birds.
So now let’s answer the question…how much does modern civilization rely on this one bird? Without chickens could we face “a starving world” as one-third of the worlds meat supply and nearly all of its eggs would vanish if we did not have chickens. The chicken might be a small bird but it has pecked it way into the lives of almost every human on the planet in one way or another. The sheer number of chickens on our planet today is astonishing. They outnumber all the pig and cows on the planet combined. We as humans consume almost 100 million tons of chicken meat and over 1 trillion eggs annually. In one Super Bowl Sunday, Americans alone ate an estimated 1.2 billion chicken wings. There are more than 22 billion chickens on our planet that is three for every human born. So what would we do without chickens? Looks to me like we would be in big trouble.
The chicken is possibly the most genetically diverse species of livestock alive today with maybe the exception of the pig. This has allowed the chicken to thrive on every continent except Antarctica. The chicken is kind of an environmental hero, the chicken has the smallest environmental footprint. You have to find 1000 percent more land for beef than used to produce commercial chickens. Cows convert food into meat far less efficiently than the chicken so when you look at feed you have to produce eight times as much feed to get the same amount of meat. If you want to talk about the environment. Unlike chickens, both cows and sheep ferment large amounts of greenhouse gas methane which is five-times that of chickens. Satisfying the world's demand for meat without chicken would slam the gas pedal to the floor on global warming so many activities are worried about.
What about restaurants and baking? The shortage of eggs would change bread and pastry as we know it. Eggs would be the hardest ingredient to replace. Some dishes just can’t do without eggs. Never mind the food or the environmental impacts of the chicken, what about the health issues? Eggs are crucial for making flu vaccines. To produce the world’s 400 million annual doses, cultured flu strains are injected into fertilized eggs. One egg is basically one vaccine. This is the world’s cheapest way to produce it. If we didn’t have chickens, one flu season could kill 50,000 people in the US alone.
Today all around the globe people are opposed to the commercial poultry industry, they feel that it's inhumane and we should go back to the days of yesteryears when birds roamed freely only in backyards, and that’s all good in theory but it doesn’t support the numbers. Civilization today has changed, and needs of the world have changed and we need the commercial poultry industry more today than ever before.
