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Posts Tagged ‘Chicken’

Chicken Wing Pricing Redux

About a year ago, I blogged about how odd the pattern of chicken wing prices was at my local Harold’s Chicken Shack.  Here was what they were charging for their wings:

2-wing meal $3.03

3-wing meal $4.50

4-wing meal $5.40

5-wing meal $5.95

6-wing meal $7.00

It is quite odd because they gave you a big discount on the fourth and fifth wings, but charged you a lot for the sixth wing.  There were many incongruities throughout the menu.

Since that time, Harold’s has invested in a fancy new menu up on the wall above the bulletproof glass that protects the workers from the customers.  I’ve also invested in a fancy new phone that actually takes pictures, unlike the phone I carried a year ago.  So this time, instead of having to write down all the prices, I just snapped a photo.


The Economics of Chicken Feet… and Other Parts

Our latest podcast, “Weird Recycling,” featured Carlos Ayala, the Vice President of International at Perdue Farms. Stephen Dubner‘s interview with him centered on chicken feet — or chicken paws, as they’re called in the industry. Until about 20 years ago, paws were close to value-less for a U.S. chicken company. But thanks to huge demand in China, paws have become big profit centers. The U.S. now exports about 300,000 metric tons of chicken paws every year. Perdue alone produces more than a billion chicken feet a year, which according to Ayala brings in more than $40 million of revenue. In fact, Ayala says that without the paw, chicken companies would be hard-pressed to stay in business:


Here's What a Lunch of Chicken Feet Looks Like

Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “Weird Recycling,” included a field trip to Golden Unicorn in New York’s Chinatown to eat some chicken feet. Our guest was Carlos Ayala of Perdue Farms. Ayala told us that the export of chicken feet, primarily to China and Hong Kong, is such a big part of Perdue’s business that the firm might be in trouble if that export market didn’t exist. Here are some snaps from Ayala and Stephen Dubner‘s chicken-feet lunch at Golden Unicorn.


Artificial Insemination: What About the Other Animals?

Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast, “Unnatural Turkeys,” reveals the surprising origins of the 40 million turkeys that Americans are going to eat this Thanksgiving. You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or read the transcript here.

So, 100 percent of commercially raised turkeys in the U.S. (save for heritage turkeys) are born from artificial insemination. But what about other animals? We talked to reproductive experts Dale Coleman at Auburn University, Wayne Singleton from Purdue, and Keith Bramwell at University of Arkansas. The graphic below shows what percentage of each animal is born from artificial insemination:


FREAK-est Links

This week, the fastest human-like robot, why the government just bought $40 million of chicken, an iPhone app to keep you from hitting the snooze bar, the environmental upside of cloud computing, and a scientific explanation of the phenomenon known as Beer Goggles.