Cluck

[ewx]

Half a million chickens every day? Can that really be right?

(...and the report itself, located by GDR.)

Comments

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

well...
Simply, no, it can't.
We need to know how the figures are arrived at. I imagine few people actually throw away a chicken at all, for example, so I assume there's some notional % of a chicken getting dumped by rather more people. At which point it all becomes very dubious. Do the bones count? The head? That tiny bit of dark meat you can never separate that nasty-looking vein from but would otherwise have eaten? How many are cooked by caterers and then not eaten coz the people catered to didn't fancy chicken that day? Are they counting chickens that were bred for food but never made it to a food product for some reason? In fact, how much of all this waste is from the catering industry and nothing much to do with _us_ at all?
Are they counting as waste the stuff that goes to pigswill?
The whole thing's rub, I reckon.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I saw that on the front page and thought that it couldn't possibly be true.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Of course it can. It's only about 1/100th of a chicken each. Easy Peasy.

[the-local-echo.livejournal.com]

That's just under 1% of a chicken per person per day. So on average people each throw away enough bits of chicken to reconstitute one chicken every four months. Sounds a bit less surprising when you put it that way.

I skim-read the dead tree edition this lunchtime, and I think it said the study was done by examining people's rubbish, so catering waste wouldn't count towards it.

[emperor]

Obviously it's not proper, but there are an awful lot of chickens in the world, and the idea that every person discards 1/120 of a chicken each day doesn't seem entirely implausible.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

Can that really be right?

It’s certainly the right order of magnitude.

Table 18 on page 27 of the report (http://wrap.s3.amazonaws.com/the-food-we-waste.pdf) contains the following figures for avoidable chicken waste, in tonnes per annum:

That’s 194 tonnes per day. The conversion to 500,000 chickens must therefore be based on an estimate of about 388g of usable meat on an average chicken. (Perhaps it was 400g and then the result was rounded to one significant figure.) This doesn’t seem absurd to me.

(I note that the figure for wasted chicken meat in terms of chickens per day does not come from WRAP’s report (which estimates the weight and cost of the waste) nor from their press release (http://wrap.s3.amazonaws.com/the-food-we-waste-executive-summary.pdf), which only mentions “chicken portions”.)

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

If anything, that's a low estimate, as it doesn't include food thrown away by supermarkets. It's a surprising number but if you estimate that each of the 60m people in the UK eats half a chicken a week, that gives 4m chickens/day eaten. The "1/3 of food wasted" is a number I've heard before.