My wife and I just got home from a delightful dinner at our favourite Vancouver restaurant, the Green Lettuce. We had hot and sour soup with chicken (the best in town) and ginger chicken. So did a lot of other people; it's Mother's Day, the busiest day of the year for an always-busy restaurant.
And now I find, via The Independent, a long, informative article: Chickens: How a creature that can barely fly became the world's most migratory bird. Excerpt:
If all canines and felines vanished tomorrow, along with the odd parakeet and gerbil, there would be much mourning but minimal impact on the global economy or international politics. A suddenly chickenless world, however, would spell immediate disaster.
In 2012, as the cost of eggs shot up in Mexico City after millions of birds were culled due to disease, demonstrators took to the streets, rattling the new government. It was dubbed the “Great Egg Crisis”, and no wonder, since Mexicans eat more eggs per capita than any other people.
The same year, in Cairo, high-priced poultry helped to inspire Egypt’s revolution as protesters rallied to the cry: “They are eating pigeon and chicken, but we eat beans every day!” When poultry prices tripled in Iran recently, the nation’s police chief warned television producers not to broadcast images of people eating the popular meat, to avoid inciting violence among those who could not afford grilled kebabs.
The chicken has, quietly but inexorably, become essential. Although it can barely fly, the fowl has become the world’s most migratory bird through international imports and exports. The various parts of a single bird may end up at opposite ends of the globe. Chinese get the feet, Russians the legs, Spaniards the wings, Turks the intestines, Dutch soup makers the bones, and the breasts go to the United States and Britain.
This globalised business extends to Kansan corn that plumps Brazilian birds, European antibiotics to stave off illness in American flocks, and Indian-made cages housing South African poultry.And that is why the various strains of avian flu, including the current H5N2 outbreak, are serious business.
