Football season is upon us, and that means it’s also pizza, beer and chicken wing season for a lot of folks.
Americans are expected to eat 28 billion – yes, BILLION – chicken wings this year, and more than 1 billion of those were consumed on Super Bowl Sunday alone. That’s according to the National Chicken Council, and that huge number got us thinking: What does 28 billion of something even look like? We were curious, so we sat down with a calculator and did some math. Here’s what we found.
28 billion chicken wings …
-Is enough for every American to have nearly 90 wings each. And it’s enough for every man, woman and child on Earth to have four wings each. It might be time to change those song lyrics to “I’d like to teach the world to wing …”
-Is enough to wrap around the world at the equator more than 44 times (I told you we did math …).
-Would cover every single NFL football field with an 8-inch stack of wings. So, um, who’s bringing the blue cheese dressing?
-Weigh approximately 5.25 billion pounds. That’s the equivalent of 17,500 blue whales, the largest animals on the planet. (By the way, there may or may not actually be enough blue whales in existence to match the weight of America’s chicken wing consumption this year. Scientists put their population numbers somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000.)
-Will cost Americans as much as $36 billion this year. That’s more than residents of Arizona paid in federal income taxes in 2012, and it’s on par with the estimated GDP of Serbia this year.
If you love going out for wings, especially during football season, we hear you. There’s little that goes better with a couple of beers and your favorite team on the big screen. But it’s good to keep in mind, especially if saving money is important to you, that eating out a lot can really eat into your budget (yeah, pun intended).
Seriously, Americans spend a lot of money eating out, evidenced in part by the massive amount of junk food we eat every year. It’s even worse if you’re splurging to eat out and using your credit card, especially if you can’t pay it off every month. High levels of debt can seriously damage your credit score. You can see where yours currently stands by viewing your free credit score, updated every 14 days, on Credit.com.
If your credit is in rough shape, you might be able to improve your scores by paying down high credit card balances, disputing errors on your credit reports and limiting new credit inquiries while your numbers start to come back up.
Image: kzenon
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