This week’s meals all had a very common theme.

On Sunday night, we ate a rotisserie chicken.
On Monday night, I made chicken marsala.
For lunch on Tuesday, I had a chicken strip basket.
On Tuesday night, we had chicken wild rice salad.
For lunch Wednesday, I had leftover chicken marsala.
On Thursday night, we went out to Lucy’s Fried Chicken.
On Friday, we had lunch at Fresa, a Cuban chicken place.

That keeps in sync with my diet for the past 30+ years. I was a very picky little boy, so more often that not I would wind up eating chicken nuggets or chicken strips regardless of what meal was prepared for the rest of the family. I insisted on eating at McDonald’s whenever we went to Huron as a youngster and never got anything but chicken nuggets. There were dozens of various shapes of chicken at school lunches–chicken patty, chicken nuggets, chicken strips, chicken tenders, popcorn chicken, chicken rounds, chicken squares, chicken rhombuses, chicken stars, chicken soup. Then in college we went to countless wing nights where we routinely ate 25 wings in one sitting.

If I figure I have eaten on average one chicken every week for the past 30 years, that is 1,560 chickens in a lifetime. If you consider that some of these chicken entrees were pieced together with the meat of various chickens, then I’ve probably eaten a part of 10,000 or more chickens. I hope there isn’t some bizarro afterlife where all the chickens I ate get the chance to eat me. But I’m probably safe from that, as I’ve never personally killed any of the chickens I’ve eaten.

This would be the rough equivalent of how many chickens I have consumed in my lifetime.

Chicken sure is good. It’s still my favorite food to this day. Speaking of which, it’s been a while since I’ve had some good Indian chicken vindaloo… maybe for lunch.