MREInfo.com

This question came across my email last week:

How many chickens are killed annually for MREs?

This turned out to be a pretty fun subject to research so I dug into it and came up with my own best guess. I don't know if there's an official answer to the question out there so I thought it'd be fun to throw the question out to you guys to see how you would figure it out.

I won't give away the number I finally came up with or how I got there...yet...but I will explain the basics of what you'll need to figure it out:

1. How many MREs are produced in a year. I used 2007 for all my numbers.
2. How many chicken-based MREs there are.
3. How many MREs you can get out of one chicken.

So post your answers and feel free to explain how you got there!

to point 3: i guess 4 MRE

So combine that with what you think are answers to 1 and 2 and that should give you your final answer to how many chickens are killed annually for MREs.

to 1: 7 200 000 chicken mre (1 800 000 chicken)
to 2: 6 (3 a and 3 b)
to 3: how i said 4

what does the quizmaster say?

Are we talking about normal chickens, or are these special MRE-only chickens that already have the fake grill marks on them?

I've been unable to find production numbers, but if I was to go by German EPA's figures of 28,800,000 MREs for 2007, then I get the following:

28.8 mil rations assuming production of each menu is split evenly, by 24 menus, of which 6 menus contain chicken.

So we got 7.2 mil chicken mre's for 2007.

Assuming we're using standard commercial chickens, white meat only, I'd say approx. 2 LB per bird. Depending on the menu, some would have higher proportion of meat to net wt. So, if we average it all out to say 4 oz of chicken each MRE, and 8 MRE's per bird, then I'd guess that 900,000 chickens are used.

German_EPA - you've got all the numbers there you need - now you need to put them together and come up with a single number of how many chickens you think were used for MREs in 2007.

MR.EMAN - you're getting pretty close! This slide ought to help you refine your numbers:

Thanks for the production numbers Kman. So, using my formula, with the numbers you posted, I get 107,492. (rounded up to nearest whole)

PLEASE THINK OF THESE POOR CHICKENS!!!!PLEASE!!!!


sorry too much coffee already

ok next try:

214984 chicken

and

859936 mre contain chicken