Why is chicken so cheap? [video]
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Killed and unfeathered they all look the same.
Probably the same as this one?
Chicken breast in Europe costs about $7-10/kg. I'm not made of money, I can't afford $30/kg chicken.
I didn't see anything that would've driven me from buying that $2 chicken though.
I guess it makes sense, because how else could you keep up with demand, but my view of animal lifecycles only has stuff like bugs fully maturing so quickly.
Interesting stuff.
Now my question is why are bananas so cheap? They come all the way from like Brazil, but they're still cheaper than the apple that is grown just a couple hours from me.
It's really a fascinating but tragic history of the exploitation of "banana republics" where banana exports become so profitable that a US-based company owned more land in some Central American countries than anyone else. They had (have?) huge fleets of ships solely for the purpose of bringing bananas into the US.
It is quite a long and complicated story, and there are more than a few books written about it.
Those bananas are transported from the tree to a hub, from the hub to another, and from the second hub to your shop. The price of transport is almost independent of the distance involved in the middle step.
https://www.accessscience.com/content/genetic-engineering-of...
They can be delivered while they are green and sturdy and then they are kept in ethylene atmosphere which makes them ripe so they can be instantly sold to the consumers.
If you keep bananas in an acetylene/ethylene-free environment, they stay green.
Green bananas are quite hard and sturdy, which makes transporting them easy and cheap.
When the time comes to sell the bananas, you just need to provide them with acetylene and they will turn yellow and pliable in about 12 hours.
Recommended documentary: bananaland: blood, bullets and poison
The contribution of international transport to the cost of pretty much any consumer good is minuscule compared to other factors, so the starting premise that something should be cheaper just because it's grown locally is false from the outset.
Emma Mærsk: 156,907 DWT, 150000 HP total, or about 1HP per ton fully loaded.
With the engines running full tilt she'll make 29.3 mph.
Compare with a truck that weighs 20 tons with 400 hp, so 20 hp per ton.
100 miles by truck == 2000 miles by ship.
Here is one link I just found that point out to the fact ‚70-75% of the world’s soy ends up as feed for chickens, pigs, cows, and farmed fish.‘: https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/stop-deforestation/dri...
We have monoculture farming because it is efficient and people (not) surprisingly have decided that they have no interest in paying more for alternative production processes.
(BTW in the link i posted above it says human products take up 6% of soybean production.)
Animal farming is not the most efficient way to provide calories, but humanity does not lack for calories. Livestock (excepting ruminants that graze on land that is unsuitable for farming) is a caloric aggregator, turning a large chunk of calories into a smaller volume that is easier to transport and more desired by the market. If you want that to change you need to meet the market's demands (c.f. the unicorn valuations of a few new fake meat companies...)
Actually, a lot of humans do go hungry. The inefficiency of using land for crops to feed to livestock means that the price of staples is higher than it otherwise would be.
While meeting market demands is a large part of what will change things I think you're missing a piece on how this will come about. If there were no vegans, the chance of vegan unicorns succeeding would be much smaller. If some people did not harp on about the inhumanity of industrial farming, others would be less motivated to try alternatives and the chance of vegan unicorns succeeding would be reduced.
I'll posit that even if you made grain free at the docks in the US, there would still be people in the world going hungry. (Fewer people, certainly) Transportation and distribution is just as large a problem as production at this point in history.
> Shadow with me while I'm steppin' on my own resentment
> Life scatter in all directions, I was overzealous
> Overcurious, Momma worry her days get better
> I know she heard me, a timid voice in her stormy weather
> And Poppa taught me our ancestors were tarred and feathered And brought across the sea, bodies swinging from poplar trees
> I wore a modernesque version, my burden haunted me I cautiously approach the rather daunting sea
> By nightfall I face the man I'm 'sposed to be All this grief, been eatin' away my stomach lining
> It's hard to eat when my poppa image stuck inside me
> I wore his death mask,
> smilin' through the trauma
> In his honor,
> I'm expounding
back then, blacks didn't occupy the same moral category as the humans who bred and traded them.
afterwards, blacks were upgraded to 2/5ths human.
now, we still struggle for acceptance and parity.
morality is a process.
Imagine a scenario in which you can save one of two lives: a human or a dog. You can't pick both. Just one. The question is not, "Which would you save?", but instead, "Would you final moral fault in a person who chose to save the dog?". Almost everybody would hold a person who chose to save the dog morally culpable for the death of the human. But they would not hold them morally culpable for the death of the dog if they chose to save the human.
That will never change. Because animals are not humans.
we came to see blacks as humans because lots of people shed blood and fought for their rights. nothing was handed to anyone for free.
Recommended reading: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/
My premise is simple: almost every single person would find a person who chose to save the life of an animal over a human morally culpable for the death of the human. Whereas they would not find a person morally culpable for the death of the animal if they chose to save the person instead. That asymmetry directly speaks to the different moral stations that animals and humans occupy.
You have yet to level a single actual argument against that premise.
> By evolving to
Being selected to by us
> they have convinced humans to feed and house them
No, humans have constructed chickens to meet our requirements, minimising the amount we need to house them (e.g. killing them at a few weeks old).
Chicken farmers breeding a fast-growing chicken is a textbook example of artificial selection.
And while humans are part of nature, nobody would call a car crash a "natural disaster" just because it was caused by humans.
[1] https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_30
Evolution is designed to increase the chances of survival by introducing genetic diversity and adapting to an environment in order to maximize life expectancy.
Selective breeding actually reduces the chances of survival and introduces massive defects. It's much more likely all of the chickens will die of a single disease with selective breeding, while evolution allows them to survive.
The world listens to this speech and learns:
- The UFO craze of the mid 20th century was real. Aliens really were abducting and probing humans.
- Their evaluation established that we are not clever or strong enough to be useful, but we are delicious and cheap to feed.
- A fleet of transports will soon arrive to take humans throughout the galaxy to be raised as food.
- The technological gap between us is incomprehensibly vast, so there is no possibility of resistance.
This is the story of how humanity became successful.
The desires of a chicken are to eat and make more chickens.
The desires of a human are more complex. For this example we don't need to list out what they are.
So let's say you are offered the opportunity to go to space as in your scenario. And your desires are met. But at the age of 40 you are painlessly killed and eaten. And you are assured of having lots of children.
What do you think? Would some people agree to this?
And to make the example more complete, the alternative is not a comfortable life on Earth, but rather war where lots of people are killed young and the rest have very difficult paintful lives of constant fear.
I'm not sure what the goal of the chicken is except maybe to make more chickens, and if that's the goal then yes chickens were successful.
If your goal as a human is to explore and pass on your knowledge to your children, then yes, that could be considered as successful as well.
Also, it depends in large part on if your goals are personal, or generational. If personal then you could argue both ways. But if generational then yes definitely a success.
Why did you just change the scenario?
I would consider chickens held in captivity comparible to humans held in captivity. Holding a human in captivity is forcing someone else's will on that person and not giving them the opportunity to be free. I call that slavery.
Always feels like someone is trying to spin reality on me. "What? The birds love it! Instead of living in nature in a part of Africa, they are suffering worldwide to the tune of billions!" Their hard work paid off!
Instead of being painlessly gassed to death like farmed chickens they'll be eaten alive by some predator, or instead of being provided with antibiotics as hatchlings perhaps worms will eat most of their siblings alive before they leave the nest.
Romanticizing factory farming is ridiculous, but so is romanticizing the lives of wild animals.
From a species interaction perspective the farming of animals could be described as mutualism, but humans tend to break all the rules in traditional species interaction models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_interaction#Mutuali...
We're not unique though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism
At least wild birds get to make a go of it, the factory birds never had a chance. Some of them are too fat to even walk and never even get to leave their cage.
If I was given the choice I’d choose the life of the wild bird over the caged one any day.
Edit: I personally eat free-range chicken, but this is for aesthetic reasons. I cannot justify why free-range chickens have a better life than those in enclosures, any more than I can justify why a human farmer has a better life than a software developer.
> Some of them are too fat to even walk and never even get to leave their cage.
Would you rather live in a tiny cage stuffed with other people, doing nothing during your short life except eating, or living with a tribe in a jungle/savannah (more or less our natural habitat) ? Remeber you'd not be teached anything, learn no language and wouldn't experience much about the world (its richness) -- the cage is your entire reality. I'd very much prefer the jungle. For the free animal the gruesome death is just an episode to a rich life of hunting, fleeing, nurturing, seeing nature, communcating with others; for the caged one the painless death is just an end to a joyless existence.
That said, I think there are kinds of acceptable compromises... not extremely intensive farming seems reasonable to me. Again, dependent on their ability to experience the world. Chicken seem to have less cognitive experience then cows, for example, so it should be acceptable to not spend as much per individual in controlling their environemnt.
And this line of reasoning suggests a (ethically delicate, but interesting) solution: Should we select (breed) animals for lower cognition, thus making factoring farming acceptable? (or equivalently making acceptable farming practices more efficient) It seems logical. If the animal ultimately has no brain (as weird as that sounds), in principle there doesn't seem to be much difference from lab-growing meat.
So the question if you're going to pose an ethical conundrum isn't to suppose that all 23 billion would otherwise be living happily in the wild, but rather the antinatalists argument that chickens would be happier as a species if they were all dead instead (well, except maybe some low number of millions who'd make it in the wild).
Of course it's rather hard to have that conversation with a chicken. Assigning human motivations to animals of that intelligence doesn't make any sense. Would you rather spend your life as a bird eating trash from a landfill, or take your chances in the open skies?
We know what most humans would pick in that scenario, but we can also see that there's wild seagulls that voluntarily choose to live their whole lives doing not much of anything except eating trash in the same small place, and they're pretty intelligent compared to chickens.
As ethical trolley problems go comparing the intelligence of a single chicken v.s. a single cow doesn't make sense either, as you need a lot more chickens to produce the same amount of meat.
If we're going to suppose some linear no-threshold model of cognition for farm animals we'd thus be better off if we killed 100 human-level intelligence animals if they were so large as to give us the same amount of food as those 23 billion chickens. After all we're killing a lot more humans than that yearly just from exposure to a chicken population that large, nevermind the ethical calculus.
> The majority of poultry (chickens, hens and turkeys) in the UK s are now killed using gas. > UK law states that animals must be killed, not just stunned, using this method.
From the same source, here is the method used most widely due to cut costs:
> Birds are hung upside down by their legs on metal shackles along a moving conveyor belt. > They move along the production line to a stunning water bath; when the bird's head makes contact with the water, an electrical circuit between the water bath and shackle is completed, which stuns the bird. > The conveyor belt then moves the birds to a mechanical neck cutter, which cuts the major blood vessels in the neck. > Live bird shackling causes pain, and hanging birds by their legs is stressful for them.
I was able to find many sources that confirm this just by googling "how are chickens slaughtered." I'm skeptical of PETA and other radical-seeming groups, but I found a source that seems to be pro-chicken that acknowledges this, as well[2]. It says:
> Birds are stunned (rendered unconscious and unaware of pain) and then slaughtered with a quick, single cut to the throat.
However, researching this process reveals many articles about it's ineffectiveness - particularly in the stunning of the birds.
> Brain activity indicates that these animals may be capable of experiencing pain first when they receive a paralyzing electric shock that induces tonic muscle seizures, then when their throats are forced against a sharpened blade. [3]
Furthermore, sometimes the throat-slitting process, too, fails. The next step in the production line is the boiling of the bird carcasses to remove feathers, which means that many birds are boiled alive, hanging upside down from their legs. The Washington post reports the number to be around a million a year in 2013[4].
I always hope that animals are treated humanely, and until very recently I had few qualms with animal products. However, I personally have found that every time I investigate these matters, I am faced with a bleak truth - animals are being tortured constantly, in the millions.
I know you never claimed that all chickens were painlessly gassed, but I feel that dismissing the issue as being more humane than nature (and I agree that nature is brutal) will only deepen the problem.
[1]: https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/slaughter/fac... [2]: https://www.chickencheck.in/faq/how-chickens-slaughtered-pro... [3]: https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/chickens-slaughtered-consc... (my apologies for a mobile link) [4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/usda-plan-to-speed-u...
I wonder how these differences extend to nutritional value?
However I suspect it's especially bad in the US as the video did casually mention battery cages were made illegal in the EU. Furthermore, that chicken farm was a lot less crowded than some of the Purdue farms filmed in activist videos.
(A) The terroir for wine is probably the pickiest of all mass produced fruit, at least according to White’s Understanding Vineyard Soils.
(B) The soil of the Western US is extremely varied but it’s hardly the only factor involved in the taste and cultivation of fruit. The most obvious wildly differing factor is climate. The high deserts of E. Oregon would produce very different fruit compared to Washington’s coastal region even if you used identical soil, due to rainfall, mean/median temps, diurnal temp variation, etc.
I don't think you can be as simplistic as "US chicken bad" though. The US has a very well established industrial food chain that reaches everywhere, but it's not the only thing going on. The US industry has some economies of scale that work for it too.
Quick-cheap-and-nasty chicken in the UK is just as flavorless as in the US. And you can find better stuff in the US, albeit at higher cost. But the same can be said of flavorless but cheap Holstein milk & butter, or basically anything that has been subjected to aggressive optimizing for cost per unit/volume whatever. Applies to factory bred chickens, but also tomatoes designed to ship well.
The end result is usually pretty cheap, and pretty bland at best.
1/12 m^2 vs. 1/17 m^2
Consumer cost, difference between free range vs. intensively reared:
4 euros/lb vs. 2 euros/lb.
Does the difference in production costs explain the drastic consumer cost difference between these two methods? Why can't free-range farming be automated like it is in the intensive rearing model?
Sounds like a good business to be in if it can be scaled up.
My guess is that free range chicken should be about 50% more expensive, but the market can handle some aspirational pricing.
Some of the large factors that affect production costs are feeding the chicken and e.g. capital costs of the stable, but optimizing production per dollar more or less boils down to getting the “feed conversion ratio” down.
It is about 1,6 for intensively reared chicken in the USA, meaning they have to eat 1,6 kg of food to gain a kilogram of weight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Poultry)
For comparison, you need two kg of feed to get a kg of eggs, so eggs are about 20% more expensive per kg than chicken meat.
You can’t keep chicken that grow that fast to an age of 80 days, as they would break their legs from excessive weight.
Free range chicken are different breeds that have a higher FCR.
you don't need automation to make it cheap
My family used to breed any sort of livestock, from chickens to lambs, from cows to pigs, from rabbits to pigeons
High quality meat, just for the family
chickens are by far the cheapest and easiest
(rabbits get sick easily, pigs eat a lot, cows need a lot of work to keep them clean etc. etc.)
1. Small animal which requires less bone structure to support (bone scales non-linearly with mass for land animals).
2. Shorter lifespan and use of eggs allows simpler and quicker sexual selection.
3. Less intelligent animal so less energy and nutrition spent on growing the brain and maintaining its function.
Its a smaller animal, basically. Fish and insects are more efficient than chickens.
There's a lot of species that could have potentially replaced the chicken if we unwind human history and started anew, but it's not a competition between wild species of birds today, but chickens with at least 5000 years of human-guided domestication v.s. most other species.
The same can be said about pretty much anything people eat and farm. Most modern fruit and vegetables were pretty much inedible in their primordial pre-domesticated forms, it's only through thousands of years of effort that we have what we've got today.
In terms innate qualities making chickens suitable for domestication over other birds, some of those are probably:
1. They're pretty much flightless[1], even in the wild. This excludes most bird species right off the bat. Hard to domesticate something that'll just fly away.
2. They're comfortable in groups, and have a group hierarchy. This tends to be common among species humans have domesticated. Good luck domesticating e.g. birds of pray productively, they'll constantly be fighting each other for territory.
3. They're not picky about food, and don't require humans to actively feed them in the context of pre-industrial village life. Some birds only eat say insects, chickens can eat pretty much anything, even other chicken.
Separately, I’m more interested in why chickens are more economically efficient than, say, pigs or cows than why they’re more efficient than other birds. Any thoughts there?
But the same happens if you put two roosters in the same hen
chickens are not much more efficient than many other birds though
just more common
Some of my grandmas chicken used to eat the leftovers around pigs manger, but some of them became reckless and ate while pigs were eating and we started to find chickens with the heads chopped off, so we built a fence to keep chickens away from pigs food.
Chicken is insanely cheap.
I don't remember ever seeing prices like these in Canada.
From my understanding, that was below the price of production. 2017 was a very tough year for chicken farmers, with a huge oversupply. The chicken rendering (killing) operations were backlogged by many months. Farmers often had no choice but to raise the chickens they already bought, knowing full well they're going to be sold unprofitably.
Last time I had to deal with the healthcare system was to get some vaccines. They couldn't give me a basic vaccine (tetanus) within 2 weeks of calling them. Most travel vaccinées were out of stock and in the $400/shot. I had to get my basic vaccines and travel vaccines in Thailand (less $100 for immunity tests + 7 vaccines).
Considering that income taxes are 25-50% and sales taxes are 15%, I expect better than that.
A lot of healthcare is about prevention. Lifestyle, habits, nutrition. For example, I think it's easier and cheaper to eat healthy in the USA. Whenever I go to the USA, I make sure to buy and bring back as much as I'm allowed ($800 total, $20 of dairy). The rest of the time, it's still cheaper to order supplements and ship them from the USA than it is to buy them locally. The range of products they have is also much better. For example, it's basically impossible to find grass-fed butter in Montreal. Looking at GoodRx.com, even medication seems cheaper in the USA.
Pretty much everything is cheaper in the USA. Restaurants, food, delivery, gyms, glasses, gas, Netflix, Internet, video games, houses, cars, electronics, second-hand goods, etc.
All those cheap chickens may as well have stickers on saying "1/3 the enjoyment"
Our distant relationship with where meat comes from is one of the most bizarre things about humans. Especially next to our psychopathic relationship with our own pets.
I've seen people freak out with disgust because there's a tiny feather or some dirt in their carton of eggs. Or disgusted by the hanging, swinging corpses behind the butcher when they go to order something that's sliced off the corpse.
Try suggesting to someone that maybe they should be turned into bacon this Christmas. I'm not talking about vegans, but regular meat-eating people. Study reaction.
There is a contradiction there. Look at it carefully. Try to generalize that to other living things, for example humans.
/End of Public Service Announcement
I guess being distant from it creates more (theoretical) passion for animals, because you just haven't developed this "emotional immunity" due to everyday exposure as our ancestors did, and so you "humanize" them more.
My point is: pushing people to be more in contact with swinging pigs and feathers (especially in childhood) won't make them less likely to want to eat meat, it will just make them desensitized and used to it.
I eat less meat now since I don't really want to eat meat from the store anymore. Not only is the animals treated well (apart from the obvious killing part), but the quality of the meat is much higher, and obviously it's much fresher.
Also, eggs. Lots of them.
So that's my anecdote: give away delicious eggs (the taste really is night and day different from supermarket eggs) and people complain that they don't look like the ones in the supermarket!
Right now I have a basket of eggs on my kitchen counter ranging from spotlessly clean to 40% mud covered and some with a fair amount of chickenshit on them. It's all good: having this many eggs is an excuse to come up with new uses for them. Made a batch of lemon bars (filling is mostly eggs and lemon juice/zest) and they were awesome.
If you don't like this type of thing, the other option is to change the entire system, pay ordinary people enough for their ordinary jobs that they can afford to care about animal welfare and the environment and all the other things that get de-prioritized when the option is not putting food on the table for your family.
you wouldn't
You already could right now but you're not doing it