Bear with me as this is 2 questions that sort of has to do with each other.
The recent classic column How many cows are slaughtered each year to make McDonalds hamburgers? on how many cows McDonalds kill each year got me thinking: People eat far more chicken than cows in this country right? Considering its size, each person probably eats, at most, a couple cows a year, while their chicken intake can be numbered in the dozens. How many chickens are killed in the US each year for food? I was kind of astounded to read in that same article that McDonalds cows are only 1 percent of the total US beef market. If that’s the case, then the chicken we eat must be exponetially magnitudes more than 100 billion pounds!
My second question has to do with a quote I read somewhere. The quote says that food animals never go extinct. I’m sure the author was trying to make the point that if humans have reason to keep some animal around, especially a delicious one, they will make damn sure the thing never disappears. Fish notwithstanding (since the oceans are deep and nobody really raises fish for mass consumption), is the quote true, at least of land animals? Have we never eaten a land animal to extinction and have all extinct animals that we know of died off not been a steady diet of a large group of people?
The Dodo, Passenger Pigeon, Great Auk, and Eskimo Curlew come to mind. All were very heavily hunted for food.
Plenty of animals that are now extinct were hunted extensively at the close of the last Ice Age, including mammoths, mastodonts, wooly rhinos, the American horse, giant ground sloths, and others. Evidence based on the timing of the extinctions suggests that hunting by humans played a major role (perhaps in conjunction with other human impacts and in some areas climate change).
Plenty of food animals have gone extinct, though no domesticated ones that I know of. Dodos are the obvious example of a species hunted to extinction for food. Bison were close (though the people doing most of the killing didn’t want them for food as much as the pelts, I suppose).
There’s some reason to blame hunting for megafauna extinctions in North America, though the jury is still out on that one.
You could argue that domestication of food crops and animals has led to their wild counterparts going extinct. The native originators of corn and cows are extinct, for example.
The “food animals never go extinct” quote would only make sense if it referred specifically to domesticated animals. And even then, there would be exceptions if, for example, tastes and markets changed and all farmers/ranchers decided to change to a new, superior food animal.
We eat Cavendish bananas now because the previous common food banana, the Gros Michel, died out in the 50’s. Yes, we will still have bananas, but if a disease gets these we’ll have to move on to another cultivar. In other words, it’s still a banana, but it’s as if, say, all the Chardonnay grapes died.
Cool (well, not “cool” but I learned sumpin). Personally, I drink primarily reds, and of the white wines only like Pinot Grigio, but I do see your point.
This is a common (and increasing) occurrence in food husbandry. Many food plants are seeing a concentration on a few varieties, the ones that produce the best, most desirable produce. Even in home gardening, for example: the Big Boy/Big Girl tomatoes have replaced many older varieties, because they produce better. But this is leading to a decreased biological diversity, and worries about the result if a disease were to attack the few remaining varieties. So now there are some organizations specializing in storing & growing stocks of ‘heirloom’ variety seeds.
This is happening in domesticated animals, too. For example, within breeds of horses, the acceptance of AI breeding has especially led to heavy use of the currently preferred stallions, with other bloodlines not being bred on. Some breeders are worried about the bloodlines that are thus dying off, and the consequences of a concentrated, more inbred breed.
Biodiversity isn’t the only reason for the interest in heirloom tomatoes. Different cultivars are optimized for different things, and people have varying priorities for their tomatoes. The Big Boy tomatoes are popular because they’re large, of course, but many folks find the heirlooms taste better, and don’t mind if they’re a little smaller.
Most cultivated bananas, known as Musa X paradisiaca, are triploid hybrids of two parental species, Musa acuminata (a diploid species) and M. balbisiana (a tetraploid species). It’s because they are triploid they are sterile, and must be propagated by cuttings.
During the nineteenth century there was massive market hunting of the medium and larger species of migratory shorebirds (including curlews), which occur in very large flocks. Eskimo Curlews at the time occurred in the millions, but it is estimated that in the late 1800s up to two million birds per year were killed for market. Market hunting of shorebirds was banned in 1918, but by then it was too late for the Eskimo Curlew, and its population never recovered.
This book describes shorebird hunting and the decoys used by hunters.
The passenger pigeon must take the award for “most formerly ubiquitous and now extinct” food animal - they used to darken the skies, and we ate almost every single one of them. (After a point they could no longer assemble the large flocks they needed for mating.) Imagine how different the ecosystem of most of the country must be from the days when there were millions in a flock?
Assuming a population of 300 million, that’s some 26 billion pounds of chicken (compared to almost 20 billion lbs of beef). Not quite 100 billion, but still a bit.
If this kind of thing interests you, the books Diet for a Dead Planet and The Omnivore’s Dilemma should be on your list. The former has a LOT of stats and numbers, but the latter is far more readable.
