(This is an expansion of a 2009 post )

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, so I understand if you don’t read this until later in the week.  But it’s a great chance to make some examples of what a feeding a nation looks like.

In 2009, I picked up on a press release from the chicken producers about chicken wings…one of many Super Bowl favorite foods.

You may have seen some blog posts and other news stories about a possible buffalo chicken wing shortage for the Super Bowl earlier this year.

But the National Chicken Council released this press release, assuring consumers that there was a large enough supply.

The National Chicken Council estimates that more than one billion wing portions will be served during the last football weekend.

One billion wing portions.

For 2011, the National Chicken Council new numbers say:

The Super Bowl weekend is unquestionably the biggest time of the year for wings.  The National Chicken Council projects that more than 1.25 billion wing portions will be consumed during Super Bowl weekend in 2011.  That is more than 100 million pounds of wings.

In my 2009 post, I did the math on the billion wings:

Assuming you can get two wings from a chicken, that’s 500 million chickens just for Super Bowl weekend.

In other words, to meet this supply, every man, woman and child in a city the size of Detroit, would need to raise 500 chickens.

Each.

Allowing each bird 8 square feet of space would cover 143 square miles.  (500 million x 8 = 4 billion square feet, divided by 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile. Detroit itself is 138.8 square miles and isn’t quite big enough.

So back to 2011′s Super Bowl.  The estimtes are 1.25 billion, so, after you done the math on the 1 billion wings, there are still 250 million wings (from 125 million chickens) to account for.  And at 500 chickens each, they are *easily* raised by all the folks in any US city of 250,000 with a little room to spare….

As I wrote this blog update, the Cobert report broke a story about “Wyngz”, which has created some buzz in the twitter verse and blogosphere.  If you want to know what the USDA FSIS says about wyngs,

FSIS has a standard of identity in Title 9 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Section 381.170(b)(7) that defines a poultry “wing.” The use of the term “wing” cannot be used on any poultry product unless it complies with this standard of identity. In comparison, FSIS allows the use of the term “wyngz” to denote a product that is in the shape of a wing or a bite-size appetizer type product under the following conditions in which the Agency considers its use fanciful and not misleading:

1. The statement may only reference the term “wyngz” (no other misspellings are permitted). All labels bearing the term “wyngz” need to be submitted to the Labeling and Program Delivery Division (LPDD) for sketch approval because it is considered a special statement that cannot be generically approved;
2. the poultry used is white chicken (with or without skin);
3. “wyngz” is placed contiguous to a prominent, conspicuous, and legible descriptive name (e.g., “white chicken fritters”) in the same color font;
4. the smallest letter in the descriptive name is no smaller than 1/3 the size of the largest letter used in “wyngz;” and
5. a statement that further clarifies that the product does not contain any wing meat or is not derived only from wing meat (e.g., “contains no wing meat,” “with no wing meat,” “contains breast meat and wing meat”) is placed in close proximity to the descriptive name and linked to “wyngz” by use of an asterisk. “Wyngz” referenced elsewhere on the package, e.g., on the front riser panel, would also need to be displayed with an asterisk linking it to this statement on the principal display panel.

I have not done the math to know how many chickens it takes to make a pair of “wyngz”, nor do I know if the Super Bowl half time show will ever be performed by  Paul McCartney and “Wyngz”.