On Wednesday this week, Jeff and I reported that Whole Foods, and Starbucks were two of many high end restaurants and natural food retailers that were in the market for slow-growing chickens to fill the perceived demand of their customers.
At present, almost all of the chickens grown for meat, whether organic or conventionally raised, are crosses of Cornish game hens and White Plymouth Rock chickens, commonly call Cornish X Rocks. The genetics of these birds allows growers to produce a 3 pound dressed broiler in six weeks, from hatch to slaughter, on about 24 pounds of feed. The down side is that death loss is steep at 15% or more, and some consumers consider them to be tasteless, as in no taste, rather than being shoddy dressers or prone to telling off color jokes.
Now there are just a few lines of the Cornish X Rock chickens that grow a bit slower, taking about eight weeks to reach slaughter weigh. That may not seem like much, but they reportedly have better flavor then the fast-grow chickens.
When I ran across this story, it sounded familiar. Here again, consumers were demanding food products that mainstream producers aren't providing, and the mass producing poultry industry was pushing back, warning consumers that a shift to growing chickens slower would push prices up by as much as 300%. The underlying message is that if you mess with our finely tuned production process, only the rich will be able to afford to eat chicken.
We have seen a similar response when consumers started to question whether GMO crops were safe. The seed and chemical companies spent millions of dollars fighting ballot initiatives to label GMO ingredients of food products in several states. Their message was that food costs would sky rocket, and that farmers couldn't “feed the world” without GMO crops.
I wonder whether in the future though, consumer backlash against GMO crops will create more demand for conventionally produced crops. I doubt that they will go away entirely, but if conventionally grown crops become more profitable because of increased demand, farmers will shift production to the crop that will make the best returns.
Consumers may also continue demand changes in livestock and dairy production. We have already seen poultry cages being abandoned for poultry production in states that have banned them, but to be competitive, producers in other states understand that if they don't jump on the cage free wagon, they will miss the parade.
As individual consumers, we have very little direct influence on the multinational food producers and processors. However, we do have leverage with the restaurants and grocery stores where we spend our food dollars. Through them, we may play a role, along with thousands of other consumers, to force big ag and big food to provide us with better quality and better tasting food that will also assure a steady supply into the future.