I am not trying to be trendy here but this is the second year in a row that I have not wasted 10 seconds of my life watching any portion of the No Fans Left league.
A year ago I decided the lack of respect I see on display for the core patriotism of this country by young men who are paid a lot of money to play a game was not going to get my support. I did not even watch one Super Bowl ad on the internet so if you are targeting me with your ad, you just wasted millions of dollars.
There are several different ways we could go with this discussion and I think I will touch briefly on each. First of all, despite the media wanting us to believe that just a few rural rednecks think like I do, there is no question that the NFL is feeling the pinch this year. Former fans are obviously not tuning in just as I have not. I haven’t encouraged others to follow my lead on boycotting this league but others have chosen the same course as I and we would welcome followers.
However, I have recently learned that farmers are also paying the price for the misdeeds of the football elite. Within the past month we learned that chicken wing sales are down by 14 percent since September 2017. Of course there is no way to directly tie the slump in sales to the reduction in people watching and celebrating this NFL season but where there is smoke there is usually fire.
I have always found it mind blowing that the National Chicken Council has for years promoted the fact that 1.25 billion chicken wings are consumed during Super Bowl week. So in a gesture of support for what we have accomplished in American agriculture I am urging everyone to increase his or her consumption of chicken wings for at least the month of January.
In addition to increasing wing consumption and in honor of our era of “sharing everything” in our life in social media, use the hashtag #ChickenWingsBowl to show your support for poultry farmers nationwide. I think this campaign says nothing about being for or against the NFL players but rather it is all about celebrating the accomplishments of the United States farmer.
Walk into in any grocery store today and you can buy a boneless chicken breast that is 100 percent nutrition for less than $2 per pound. Price chicken wings and you will find them to be over $2 per pound for mostly bone, much less protein and a serious napkin requirement. But they sure are popular, so much in fact that restaurants dedicated primarily to the sale of wings have sprung up nationwide. They represent one more way we use technology and creativity to add value to an otherwise undesirable product.
A similar story applies to pork with whole pork loins priced at half or even a third of what baby back ribs cost. Baby back ribs are wonderful but are 75 percent bone. Yet we proudly buy these products because the American farmer/rancher has done a tremendous job converting natural resources into the essentials of life and making them pretty darn tasty as well.
As a quick reminder, in 1900 it required 5 acres of land to produce enough food to feed one person for an entire year. Today it takes less than a third of an acre to feed the same person for a year. Do you think in 1900 our ancestors would be paying 3 times as much for food that was mostly bone?
So join me in the month of January and increase your consumption of some hard-to-eat, sauce laden chicken wings and then do what any 15-year-old would do and post a selfie. Let’s get #ChickenWingsBowl trending as a message that we should all celebrate the abundant reasonably priced supply of food we have here in the United States of America.
Editor’s note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].