A friend of mine told me 3 days a while back, what with growth hormones.
That seems just a little optimistic.
So, if I don’t care about how the end chicken looks, or give a toss about how healthy it is, and just care about its weight, how quickly could I get a just hatched chick to the size needed to be sold as an eatable full grown chicken? (Oh, and I don’t care if the end result is edible either).
Why not just save the time and eat the egg?
Because no one orders egg mcnuggets.
In Holidays in Hell, P.J. O’Rourke describes a Filipino delicacy that involves boiling an egg that is just about to hatch and eating the near-term chicken fetus. He described it as looking like something the Duckberg Right-to-Life Foundation might put on their posters.
Why waste food and energy to make a chicken lay an egg in the first place?
http://animalscience.ucdavis.edu/Avian/pfs20.htm
I’m sure if there was a way to blow up the weight of chickens in less time, the meat industry would have found it already.
Anyway, there’s more room for optimization in trying to maximize the final weight, not to minimize the time for reaching it. http://www.scientecmatrix.com/seghers/tecma/scientecmatrix.nsf/_/6E95793FB7DAABDEC1256B73002CD0BF (2 pages)
I think young chicks look quite mature after a surprisingly short time, could your friend mean this?
I think they made them eat those on Fear Factor once.
:o
Pig fetus was on fear factor… though they may have had these, too.