NFL Lockout Could Mean Less Chicken Is Eaten

Written by Vegetarian Star on March 21st, 2011 in Animal Issues, Athletes-Games-Sports, Environment-Eco-Green, Food & Drink.

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Hard to imagine a year in America without football season, but if players and owners can’t come to an agreement, we might say kiss off to kick-off.

And that may be good for chickens and the environment.

According to NFL Lockout, each NFL city could potentially lose $160 million dollars and 115 thousand jobs would be affected if football season is cancelled.

One of those businesses involves chicken wings.

According to Joe Sanderson Jr., CEO of Sanderson Farms, the fourth largest poultry company in the U.S, chicken wings account for 12% of his company’s product volume. The National Chicken Council estimates that in 2011, more than 13.5 billion wings will be marketed. Many of those wings are demanded during football season by individuals and sports bars. If there’s not a football season, that demand will drop significantly.

Or, in Mr. Sanderson’s words: “It will be a major blow.”

Well, depends on how you look at it.

Yes, the lockout has serious implications for many people and their livelihoods, including the players and their healthcare. But from an environmentalist’s perspective, less people eating chicken could go a long way toward reducing reducing greenhouse gases since meat is more costly to produce in terms of energy used.

According to the Environmental Defense Fund, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week (like the one they eat during the football game on Sunday), it would generate the equivalent of taking more than half a million cars off U.S. roads in terms of saving carbon dioxide. This value was obtained based on published data that shows how much fossil fuels are used to produce certain types of food.

Photo: Insancipitory/Creative Commons

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