By Faith Peppers
University of
Georgia

Daniel Fletcher is a scholar of all things cluckish.

Fletcher, a University of Georgia poultry and food scientist
and a recent inductee as a fellow of the Poultry Science
Association, recites the history of poultry production like
some scholars spew Shakespearean prose.

“This is a grocery store newspaper ad from 1948,” Fletcher
said, pointing to a frame on the wall of a UGA poultry research
facility. “At that time, 57 years ago, chicken sold for 69
cents a pound. Last summer, we were selling chicken for 69
cents a pound.”

Just with normal inflation, chicken at 69 cents a pound in 1948
would be $5.71 a pound now.

“It’s so cheap because of the efficient way we produce
chicken,” Fletcher said. “If I gave you a one-day-old chicken
and all you had to do was feed it, it would still cost you more
to do that than to go to a grocery story and buy it.”

Super science

Efficiency is the name of the game. “We owe it to nutrition and
genetics,” he said. “Back in the 1930s it took 16 weeks and
about 12 pounds of feed to produce a 3-pound broiler. Now we do
it in less than six weeks with less than 6 pounds of feed.”

The dramatic difference has led some to contend that U.S.
poultry is treated with growth hormones. “Why people talk about
that, I don’t know,” Fletcher said. “We’ve never used any
hormones in the United States. We don’t need hormones for
chickens.”

The secret to improvements in U.S. poultry, he said, is all in
the science.

“We’ve mastered the genetics and nutrition,” Fletcher said. “We
know much more about feeding chickens than we do about feeding
human beings. There’s only one way you can eat better than a
chicken, and that’s to eat the chicken.”

With the genetic and nutrition changes, chickens “grow like
crazy, and we don’t have to give them anything,” Fletcher
said. “You try to slow a chicken down from growing. You can’t.
You give them a little bit of food and water and they’ll
grow.”

The genetic changes have created chickens with more breast meat
than chickens even 25 years ago. “Poultry is the space shuttle
of agriculture,” he boasted. “It’s the highest technology in
agriculture.”

Eat more chicken

He motioned around the state-of-the-art pilot processing
facility he oversees. “What we do here,” he said, “is take a
bird with feathers on it and turn it into something people want
to eat.”

People don’t say they want beef for dinner, he said. “They
say, ‘I want a hamburger, or I want a steak.’ They want a meal,
not a commodity.”

“There are more than 100 types of chicken products you can buy
in the grocery story,” Fletcher says. “About 35 percent of the
chicken sold in the U.S. is sold in consumer packages,” he
said, “Shoppers don’t take home a whole chicken any more.”

They don’t take home much to cook at all. Fletcher said about
half of the food eaten in this country is prepared outside the
home.

Poultry fits in with the U.S. culture, Fletcher said. “Chicken
is so low-fat that you can put a lot more chicken in a dish
than beef and still hold the fat content down,” he said. “It
has less fat and fewer calories than other meats out there. It
fits the diet lifestyle very well.”

Fletcher said chicken “was the original convenience food,”
too.

“Think about it,” he said. “If you wanted beef and killed a
cow, what would you do with the meat you didn’t eat that night?
You’d have leftovers for three months. But if you wanted
chicken, you went out in the backyard and grabbed one, and
pretty soon that was dinner. That’s convenience.”