Why are there so many chicken bones on the street? (Part 1)

0:00This week on Search Engine, a mystery that has haunted us for years. Why are there so many chicken bones on the streets? That's after some ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Zapier. Over the last few months, everyone's been talking about AI. It's in the headlines, it's on social feeds, and it's dominating conversations. But here's the thing. Talking about trends doesn't make anyone more efficient at work. For that, you need the right tools. You need Zapier. Zapier is how you break the hype cycle and put AI to work across your company, for real. With Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow.

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1:47Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. A few months ago, I got an unusual message from some unusual people. Why don't we start? Do you guys just want to introduce yourselves? Sure. My name is Manny. I'm Noah. I'm Devin. Manny, Noah, and Devin. They're all journalists. Noah works at a newspaper. Manny and Devin work for a national broadcasting company called NBC. The three of them met early in their careers. And what is your relationship to each other? We used to sit next to each other at Business Insider a long time ago and argue every day. And what would you argue about? We would argue about things like whether water is wet.

2:31A classic. What else? Oh, whether CNN puts an orange filter on Trump. You know, things like that. But just on Donald Trump. Yeah, so they press the Trump button when he's on. It's not a button. It's, you know, we know how to do this. It's not like magic. But so like the kind of conversations people have when they're locked in a room for a really long time, whether that's like confined or like purgatory or like a job that's like not as engaging or whatever. It's just like we're in this room all day, every day, and this is what eventually happens. Yeah, I'll put it this way. The work we were doing back then was not very taxing creatively.

3:08And so I think we found ways to entertain ourselves. Okay. So normally the way the show works is like either we have questions ourselves that we go try to answer, or people send in questions, and then we try to answer them. You guys send an unusual email in that you're like, we've got a bunch of questions. They're really good questions. They were really good questions. and you were like, and we want to answer them. And I was like, that seems cool. Also, normally, just to talk about what else is happening. When you put it that way, it sounds bad. No, no, no, it's good, it's good. We are the experts on all these things.

3:38We can handle this one. And it was funny because typically, like, when podcasts have, like, a freelance reporter, it's like a freelance reporter, but you guys were like, no, we're three people in a person's suit, and we want to both ask and answer the questions together. Yeah, just hand us the mic, essentially, is what we're asking. Three mics. Yeah. So what question do you have for me for you to answer? Our question is, why are there so many chicken bones on the street and who is the culprit? It's a pretty simple question, but we dug into it a little bit and it turns out that there's a ton of layers to this question.

4:16The inception of the question actually started with Devin. Yeah, so me, similar to a lot of people during the pandemic, got really bored. Yep. I started fostering dogs, and then I quickly started to notice how much trash there is on the streets. You never notice how disgusting the streets are until you have a dog that's trying to eat everything disgusting on the streets. And the second dog I had would, like, try to eat literally everything. At one point, I had to take him to the vet because he ate a rat. Like an entire rat? I don't know how much of the rat because it was just the tail sticking out of his mouth.

4:53Did you try to pull it out? I just shook him a lot. I was like, you're not even really my dog. I'm just fostering you. So I wasn't putting my hand in. It's so disgusting imagining like the end of a piece of spaghetti just like a rat. Because I'm like, you know, dogs eat a lot of stuff on the streets. But the thing that I kept coming across were like chicken bones. Yes. And I was like, why are there just so many chicken bones? You know, more chicken bones than rats. And then we talked about it. And I'm like, oh yeah, like in all of our neighborhoods, we're noticing like just a shit ton of chicken bones on the ground.

5:37We noticed that this was an issue in our neighborhoods in Brooklyn, but we have journalism backgrounds, so we wanted to make sure that this happening to us was also happening on a larger scale. In order to confirm this, we started texting a bunch of our friends to send photos to us whenever they encountered chicken bones, just to make sure that this is happening on a broad scale. And I wanted to show you just a sample of those photos. Okay, so this is chicken bone evidence. So what happened was I think we accidentally created kind of a surveillance state of people across Brooklyn who are sending in these photos of chicken bones and encountering people who are throwing them on the ground.

6:22And when they send us these photos, they are also sending, you know, where they are when they took the photos. Either that or, depending on your iPhone settings, I can click into the picture and see the metadata and see where the photo is being taken. So most of these photos are just like, it's somebody taking a picture of their sneakers on the concrete. And like there's like gross, like there's like a push down Dunkin Donuts bag and then chicken bone. There's like two chicken bones. And I think. Yeah, get in close there. One of these photos has maybe 16 bones. Yeah, I'm looking at one with a lot, a lot of bones.

6:58So because these have metadata, it's like you're also getting, because it's not like chicken bones are evenly distributed throughout New York City. you're getting a map of what are the hotspot neighborhoods for chicken bones among the friends you surveyed. Yeah, and it's, you know, admittedly not a gigantic sample, a big enough sample to do an official study. But I found that, like, generally Bed-Sign, Crown Heights have a more concentrated, you know, proliferation of chicken bones on the street. Well, I'd also say, so we wanted to expand it to see like, is this just a New York thing? So we did search and like, if you search just like chicken bones on street, you'll find like every major city's Reddit has at least a few threads on this issue.

7:47So it happens everywhere. Yeah. It happens everywhere. People gather in cities. Yeah. It seems like any dense area is going to have someone complaining about chicken bones on the street. And is it usually dog owners? Yeah. Typically it's people complaining because their dogs are eating them. there were some TikToks we found too that are about this issue. Yeah, we can play one maybe. Yeah, I'll watch TikTok. On TikTok. Stop throwing your fucking chicken bones on the ground. I can't keep fighting with my dog every fucking morning. This person's frying their tiny Pomeranian's mouth up and trying to get chicken bones out of it.

8:16And that has 75 ,000 favorites. So this is a thing that people are feeling. Yeah, this is real.

8:25Okay, so coming up after a short break this real thing this plague of chicken bones in American cities, who's behind it? We'll investigate.

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11:00So, once we confirmed that this chicken bones thing was a real problem and has been for years, in multiple American cities, the three of us began our investigation into this question. Why are there so many chicken bones on the street? And we divvied up the work into three prongs. And who took what prong and what other prongs? Each one of us has like a thing we're kind of good with, if you will. We're going to start with Noah. He's like a nerd. He really dug into the history of chicken consumption in general. So we'll start with him.

11:38Yeah, so my job was to look into why there are so many chickens that then turn into bones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so why are there so many chickens? So I went way back and pretty deep on this to like the first domesticated chickens, which would be in modern day, would now be like central Thailand. I just want to say I really appreciate the depth of research on this. Yeah, did a lot of reading this weekend. Okay, so wait, so the first domesticated chickens are when and where? So the first unambiguous domestic chicken bones, that's kind of the term they use in this recent research I've been looking at, they're dated to around 1650 to 1250 BC in central Thailand.

12:13There's some debate about other regions, but the theory is basically wild jungle fowl were drawn there by rice agriculture. I never would have pictured that there was a wild version of a chicken, but of course there was a wild version of a chicken. Yeah, and if you look them up, they're actually pretty beautiful little creatures. They're like, there's red ones, gray ones, different colors. It's like Pokemon. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It seems like they were attracted to the rice because it's easier to just live off grains other people are growing and you can stay in one area and that sort of thing. So they wander in and get domesticated.

12:45Exactly. So then people would take them in or whatever. And those are the first kind of domesticated chickens, is the theory. Then it's like they spread from there, across South Asia, Mesopotamia, Europe, and Africa. They're not really primarily raised for their meat. It's really much more, they're kind of novelties. They're sent along trade routes as like gifts for royalty. In this time, they kind of develop different sorts of associations. So like in Japan and China, they're associated with sun gods, which makes sense because they'll crow in the morning. Right. So they'll start the day. In ancient Greece, they were associated with lots of medical uses.

13:20So, like, the chicken would be taken apart and all different parts of it would be used in different medicines. And you can see stuff like that today in, like, chicken soup that we have. It's kind of a cure-all. That idea traces back to the idea that chicken is, like, a medical cure. Yeah, exactly. And then today, in, like, vaccines, they use egg protein. So, like, certain people can't have flu vaccines because there's eggs in them. So, chickens are kind of associated with medicine for a long time. And some people can't have them because of the 5G chip. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's correct. And fact check.

13:50But it's like if today the thing about the chicken is that it's ubiquitous, in the moment that you're describing it, they're not ubiquitous. And so it's like they're serving a lot of different functions, but one of the things that they have in common is that chickens are rare. And so a chicken is traveling along this trade route because it's a gift from somewhere else that means something different depending on who's receiving it. Yeah, exactly. And now we're going to fast forward a few thousand years to America. Sure. There's some debate. The main theory is that Christopher Columbus brought them in 1493.

14:18There's also a theory that Polynesians brought them, and that would have been about 100 years earlier. But at this point, they're coming because they're a source of food, not because they're an exotic gift? Yeah, that's more just like, okay, these are good animals we could eat. Yes. And they made it over because they're hardy animals, so they could survive a passage like that. So they were good as an option for food. And then getting forward to the 20th century, pedigree chicken breeding begins. And this is kind of when the commercial broiler chicken comes around in 1923. And that's a broiler chicken is a chicken raised for meat and not for eggs or other things.

14:51So this is really those, like when you picture a chicken dinner, that's the broiler chicken. So it's like we're turning chickens from something wild to something domesticated to something that is almost an industrial product. And as that happens, they become more popular in America. Yeah, exactly. And then that's in the 20s. And then it kind of develops pretty quickly from there. The main touchpoint is World War II. There's rations on beef, pork, and lamb. So the government then encourages way more chickens to be raised and eaten to kind of make up for that. So by the end of the war, there's three times more chicken being eaten than there was before, which is a pretty huge kind of immediate jump in just a few years.

15:30But then the war is over, so everyone can have their beef and pork back, and then people aren't really that into chicken still. It's like, yeah, we ate that during the war because we had to, but we can kind of go back to the good food now. So the government's like, okay, we have all these chickens and no one wants to eat them. We're like, we know we can make all these chickens and they're really cheap to make because of all these other things. But how do you make people eat them? Exactly. So there was actually a contest called the Chicken of Tomorrow Contest, which was sponsored by the USDA and the A &P grocery store chain in 1948.

16:02And the whole contest was set up to encourage farmers to develop bigger, better chickens. and there's like a very good like government made and Texaco sponsored documentary which I can show you some clips of. Okay. Besides being a good egg layer, the chicken of tomorrow will be an improved meat producer. Oh, so there's the chicken of today next to the chicken of tomorrow and the chicken of today is much, I mean it's a carcass, but it's much skinnier. Notice how breeding has increased the amount of meat on the breast. Look at that drumstick. Oh man. The chicken on the right looks like the chickens you're used to and the chicken on the left looks like a chicken that's never lifted weights.

16:40Make your own guess as to which is the more profitable to raise. I have to say, it's kind of working on me. Look how pumped that thing is. Yeah. And when the chicken of tomorrow gets to the dinner table, its advantages are still more apparent. This video from the perspective of chickens is just really dark. Yeah, the overall quality of life definitely seems to go down from like the days of being kind of gods of the sun.

17:08But there's more of them. And they're like Jack now. Which is also cool. That's true. So bleak. Okay, so what happens now? So chickens are much bigger now. And then this is when big name brands emerge. So Tyson, Purdue, etc. And there's kind of a real commercial chicken industry. And then fast food comes along. So KFC and later McDonald's. So by the time we're in the late 70s, 80s, we're at the point where chickens are starting to catch up with other meats. Okay, so 80s is when it starts to become like fast food fried chicken, which I'm assuming is where like it really takes off. Yeah, yeah. So like today worldwide, there's 74 billion chickens a year raised and slaughtered for food.

17:53And like that's even risen so much. In 2000, that was 40 billion, that number. So it went from 40 billion in 2000 to 74 billion today? Mm-hmm. When you describe it like that, it's almost surprising that like every street isn't just fully like knee high and like a macabre red carpet of chicken bones. I did a quick number crunch and there's about 120 bones in a chicken. So if you do 120 times 74 billion, I believe this would be 8.88 trillion bones per year. Per year. Yeah. Available to be on the ground. Available, yeah. So honestly, the real question is why are there not more chicken bones? Yeah, we should be tripping over them.

18:35Drowning, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so we have like a history of the chickens' popularity to humankind from 1600 BC to today. Which is like the prerequisite for how you get streets filled with chicken bones. What is the next prong here? So the next prong here is we come back to the question. And now we begin to look at the suspects. Who is throwing these bones on the street? Our first and leading suspect is human beings. Right. Lots of accusations online with people saying this. People are eating their chicken wings, legs, thighs, whatever. All of the chicken. You name it. And then discarding the bones on the ground when they're done with them.

19:17That's what the allegation is. That has been my assumption. Yeah. And I, Manny, was responsible for this part of the investigation because I think I'm kind of skilled at surveillance in a way. He's very nosy.

19:38So in order to kind of confirm whether or not this was happening, I asked a bunch of friends of mine to send me photos of when people are doing this in real time, eating chicken bones. You asked your friends to do, like, chicken steakouts. Chicken steakouts, exactly. How does a chicken steakout work? Do you sit outside of a chicken place? Do you sit in, like, a cruiser? Like, what do you do? So I personally sat outside of a couple of chicken places on Fulton Street. Couldn't find anyone, unfortunately. But I did get a text message from my friend Dre, who saw a woman eating chicken wings in her driver's seat of her car and then throwing the bones out onto the street.

20:19And I'll show you that text message right there at the top left. Okay, so this is Exhibit A. It's a photo. All you can actually see is a parked car, but the text underneath says she's parked eating chicken wings. And then you say, and throwing them out? I need video if possible. It's a leading question. And then Dre says, ugh, my pig scared her and she left. Yeah, and I want to show you the photo that's just above that that didn't fit into that other photo of the woman. That's a good shot. Okay, so there's four, and they look almost like shell casings of the crime scene, but there's four chicken bones on the street.

20:56Oh, and then below is the photo of the car. and I will say like I feel like as like I don't know what we are but like I feel like a bias among like progressive journalists is like when there's a problem you're kind of like well it's not people it's like structures and systems I've seen people do disgusting stuff in New York City I've seen people litter I've stepped in human feces on the street like if the answer that you have found in your reporting is there's actually enough people who just genuinely don't give a shit, and those people have to eat a lot of chicken, and it's like a small amount of people are causing this entire problem.

21:31I'm open to believing that. Yeah. Well, that's where I started. That was my question. Like you just said, I consider myself the average lefty liberal who cares about the environment. And so when my friend Dre sent me this photo, I was like, why the hell would someone eat it in their car and then throw it right there onto the ground? Wait, and can I also say another thing? First of all, just to, because I don't want to make assumptions about you guys. Do you guys litter? No. No. And when you say you don't litter, would you throw an apple core on the ground? No. I don't really eat apples, so I can't speak to it.

22:04I can see, I mean, I don't drive. If I was driving on the highway, and then there's woods. You would throw out an apple on the grass? That's insane, Noah. No, listen. And there's woods to my right, say. I'm driving somewhere. Long drive, long haul drive. I would throw that out. Because you're crazy. And it's not, people aren't walking around there. I guess there's an argument to be made that if like the thing you're discarding is biodegradable, who are you really harming? I think we've all been, like when you say it's biodegradable, like I definitely have a memory. I'm not going to say who else is in the memory, but I remember being young, getting like the no littering rule drilled into my head and then being around an adult and watching them litter and you're like, what?

22:42And they're like, it's biodegradable. I think I learned about the concept of biodegradable. Oh, totally. Yeah, exactly. And I will say if I was driving down a highway and there was a cop's of trees to my left, I'm driving all day, eating apples. Eating apples like you are. How long are we driving? Where are you going? I don't know. It's a long drive. A long way. And the only restaurants are Apple restaurants. Yeah. I can imagine a world where you're like, okay. Why not? Why the hell am I not? It's biodegradable. There will be an apple tree next time I drive by here in 30 years. Otherwise, you have this sticky apple core sitting next to you.

23:10And it's browning. And you still have hours to go. You can't stop. Are you not stopping? We've got a long way to go. You can't stop. This is like speed where if he slows down, the car explodes. You're in big trouble. If I'm in the bus, in the movie Speed, then yes, I'll throw it out the window. But I could imagine a world where, like, the it's biodegradable idea travels up the food chain a little bit, and there's somebody or somebody, lots of people throwing chicken bones on the ground, being like, they're biodegradable. I don't think they are. Yeah, I looked into that a little bit to see, like, how long it would take for it to biodegrade.