Does Chick-Fil-A Hate the Environment?

When you think about Chick-Fil-A, what comes to mind? If you’re anything like me, it’s the delectable chicken sandwiches, geometrically-pleasing waffle fries, and an extreme prejudice against the sweet, bloody meat found only on the cold, dead carcass of a cow. At first glance, this prejudice can be attributed to a simple preference of chicken; but, upon closer inspection, it seems to run much deeper.

In light of recent discoveries on the effect cow flatulence has on the environment, made by esteemed environmental scientists such as Al Gore and Michael Moore, why does Chick-Fil-A continue to refuse to contribute to the planet’s well being? McDonalds, Wendy’s, Burger King, Steak ‘n Shake, and many others do their part in eliminating the menace, yet Chick-Fil-A does nothing.

All over the world, cows are passing gas - and not just once or twice a day each, but constantly. One of the major components of bovine flatulence is methane. Methane, as any 14 year-old chemistry student can tell, is a greenhouse gas.

Do you remember the hairspray scare of the ‘80s, or the Freon epidemic of the early ‘90s? I don't, I wasn't even alive for the former, and was playing with legos during the latter; but I heard about it in history class, and it was evidently pretty risky business. Anyway, the methane released every time a cow farts poses the same threat as hairspray and Freon once did.

The current estimated cow population is 1.3 billion. Can you imagine if 1.3 billion people were to hold down the nozzles on 1.3 billion bottles of hairspray simultaneously? How about the same thing, but 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, year after year? Well, that would have the equivalent environmental effect as the current cow-fart epidemic.

I can’t find exact numbers on how many chicken sandwiches Chick-Fil-A sells a year, but I can estimate. In 2005, Chick-Fil-A claims to have made roughly 2 billion dollars in sales. We can safely assume that about 50% of their product sold was chicken nuggets or chicken sandwiches, based on their menu and business model (I’m an expert on such matters). This means that about 1 billion dollars were made in the sale of chicken. I can’t remember for sure, and I can’t be bothered to actually go check, but I think their chicken products have an average price of about $2.50. So, my estimated amount of chicken product sold is 400 million.

I’m going to make another assumption, and that is that these chicken products have an average weight of a 1/4 pound (minus the weight of the buns of course). So, that adds up to approximately 100 million pounds of chicken. The average weight of a cow is like 1,200 pounds. Probably only 50% of that is edible, so we'll say 600 edible pounds. That means that, if Chick-Fil-A were to substitute beef for chicken, they could eliminate 170,000 cows – every year. That would cut down the adverse environmental effects of cow flatulence by about 1.3% a year.

Now, that may not seem like a whole lot, but when you consider the fact that that would decrease the cow population faster than the cow population can reproduce, you begin to realize that the cow menace could quickly become extinguished. So, why does Chick-Fil-A hate the environment so much that they’d risk their reputation in order to kill it? What are the executive at Chick-Fil-A getting out of this? Is Al Gore paying them? Or are they doing it in return for the permission to keep that outrageous claim that they invented the chicken sandwich?

 

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