It is baby chick season. For the 4th time in my adult life I have become the surrogate father of 100 day-old chickens. I am entering my 10th year of raising back yard laying hens. I thought I knew chickens, but it turns out I was clueless to many of the finer points of chicken terminology.
The chicken’s scientific name is Gallus Domesticus. The chicken has a crop, which is a wide spot in the esophagus just above the stomach, it is used for storing food. The gizzard is the second part of the stomach where the food is ground with rocks and grits so it can be digested since chickens do not have teeth. All my life I have mistaken the crop for the gizzard.
I also just learned that a cockerel is a male under one year old; it is called a cock if over one year of age. Similarly, a pullet is a female under a year and a hen is over a year old. There is also a term for the capon, a male chicken castrated at 4-8 months. I can only speculate how that process is performed, and I will refrain from asking Mr. Google to search the internet for a video on this procedure.
I have also quickly gleaned the following facts. The average person now eats about 285 eggs per year. Iowa is the top producer of laying hens at 56 million layers. Interestingly, Illinois does not make the list for the top ten egg producing states, yet almost every state that borders Illinois does. Only two of the top ten are not in the Midwest, Georgia and California. Also, due to consumer preferences, almost ½ of all layers now are housed in a cage free environment.
Our grandparents and great grandparents ate the males of the laying breeds for their chicken dinners. It was not long after WWII that the meat birds were bred specifically for our dinner fare. Now almost every laying breed male chick is euthanized at birth. They have absolutely no value. The meat birds gain weight much faster than the laying breeds. That is a good thing since the average person now eats almost 100 pounds of chicken per year.
As a youth I believed, maybe correctly, that old laying hens were used for soups and other dishes that did not require the tenderest cuts of chicken. Several years ago, when I was talking to an egg producer who had about 1 million birds, he told me that none of his “retired” layers make into the human food chain. They are shipped to Purina and used for pet food. An industry expert has also told me that there are times the pet food market even competes for supply and raises the prices for us humans.
The United States averages about 400 million laying hens per year and we butcher about 10 billion chickens per year. I did butcher some old laying hens in my youth, and I hope to never do it again. It is a very time consuming process. Thank goodness for automation, I certainly would not want to butcher the 25 chickens I eat per year. I cannot even begin to fathom the chore of butchering 10 billion.
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