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.