Friggin Texans and their crap power grid............
SIOUX CITY, Iowa — First, it was a shortage of toilet paper, then Clorox wipes, and lately those tiny ketchup packages. Now there's a shortage of chicken wings!
The shortage is so bad that Bob Roe's Point After is temporarily canceling its normal "Wings Wednesday."
Other restaurants in Siouxland and across the country are facing a similar predicament.
The shortage is being blamed on increased demand for takeout and comfort food during the past year and the devastating winter storms in Texas shrinking the supply.
I find the chicken wing market to be very interesting.
Chicken wings used to be throwaway items that nobody could find a market for. They were dirt cheap. I mean, there's not a lot of meat on them, they're hard to eat due to the bones, and a lot of people seem to have a preference for white meat chicken.
At the same time, chicken breast was premium, and usually carried a much higher per-pound price than chicken wings. Chicken breast is incredibly versatile, becoming the protein in basically just about any recipe that needs a cheap protein.
Enter Buffalo and the chicken wing craze. A market was created out of nowhere based purely on bar food to start.
I remember sometime in about the mid-oughts seeing a story that chicken wing prices had surpassed boneless skinless chicken breast on a per-pound basis, and that being a big thing. Especially since the wings have bones, which are inedible weight, and that wings (because they have skin and bones) are likely less processing cost.
But it makes sense. To feed someone a meal, you need 1 chicken breast, or 1/2 of the breasts available on a chicken. To feed someone a meal, you probably need 12 chicken wing pieces, or 3 chickens worth of wing pieces. So as wings became more popular, you had a 6x number of chickens needed to be slaughtered for per meal compared to chicken breast.
So if there is going to be a chicken shortage, the wing market is the first place it would show up.
