Chicken or Beef?

I’ve had this theory that most people prefer chicken to beef, at least on an everyday, low-key, or eating just-by-yourself basis—but that it’s a really close call. Think of it, when you were a kid, you probably preferred poultry. It’s milder, and less variable to the cut, preparation, etc. Now that Tyson is the nation’s largest beef producer in addition to poultry producer after their acquisition of IP Beef about a year ago, beef now trumps chicken in their overall profits, which could be an indication of the meat preferences of this country, at least. (But don’t you, between you and me, have a sinking suspicion that this is mostly due to fast food chain buyers, who need fewer amounts of actual chicken than beef because they add so much water and who knows what to their chicken products? Gelatin, perhaps?)

It’s time to put my unqualified guessing to a stop. I’m turning the debate over to DearInter.net, a new site that hosts “consensus life coaching.” Originally intended as a place where anyone could anonymously ask a personal question and in turn receive the consensus answers of anonymous voters, visitors also tend to use the site to gain really skewed statistics on questions such as the one I ask. You can vote on my question, “Chicken or Beef” by clicking here. After posting the question a few days ago, my hunch stands pretty much true. Among the multiple choice answers I provided, “Chicken is way better” is at a 36% lead, “Beef will always be the ultimate” close behind at 34%, “Neither, I’m a vegetarian” a surprising 22%, and “Pork rules” at 8%. Though it was a small showing for the last choice, apparently it was not lacking in enthusiasm—one commentator claimed on the results page that pork is “the most versatile meat!”

This is a very new site and I have no idea what kind of people vote on it, but I get the sense from reading many of its questions and answers that it’s a fairly multinational crowd. Obviously, my question was mainly written for an American or Western audience. It would be interesting if there were different DearInter.net sites for specific countries around the world to compare—and find out how many Indians prefer lamb to chicken, or ramen to udon for how many Japanese, and so on. But as it stands, I guess the random smattering of voters that do participate in the current DearInter.net give you a consensus of unknown size and diversity. And that’s pretty cool, too.

You might also say to yourself, why am I asking this question in the first place? Do I find it terribly fascinating what kind of animals which groups of humans choose to slaughter the most, depending on taste, texture, nutritional value, and versatility? Well, yes. Aren’t we all “what we eat”?