Rumored Wing Shortage Has Super Bowl Partiers Clucking Like Decapitated Chickens

As we get ready for the biggest wing-eating day of the year, you should know that supply should meet demand, but it will cost you more.

Super Bowl party planners, some of whom are fiercely competitive, have been buzzing this week on the question of whether there will there be enough wings – it’s estimated Americans will eat 1.23 billion of them during the big game – to go around.

It depends on who you ask.

If you live in Waukee, Urbandale, West Des Moines or anywhere else in the Des Moines metro area, peace of mind is just a phone call away to area grocery stores.

“We’re OK for the Super Bowl,” says Dahl’s Foods President Mark Brase, “but beyond that, it might be a problem.”

Hy-Vee spokeswoman Ruth Comer said that she’d talked to several meat managers in the Iowa-based chain’s stores and none of them mentioned a wing shortage looming large over Sunday’s Super Bowl festivities – and given that part of her job is to help calm frenzied grocery shoppers, she would have heard.

“No wing crisis here,” she said.

"A chicken has two wings, and chicken companies are not able to produce wings without the rest of the chicken.”

It’s not exactly a hoax. Fewer chickens were raised this year. But that does not a shortage make.

U.S. News & World Report pooh-poohed a rumored chicken wing shortage, saying the law of economics always proves such imagined meat-shortage crises overblown. Still, consumers should be prepared to pay a little more for wings.

“Surpluses and shortages do not exist if the price system is working,” Tim Petry, a North Dakota State University livestock specialist, told the magazine. “In other words, if we have less, the price goes up to ration the amount that’s available to consumers.”

So relax and start preparing the rubs.

On the notoriously bad day for chicken flocks nationwide, football fans can be assured they’ll be licking their fingers while watching the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens battle it out for the national championship -- if they’re willing to pay a little more.

Still, don’t get too comfortable with the economic theory of supply and demand and survival of the financially fittest.

Brase said suppliers have told Dahl’s meat managers that down that storied road the chicken crossed, wings might not be as plentiful.

The nation’s chicken farmers raised 1 percent fewer birds last year. The drought dried up corn crops, sending chicken-feed prices sky-high, according to the National Chicken Council.

In other words, it’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing, a matter of simple math. 

“Simply put, less corn equals higher feed costs, which means fewer birds produced,” the chicken industry group said, adding a helpful anatomy lesson. "A chicken has two wings, and chicken companies are not able to produce wings without the rest of the chicken.”

Super Bowl Bonus Fun

The whole wing non-shortage has all the makings of a couple of math story problems:

Americans will consume 1.23 billion wings – enough, the Chicken Council says, to stretch 27 times from San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium. That’s 12.3 million wings fewer than they ate last year on Super Bowl Sunday. If each chicken has two wings, how many fewer chickens did farmers raise last year?

Extra Points

How many wings would be needed to stretch 27 times from San Francisco to Baltimore if:

• 45 percent of them are extra-fancy broiler wings
• 45 percent are smaller free-range wings 
• 10 percent of chickens lost one wing while crossing the road