A single chicken represents how many days of survival food?

[rod5591]

Here is a hypothetical survival question: A single chicken represents how many days of food for an adult human?

I know there are many variables like size/weight of the bird and the number of people eating it, but based on my personal observations, a single chicken will feed a single adult person eating moderately well for three days.

This is done by turning the entire bird into chicken soup with an onion or two and a few stalks of celery and eating a full bowl three times a day for three days.

Or put another way, one full size chicken = nine bowls of chicken soup.

What do you chicken experts think? Agree or disagree?

 

[Bigtom Turkey]

I think that would keep you alive, but a large, active, 6ft man would need more than that to survive long term. If you are a 5 ft woman than maybe?

 

[Yardmom]

Turning it into soup would stretch it farther, but even in your hypothetical plan you had variations on how much extrs food you put in.

 

[Hopulence]

Basic googling says a pound of roasted chicken is 1,000 calories roughly. So a larger bird 6 pounds dressed would solve the caloric needs for an average person 3 days

 

[FunClucks]

I'd say 2-3 days. That's how long one chicken's worth of soup usually lasts me.

 

[BastyPutt]

Basic googling says a pound of roasted chicken is 1,000 calories roughly. So a larger bird 6 pounds dressed would solve the caloric needs for an average person 3 days

You can also take into account organs, feet, eyes (ewwww) and bone renderings. Using this method I'm sure you'd get atleast an extra day.

 

[Kimberoo]

Depends on how you define survival food. People can live with a calorie deficit for a certain period of time so I'm sure you could stretch it to a week with added greens, nuts, etc to bulk but that wouldn't meet adequate calories long term.

Would also have to keep in mind storage- how would you keep the meat from spoiling if you're assuming an emergency situation where you might not have electricity? If the meat doesn't stay fresh for more than a day, that's how long it lasts because I'm not messing with food poisoning in a survival situation. Or am I taking this too far?

 

[CNJ]

If you didn't have a refrigerator, you could cure the meat..................Also, how long you can survive on cured meat, depends on if you have other things available like flour, yeast, bread, rice, vegetables etc........

 

[FunClucks]

Would also have to keep in mind storage- how would you keep the meat from spoiling if you're assuming an emergency situation where you might not have electricity? If the meat doesn't stay fresh for more than a day, that's how long it lasts because I'm not messing with food poisoning in a survival situation. Or am I taking this too far?

Keep it boiling over the fire. That's what the pioneers did - they kept a pot of soup boiling all the time and kept adding things to it, and eating out of it. Palatability goes down after a while, and you can't do this well while traveling, but you won't get food poisoning.

 

[NatJ]

This is done by turning the entire bird into chicken soup with an onion or two and a few stalks of celery and eating a full bowl three times a day for three days.

If you just want the person to feel like their belly is full, unlimited water would mean unlimited amounts of soup to fill the belly, so one chicken can "feed" as many people as you want for as long as you want.

If add enough other ingredients, your one chicken can feed the person forever (because they are mostly eating other ingredients, so the chicken doesn't actually matter much).

But I don't think either of those is really an answer to your original question.

Here is a hypothetical survival question: A single chicken represents how many days of food for an adult human?

If you have just the chicken, and NO other ingredients, I think it would come down to how many calories in the chicken and how many calories the person needs. It ranges from several small chickens per day for a large active adult to several days per large chicken for a small inactive adult.

And if you really are eating just chicken, make sure it's a nice fatty one. A diet of lean meat and nothing else will give you problems pretty quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

If you are actually planning a diet that includes chicken and other foods, then you have to consider how all the pieces go together. Pure calorie count is a good starting point-- not enough calories would mean starvation. But people need a bunch of different vitamins and minerals, along with enough protein and enough non-proteni calories and fiber and various other things, and chicken alone will only provide some of those things.