12 ms·
Why is chicken so cheap? [video]
- RandallBrown 7y agoWow, 39 is much shorter than I expected. 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.
- 781 7y agoApples are also more expensive than oranges, which I too find strange.
- toasterlovin 7y agoCheaper by what metric? Also, it depends on the variety. FWIW, my experience is that oranges are usually more expensive than apples, except for the few weeks that oranges are in season.
- senorjazz 7y ago;)
- hombre_fatal 7y agoI'd imagine it's the cost of paying migrant labor to sweep a field in Brazil vs an hour away from you.
- anon5579 7y agoRegarding bananas, I would recommend taking a look at the history of the United Fruit Company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company 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.
- cprayingmantis 7y agoThe book The Fish That Ate the Whale was a pretty good read about all that. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250033314/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_t1_0tb7CbSZRAM70 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250033314/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_t1...
- Arnt 7y agoBulk transport is amazingly cheap. 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.
- EL_Loco 7y agoBananas in the U.S. come from Guatemala, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, and a few others, but not from Brazil. As for global production, India, China and the Philippines account for almost half of the world's production. The majority of Brazil's production remains in the country.
- gnicholas 7y agoWith an impending disease that is wiping out Cavendish (the most popular kind of banana), they may not be cheap for long! http://freakonomics.com/podcast/bananas/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/bananas/
- Creationer 7y agoCan be solved with genetic engineering: https://www.accessscience.com/content/genetic-engineering-of-bananas-to-combat-panama-disease/BR1208171 https://www.accessscience.com/content/genetic-engineering-of...
- ymolodtsov 7y agoBananas are very easy & cheap to transport which led to them becoming a more popular fruit, accelerating demand and supply, etc, etc. 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.
- pcstl 7y agoBananas are dependent on a chemical (ethylene or acetylene) in the air around them to ripen. 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.
- senorjazz 7y agoTerrible pay and work conditions for the people who work the fields and huge economies of scale. Recommended documentary: bananaland: blood, bullets and poison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoRmtQht8-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoRmtQht8-E
- ymolodtsov 7y agoThat can be said about a lot of products, but bananas are still cheaper..
- avar 7y agoThe same reason a T-shirt made and shipped from China is cheaper than one manufactured next door to you. 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.
- Gibbon1 7y agoOne thing that's very informative is to look at the HP per ton of various modes of transport. 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.
- edgartaor 7y agoHere is an excelent video explaning why bananas are so cheap. Mainly because Container Ships https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY9VE3i-KcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY9VE3i-KcM
- vbuwivbiu 7y agoThat man and his automatic shed. How depressing. I'd much rather pay 3x as much, eat chicken 1/3 as often and actually enjoy it instead of eating it every day and hardly noticing it. All those cheap chickens may as well have stickers on saying "1/3 the enjoyment"
- hombre_fatal 7y ago> eating it every day and hardly noticing it 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.
- 781 7y agoThere are quite a few (relatively) famous pigs on Instagram. 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.
- mc32 7y agoThey haven’t been through hunger or starvation. They have plenty, so they can experience such “luxury”.
- a1369209993 7y agoThat's a entirely reasonable position; those pigs are more useful as entertainment than food, by a rather large margin too.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y agoAs someone with a rack of ribs currently slow cooking in the oven, I beg to differ!
- hombre_fatal 7y agoI always found it a bit tacky to call it an "achievement" for the animal/plant that humans farm it. Same with "evolutionary" changes due to selective breeding. Both said in the video. 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!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- UK-AL 7y agoThe idea being when wr farm, it becomes a very populus species.
- Luc 7y agoConflating the individual and their genes. The genes thrive while the individuals lead miserable, short lives.
- avar 7y agoWhat sort of lives do you think birds living "in nature" in Africa have? 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#Mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_interaction#Mutuali... We're not unique though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism
- nsomaru 7y agoCan’t say that comparing the appalling conditions in bird factories with a life lived in the wild really compares here. 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.
- rasengan0 7y agoBreeding a "product" with a small gene pool, churning out monoculture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana or a more imaginative corrective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H7N9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H7N9 makes a plant based diet a very good hack indeed.
- evgen 7y agoYou don't know what the word monoculture means until you stand in the middle of a soybean field in the midwest and see nothing but more soybeans (from the same small handful of varieties provided by giant seed companies) as far as the eye can see. Please do not imagine for one second that a plant-based diet increases biodiversity.
- hapidjus 7y agoAren’t most of those soybeans used as feed for livestock?
- dyeje 7y agoIs that relevant to the monoculture topic?
- vegetablepotpie 7y agoNot OP, but land use due to animal feed is relevant to mono-culture because reducing land use for animal feed would free that land up for other uses (besides soy beans), either for other crops or to leave the land unutilized and left to nature.
- evgen 7y agoThe land would not be left unutilized or left to nature, and those same practices are used to produce all of your food. Take a drive down the central valley of California and the vast lettuce and fruit farms will have less genetic diversity than your backyard garden. Monoculture production is a consequence of efforts to increase production efficiency, regardless of the actual crop being produced.
- Reason077 7y agoChickens are one the most successful animals on earth! By evolving to become fatter, more succulent, and delicious, they have convinced humans to feed and house them, and in doing so have multiplied to vast numbers and spread their genes almost everywhere across the globe.
- perfmode 7y agoblack people, too! we were so strong and resilient and good at labor that humans paid for our travel across the seas and gave us the opportunity to help build America! we were fed and housed and everything, oh my! gosh > 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
- purplezooey 7y agowait.... what
- toasterlovin 7y agoAnimals are not people and they do not occupy the same moral category.
- perfmode 7y agoblacks weren't people then, either. 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.
- miguelrochefort 7y agoWhen I went to America, I couldn't believe how cheap chicken was. I once found boneless chicken breast for $1.99/pound. Eggs were dirt cheap as well, sometimes less than $1.00/dozen. I don't remember ever seeing prices like these in Canada.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoWe don't pay for the healthcare of anyone in the production chain.
- titanomachy 7y agoIf they wanted healthcare they should have been smarter and got better jobs. /s
- froindt 7y agoMy record for a dozen eggs was $0.37/dozen in summer of 2017 at an Aldi in a town go about it 30,000 in Iowa. It was roughly that price the whole summer. 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.
- eden_hazard 7y agoMy record for chicken is $.35/lb for chicken drumsticks. It was however from a wholesale store and came in a 40lb box. To me that's more frightening than anything. Like how is that chicken so cheap...
- asdf21 7y agoCurrently $0.56 / dozen at Meijers in Columbus Ohio.
- toasterlovin 7y agoLife is incredibly expensive in Canada, across the board, with pretty much only a single exception: healthcare.
- jolmg 7y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19743006
- lostjohnny 7y agobecause chickens are cheap to feed and breed 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.)
- toasterlovin 7y agoRight, but why are they the cheapest form of meat? There’s probably some biochemical or energy utilization reason. Perhaps it has to do with chickens being fairly lean meat. I don’t know, but have often wondered.
- kgwgk 7y agoOne of the reasons is that you raise them for weeks, not months.
- toasterlovin 7y agoHow does that impact cost per calorie (or gram of protein or whatever)? Haven’t thought deeply about it, but this doesn’t seem like a fundamental constraint, though it would allow breeding (which takes place over generations) to find optimizations faster.
- Creationer 7y agoContrasting against Pigs and Cows: 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. https://ib.bioninja.com.au/_Media/feed-conversion_med.jpeg https://ib.bioninja.com.au/_Media/feed-conversion_med.jpeg
- 7y ago
- jawarner 7y agoLand usage per chicken, difference between free-range vs. intensively reared: 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?
- thinkingemote 7y agoFree range are older I think
- newman8r 7y agoThat's an interesting thought. I was curious if anyone was working on something like this and I was able to find this: https://phys.org/news/2013-09-automated-comfort-free-range-hens.html https://phys.org/news/2013-09-automated-comfort-free-range-h... Sounds like a good business to be in if it can be scaled up.
- iambateman 7y agoIf free range chicken makes up 4% of the market, perhaps it’s analogous to a Mercedes Benz...it’s not 4x more expensive to manufacture, but the people who buy it aren’t strictly cost-sensitive. My guess is that free range chicken should be about 50% more expensive, but the market can handle some aspirational pricing.
- Someone 7y agoChickens do not eat in the dark. That’s why the light in stables for intensively reared chicken is on way longer than the sun is up (I’m not up to date on what’s considered optimal today, but I think 24 hours a day was abandoned because it caused too much stress (and stress harms growth, or even kills chicken) for weird things such as “40 minutes on, 20 minutes off”) 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 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.
- arendtio 7y agoMaybe Farmers should be required to print a photo of the actual living bird and their habitat on the packaging. When consumers would see those scruffy chicken for $2 compared to the healthy $7 they might choose the organic ones more often. Killed and unfeathered they all look the same.
- Epskampie 7y agoWhile I agree with the sentiment, in the long run that would just lead to quick-growing chickens that look nice but are as unhealthy as they are now. See "purebreed" dogs.
- erikig 7y agoThis reminded me of the "Colin the Chicken" skit on Portlandia where a couple ordering chicken gets to see its birth certificate, diet, emotional profile, heritage and family... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__PVLB8Nm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__PVLB8Nm4
- rmtech 7y agoI would not pay 3.5× as much for chicken just to look at a nice photo. Chicken breast in Europe costs about $7-10/kg. I'm not made of money, I can't afford $30/kg chicken.
- agumonkey 7y agoIn Europe, people still buy cigarettes as much as before even though they're generic and covered with morbid pictures of various gruesome diseases.
- arendtio 7y agoThis reminds me of this 'In a Nutshell' video: https://youtu.be/NxvQPzrg2Wg?t=163 https://youtu.be/NxvQPzrg2Wg?t=163
- feld 7y agoI feed my dogs almost exclusively chicken leg quarters and can get them for as low as 39 cents per pound (USD). Chicken is insanely cheap.
- _hardwaregeek 7y agoWhenever I travel outside the US, I'm always struck by how different the chickens look. Chickens in the US have a pale appearance, with flabby, almost mushy meat. They look as if they were grown on a tree, never alive and running. While chickens in say, Italy or Mexico tend to look like they were alive at some point. There's color in the meat, often a yellow tint. Their skin and muscle look used and not atrophied. I wonder how these differences extend to nutritional value?
- hhjjkkll 7y agoAnecdotal, but from watching food/travel videos on YT, meat in general outside of the U.S. tend to taste better too apparently.
- deschutes 7y agoThe bulk of the video is a british chicken farmer explaining the economic realities. I don't think bad chicken is unique to the US; I suspect cheap meat is about the same everywhere.
- _hardwaregeek 7y agoIt's about the same everywhere that has industrial scale farms that breed chickens through enclosed spaces with limited sunlight and processed feed :D. That's not every country. 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.
- 13of40 7y agoI've noticed the same thing with tomatoes and apricots. I've got a good friend whose family have an apricot farm in the Kurdish part of Turkey, and their apricots are amazing, but the same variety grown in Western Washington tastes like plastic. There's something seriously pathological with the "terrior" in the western part of north America. (Luckily it doesn't extend to wine.)
- 7y ago