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Laying chickens are usually disposed of directly after their laying year. Soup chickens can also be turned into something delicious.
It’s the dark side of the happy “egg cone” at Easter that many consumers don’t realize: the production of thousands of eggs is associated with a great deal of food waste.
Chickens can only lay one egg a day for about a year, after which their productivity decreases and they are therefore soon discarded. That means concretely: You will be killed. But in most cases not to end up on our tables as chicken meat. But to be disposed of directly in the biogas plant. More than a million chickens end up in the garbage in Switzerland.
Legend:
Marc Keller in his farm with 12,000 chickens.
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There is an economic reason for this. The meat from laying hens – so-called soup chickens – is tough and therefore cannot be sold profitably. Even slaughtering is not worth it, given the low price that the meat brings in. “It’s exactly the same price to slaughter a chicken with more or less meat,” explains Marc Keller, egg producer from Freimettigen in Bern.
With this action we want to send a signal that laying hens are not gassed.
So the massive waste of chicken meat is a reality. But what to do about it? One approach is: Use more soup chickens in the restaurant again. This is exactly what Daniel Gehriger, head of gastronomy at the Lucerne Cantonal Hospital, has set out to do. He bought 2,000 soup chickens from Marc Keller’s egg business.
“With this action we want to send a signal that laying hens are not gassed. That you shouldn’t bring food to the biogas plant, but can use it in the kitchen,” says Gehriger. And in a very creative way. In the Lucerne hospital kitchen, delicious meatloaf or juicy meatloaf is made from the chicken soup.
Legend:
One of the menus: soup chicken burger from the hospital kitchen.
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As a large company that produces 3,500 meals a day, the hospital can use everything, Daniel Gehriger calculates: “The 2,000 chickens give around 1,000 kilos of meat. That makes about 7,000 meals.”
However, one thing is also clear: in view of the fact that more than a million chickens are disposed of every year throughout Switzerland, even a canteen kitchen like that of the Lucerne hospital can only make a small contribution to solving the problem. Much more should be possible, as the Swiss egg industry association Gallosuisse knows. Karin Frederiks heads the soup chicken project there: “The simplest recipe would be if every household in Switzerland made a soup chicken once a year. Then we wouldn’t have the problem anymore.”