The internet is full of fabulous facts about everything from current events to the history basket weaving and poultry fun facts. As we research for our daily content on food trucks, food carts and street food, we stumble upon some items of knowledge that we just did not know.

We have decided when these fun facts pop up, that we would share them with our readers in our section titled “Did You Know?”

For today’s Did You Know we will look at Poultry fun facts.

Poultry Fun Facts: Poultry are domesticated birds kept by humans for the purpose of producing eggs, meat, and/or feathers. Poultry comes from the French/Norman word, poule, itself derived from the Latin word Pullus, which means small animal.

• Dark meat, which is referred to as “red muscle,” is used for sustained activity (walking), in the case of a chicken. The dark color comes from the protein myoglobin, which plays a key role in oxygen uptake within cells. White muscle, in contrast, is suitable only for short, ineffectual bursts of activity such as, for chickens, flying. Thus the chicken’s leg and thigh meat are dark while its breast meat (which makes up the primary flight muscles) is white. Other birds with breast muscle more suitable for sustained flight, such as ducks and geese, have red muscle (and therefore dark meat) throughout.
• March 19th is National Poultry Day.
• Chickens are classified by age and weight. Young chickens are tender and cook quickly; older chickens need slow, moist cooking to make them tender.
• Poultry is the second most widely eaten meat in the world, accounting for about 30% of meat production worldwide, after pork at 38%.
• In Ancient China, a goose was given as a wedding present to represent faithfulness.
• The oldest duck ever to have lived in the United Kingdom was a female mallard duck called Desi owned by Ingrid Raphael from Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK that lived to be 20 years 3 months and 16 days old before she died in August 2002.
• Chickens have panoramic vision of about 300°
• Chickens and other birds are thought to have descended from dinosaurs.
• The first Poultry Exhibition in the US took place Nov. 14, 1849

Poultry Fun Facts We Missed

Please feel free to let us know if we may have missed some poultry fun facts in the comment section below. If we can verify that the facts is just that, a fact, we will give the reader credit in the article.

Reference: Wikipedia: Fun Facts about Poultry

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