THE CHICKEN AS UNIT PROCESS (C)1997 Alan M. Schwartz Who corresponds with Uncle Al? Schoolmarms dipping into the newly grown charms of ninth grade boys, and best wishes to all of them, log in. DoD analysts flexing voluptuously unclean thoughts in a White House sub-basement, composing a future imperial Pax Americana, pass through. We savor kindred to the fellow at the other end of today's essay, who slaughters and processes 35 million chickens each week. He exercises the proper perspective, and it exercises him. A problem with whacking 1.8 billion chickens/year is the ten grams of feces which a suddenly slack distal sphincter discharges through a bird's cloaca. That sums to 18,000 metric tons of adventitious byproduct and salmonella effluent annually. The industry professed a passing fancy for a hind squirt of Super Glue before the intricacies of training production line workers in handling the stuff shut them down. Is that your finger flash- glued to your coworker's nose? Chickens are woefully incapable of assimilating feed. They are so inefficient in digestion and absorption that their feces are collected, dried, ground, and added to new feed as a supplement, given them a Kilkenny second chance. In light of current nutrient management challenges - the cost of feed rises and the cost of waste disposal with it - folks in the know (and knee-deep in the problem) banter about gluing rear exits shut at the hatchery. This is real-world silly. MBA implementation requires arcane digital technology so the books can be adroitly juggled away from IRS trespass. Chickens are crappy chemical reactors. Get a good refinery man, he'll make them perform unit operations! (Uncle Al was once employed by Occidental Petroleum. Squawking locals had a habit of disappearing into drilling mud.) If Environmentalism condemns veal; and Environmentalism is expensive, shoddy and dangerous; then doing more of then same with greater vigor is just the ticket to efficient operation. Chicken manufacture is already performed in huge long barns holding thousands of cages of laying chickens. Chicken digestion and absorption are industry nightmares. It could not cost more to drop gastric tubes and feed predigested pap with a smart peristaltic pump (less capital expenditure to rig and debug it). The industry needs a good chemical engineer and a tax write-off. I envision a bright tomorrow wherein tens of thousands of thin tubes continuously dribble nutriment at optimum composition and rate into tens of thousands of cages of Egg Unit Production Bio- Modules moving along a massive miles-long conveyer system chick to roaster, and eggs on the side. The whole building must be thermostatted anyway, so we eliminate feet and feathers as atavistic, wasted metabolism. India has for decades collected hair from barbershops and hydrolyzed it into amino acid supplements. There is no lack of hog waste and excrement in the world, protein-rich nascent chickenfeed to a nation! Newsprint is hydrolyzed to sugar syrup. Slap them into an autoclave, sterilize, hydrolyze, package, and pump. 1.5 billion pounds/year of polyester can be profitably recycled as chicken feeding infrastructure. The Sierra Club will howl their outrage at capitalist triumph! Why stop here? We optimize feed-to-animal conversion, purge obsolete limbs and feathers, and there prevails more profitable unit conversion. Capitalism is not content with incremental net retained earnings. Real players dominate market. Science 277(5334) 1922 (1997). Go from hatched chick to nominal chicken in less than half the normal interval - tender, too! Jumbo eggs will be the small ones. Would you like to triple meat production? Wait for full growth. Imagine chicken breasts the size of catcher's mitts, thighs like bludgeons, and buffalo wings from a roc. One gene unleashes awesome meat development - the chicken equivalent of Arnold Schwarznegger by birthright, less steroids. What does tomorrow portend? We can worship Environmentalist dogma and spend our days moving chick manure with Rome plows as costs soar and profits plummet. Squawking Luddites with stinky armpits will demand we eat beans and algae instead of coq au vin. Enough! A digital feeding retrofit in existing chicken factories tightens discounted cashflow/return on investment to NASDAQ- busting magnitudes. The spawn of a few weeks of recombinant DNA work in a biotech lab revolutionizes the feeding of humanity, Third World swamps to five star restaurants: The Super Chicken. Will we tolerate scrawny filthy beasts scratching in dirt as three billion humans suffer marasmus and kwashiorkor? Will we engineer a chicken apropos to feeding planet Earth? Shoot bellyaching hind gut fermenters a squirt of Super Glue where it will do the most good, and get on with civilization.