"Eat feathers!" Topic

When Sorawut Kittibanthorn was looking for new types of waste to recycle, the then London-based student was drawn to the millions of tons of chicken feathers being discarded each year…

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I see it now Mcfeather nuggets…I'll pass.

There's a lot of protein in feathers, but I'm not sure the human digestive system can absorb them. Also, there are far, far fewer different proteins in feathers than there are in the parts of the animal we traditionally call "meat".

So, there's probably a lot of processing to do between feathers and healthy human sustenance. And processed foods are not the answer, that's gonna have an environmental footprint.

Better to figure out something else to make out of the feathers, I expect.

Cats, on the other hand, are perfectly happy and healthy eating feathers. They're supposed to eat their entire prey. We buy and collect feathers for my cat to play with and eat, he gets as excited about them as any other treat.

There's an awful lot of them produced from the chicken industry, I'll witness that.

But turning them into edible protein? That would take some truly difficult tricks with enzymes, because it's mostly keratin, the same item that makes up fingernails. Not impossible, just very intensive work.