Soylent Green is Enzymatic Chicken Pulp (for Now)

A Few Points to Consider Before Glamping the Apocalypse in New Zealand

Your author recently spent some time in New Zealand, a paradise for outdoor activities and enjoying nature. If one has the money to spend.

Approaching Akaroa Harbor, South Island, NZ. Image © 2025 by Data Humanist.

On a two-week visit which included hiking, sea kayaking, and mountain biking, your author joined a group on the South Island for a multi-day bike tour, and had some interesting conversations there as well as elsewhere. Glimpses of change in this near-paradise. Some notes below, and one dystopian note to end this post with.

Stray Notes from Scattered Conversations

Like the USA, employers in New Zealand increasingly are not: even full-time workers are contractors, independents, Uber-ized, so to speak. Gig work seems the future.

This nation with once the most advanced hydroelectric power grid among the Five Eyes nations, and which experienced a boom in hydropower development from the 1950s to 1980s, now increasingly relies on imported fossil fuels — even though an Electric Vehicle push is underway. The grid cannot meet current demands, and further hydropower development is curtailed over environmental concerns real and speculative. So in the face of known increased energy demands, policymakers have apparently tied themselves in a Green No-Deal knot. With an emphasis on the NOT.

Likewise, since the 1980s, New Zealand’s Gini Coefficient — one standard measure of Wealth Inequality — has been rising.

When travelling through Arthur’s Pass, South Island, we were delayed because one small bridge has been undergoing construction for two years — this on the major highway which connects the East and West coasts. Even some fiercely nationalistic Kiwis in our group remarked that the Chinese would have had it done in two weeks. Rightly or wrongly, the blame went to bureaucracy, overly zealous regulations, and general lack of accountability for how such money was being spent.

What else? That grass-fed famous Westgold butter, a brand dating back to late Victorian era, now part of a larger Chinese agricultural products consortium. This part of a greater trend. Your author picked up a lovely but expensive Merino wool shirt — technical gear, for its anti-microbial and thermal properties. Wool from New Zealand. Design from New Zealand. Manufactured in China.

So increased costs for energy, no-growth development policies, infrastructure challenges, and greater economic insecurity and inequality — although this last concern most certainly NOT distributed evenly.

A Shift in the Imperial Center?

In truth, New Zealand still functions in some ways as a former colony, exporting raw materials and agricultural commodities while importing back the value-added products. The export commodities have remained largely similar over the past several decades: milk, beef, wood, sheep and goat meat, butter.

But the export partners have shifted. According to the CIA Factbook 2022 estimate, the five major export partners are China 28%, Australia 11%, US 11%, Japan 6%, South Korea 4%. And the five major import partners, for refined petroleum to personal electronics to cars to household goods to clothing: China 21%, Australia 14%, US 8%, South Korea 7%, Singapore 6%.

The pivot to China — and Asia more generally — unmistakable.

The growing presence of China in New Zealand was also manifested on this trip not just by Chinese tourists everywhere, but also the increased number of Chinese students at Auckland University and other campuses in New Zealand. But a more subtle demographic shift might be underway.

Indian Entrepreneurship and Diaspora Community

The Indian diaspora in New Zealand dates back practically to the national founding by British settlers. Laborers, tradesmen, merchants, and servants — just past of the larger imperial package. Although there exists a long-standing Indian community, it now includes more recent immigrants from Uber drivers to recruited medical and IT professionals.

On this trip, as opposed to a prior one, entrepreneurs of Indian descent were more prominent. Your author found his favorite Christchurch hotel under new ownership and management. The same for an established restaurant in Christchurch. More Indian Uber drivers as well than last time, for whatever reason. This was a small and unscientific sample, to be sure — but the effect was still noticeable. Young people with drive, energy, and ambition contributing to the economy. All good. So far.

A Generation Being Left Behind?

New Zealand officially breaks down its labor force statistics by gender, and by people of European, Māori, Asian, Pacific, and MELAA (Middle Eastern, Latin American and African) descent. Reinforcing the stereotype, perhaps, the Asian category has the highest rate of employment.

Your author had the chance to interact and chat with several younger New Zealanders. These young people were kayak guides, food truck owners/workers, and the like. Mostly of European and Māori descent (or mixed), and generally without STEM or other high-powered college degrees. They seemed invariably friendly, helpful, and engaging. Your author kept it light but did ask some conversational questions about how they thought things were going in New Zealand. Their take, as opposed to my tourist take.

These young men and women are living in paradise, to be sure, but for a good bit of this work force, wages are not keeping up with living expenses. Unlike their working-class or petite bourgeoisie parents and grandparents, for this generation owning a house no longer seems a given. Or in cities like Auckland and Wellington and yes, Christchurch, even a possibility. The jobs are there — but often seasonal or gig-work, with no certain career path upwards.

What data we have also suggests possible trouble on the horizon. The OECD average of Youth not in employment, education or training (NEET): 8.02. For New Zealand, a NEET of 12.4 (Men: 10.7; Women: 14.2). NOT a catastrophe. But over the past two decades, no real improvement either. Stagnation, at least. So now approaching two generations experiencing at least relative decline to the Kiwi Boomers.

But one has to search to find faults. The place so beautiful and friendly — if you have enough money.

Glamping the Apocalypse

At first glance, New Zealand seems highly self-sufficient. A Doomsday Prepper’s Paradise, even and especially if one plans on Glamping the Apocalypse. Plenty of clean, fresh water sources. Locally raised food of the highest quality. Undeveloped wilderness and under-developed rural areas. In the cities, modern and generally well-maintained infrastructure, a highly educated population reasonably free from civil unrest, a low crime rate, excellent medical facilities available, et cetera. The perfect retreat from the Decline of the West while still enjoying a high Western quality standard of living. Sell everything and go now — if you can afford it.

Heading back from the West Coast, South Island, NZ. Image © 2025 by Data Humanist.

Upon further review, New Zealand all but floats about on the whims of the global economy — with the strongest currents originating from China and Australia (itself heavily in the current of China). The local manufacturing base is highly limited. Hence although the service economy in New Zealand is strong, nearly everything — every good, every artifact, every product — required for a post-18th century lifestyle must be imported. Even if the thing is not imported, key components for it likely are.

Moreover, according to NZ government stats, international tourism employs directly or indirectly an estimated 1 / 9 of the workforce (or 11.1%), while contributing directly and indirectly an estimated 6.2% of GDP. Once again, the jobs to GDP ratio: 11.1 / 6.2. So international tourism creates jobs, but not necessarily well-paying ones. New Zealanders do welcome American tourists, but Kiwis also depend on the Chinese tourists to help pay the bills. The Chinese tourists pretty much everywhere.

Five Eyes Blind

An economically isolated New Zealand might well in short order be an impoverished New Zealand. The proposed Trump tariffs were a hot topic of discussion among the businesspeople your author had some brief opportunities to chat with. Moreover, the sort of sanctions which the USA imposes upon 34 other nations would prove troublesome — if not devastating in the short-term — to New Zealand.

For that reason alone, the USA can expect New Zealand to remain part of the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance — even as China has emerged as New Zealand’s dominant economic partner. But we and the UK are New Zealand’s past, not their future.

This brings your author to a discussion of chicken carcasses or soon-to-be carcasses, particularly but not exclusively egg-laying hens past their prime. In the food and agricultural industries, after you got the best parts out, the rest is known as “residual biomass.” Or, in a different context, what Yuval Harari has deemed the “useless class.”

Welcome to one possible permutation of our Neo-Feudalistic future.

Dissolving Dead Chickens

During a bike tour on the West Coast of South Island, your author had some conversations with a wealthy New Zealander involved with agricultural exports. He and his wife had met Barrack and Michelle Obama on one high-powered occasion, had spent time in Boca Raton, Florida, mixing business and vacation, and have a country mansion outside of Christchurch which looked worthy of Town & Country. But a damn decent fellow worth speaking with and listening to — based, as the young people now say. Don’t hate on the man for his success. Your author will call him Obadiah, not his real name, after one of the prophets.

The new venture that Obadiah’s globally connected American partners wanted him to look into — getting the most out of dead hens, and soon-to-be dead hens past their egg-laying prime. Upon such, fortunes are made or at least maintained.

So New Zealand chicken carcasses being maximized for profit in the global food and bio-products market. My bike ride companion Obadiah was at the raw resource end (or rather, start) of this particular supply chain.

How does it work? Why? Well, as a Sci-Fi classic once warned us, Soylent Green is People. But for now, Soylent Green is enzymatic chicken pulp (ECP). Let’s walk through the process.

A Hen Past Her Prime

Even a hen past her prime has (exclusive of the feathers) considerable protein. But if harvested by current methods, much of that protein is either unavailable or unpalatable — even downright inedible. Hence residual biomass. Same for the other birds chopped up in their prime for the breasts and wings and legs. How to get the rest? (This question and answer may apply to far more than poultry).

What if — after removing the feathers — you could just mince it all up? All of it, the skin, intestines, bones, and organs not worth the cost of removing. Throw it a grinder. Get your result.

A mince-sludge.

Then using the right enzymes, dissolve that mince-sludge into a protein-saturated solution (perhaps more formally, a suspension) of water, fat, and residue.

This is known as enzymatic protein hydrolysis. For a detailed breakdown, one team of three Chinese research scientists from the mainland and Singapore explain the general process in a published peer-reviewed paper (Xhang, et alia, 2023; DOI: 10.1016/j.psj.2023.102791).

Making ECP

Flowchart below from same (Xhang, et alia, 2023) — cited under Fair Use:

You could then salvage the protein and repackage it as fodder — as feed. (You can use the other by-products as well, but we’ll get to that in a bit). Maybe you mix the protein with a grain base. Your new and improved Chicken McNuggets, so to speak.

What’s that? Not for human consumption, you say. Just wait. But for now, for example, we could use it for Aquaculture — for feeding shrimp and fish.

Enjoy Those Buffet Shrimp

We have another peer-reviewed research paper (V. Hlordzi, et alia, 2022; PMID: 36005570) published by seven scientiests based in mainland China and associated with either major academic institutions or bio-technology firms: “Enzymatic Chicken Pulp Promotes Appetite, Digestive Enzyme Activity, and Growth in Litopenaeus vannamei.” For Litopenaeus vanname, substitute Pacific White Shrimp.

Our researchers compared Enzymatic Chicken Pulp (ECP) to the standard Fish Soluble Pulp (FSP) now in use. The winner, winner? Chicken dinner!

And it turns out shrimp farming is big business, indeed. According to the WWF, farmed shrimp accounts for 55% of the global supply with “China, followed by Thailand, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Brazil, Ecuador, and Bangladesh” as the main producers

The WWF also notes that “[i]nvestors seeking profits have intensified farming methods with industrialized processes, sometimes at significant cost to the environment” — but hey, “the annual per capita consumption of shrimp in the U.S. is now at four pounds” so the ocean will just have to deal, right?

You Down with ECP! (Yeah, You Know Me)

Dissolved chicken carcasses (ECP) for industrial aquaculture with hence increased shrimp production and profits. Progress and SCIENCE!

From their findings which focused on the Pacific White Shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei), the aforementioned research team of V. Hlordzi, et alia, did generalize that “Enzymatic chicken pulp (ECP) is an animal protein source that has been proven to be of excellent nutritional content and good quality for the majority of aquatic organisms” (2022; PMID: 36005570). Really? Sharks, squids, sea-monkeys — all down with that ECP?

As mentioned earlier, the ECP as a protein sludge could also be combined with a grain-base and then used as fodder. Think dog food or cat food kibbles. Still all good?

Soon enough, the shrimp you consume might have fed on what were once New Zealand (or elsewhere) chickens. The kibbles you feed your pet, likewise. Sounds reasonable — just a slight tweak to the status quo. But we can do better.

Added Value Products (From Fish Food to You Know Who)

We’re not done yet. We’ve minced the chicken into sludge, and added the enzymes to break it down, the hydrolysis: our solution is a solution or suspension. Three main components: the water-soluble part, the fat-soluble part (and oils), and any bone or collagen residue.

Each has market-value. To review quickly (cribbed from Nofima, a Norwegian food research institute and industry partner):

1. Our solution has a water product: rich in proteins, peptides, and other water-soluble compounds.

2. Our solution has a fat or oil-based product: depending upon the starting residual biomass, this might contain marketable fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins.

3. And our solution has a residue which can be used to make bone meal, gelatin, and collagen.

Okay, so maybe plants don’t crave Brawndo for the electrolytes, but the protein in ECP still provides “excellent nutritional content and good quality for the majority of aquatic organisms” (PMID: 36005570). What can we do with this sludge besides feed shrimp and fish and perhaps cats and dogs?

Breaking the Pet Food Taboo

Nofima, our smarty-smart Norwegian institute, identifies the following “Valuable products” from enzymatic protein hydrolysis (13 Mar 2024):

• Feed and pet food

• Protein enhancers in mince products, dry soups, baby foods, bread and more

• Flavour enhancers

• Sports and recovery drinks

• Bioactive ingredients in health food products / medicines

• Cosmetics

• Functional ingredients (gelatin) in food and other products

• Growth media for cells, bacteria and moulds for the production of new products

Baby food. Sports and recovery drinks. Yes! ECP: The Thirst Mutilator! Make-up. Meds.

Why not also cheap protein meals for senior citizens on pensions? For incarcerated persons? For public school lunches? Once we get past the pet food taboo, which we kinda already did, the possibilities are near-endless.

It’s Going to Happen — It IS Happening

Soylent Green is enzymatic chicken pulp. Or, as Nofima points out, the base for Soylent Green could be potentially any residual biomass with enough protein to make it worthwhile: “In order to improve the utilization of the residual biomass and get a better price, new methods for processing, analyses and preparation of these raw materials are required” (13 Mar 2024).

Get that better price! Enzymatic protein hydrolysis is at the top of the new methods list.

In the old days, perhaps a farmer might have tossed the chicken carcass to the pigs, or into a compost heap to generate enriched fertilizer. Almost certainly, small scale local farms have their own means of dealing with chicken carcasses. But wait for the big numbers.

Count the Chicken Carcasses

In our era of industrial poultry farming, approximately 159 million to 178 million chickens are killed daily. Let’s do some simple math for a non-leap year. So that would be 58,035 million to 64,970 million per year — perhaps better expressed as 58 billion to 65 billion chicken carcasses per year.

That’s a lot of residual biomass. A problem, an opportunity. Hence enzymatic protein hydrolysis.

What could go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong?

The Global Homogenization of Bio-Protein Sources

The competing concerns between quality control and the profit motive, to start. The impossibility of inspecting and regulating such a globally distributed large-scale process.

Your dead chickens are coming from where, exactly? And other than butchering for parts or of old age, your chickens perhaps died of what?

Your sludge is being processed where? Who enforces sanitary and hygienic conditions and does testing. All of which costs time and money.

These are questions for which your author would want clear and demonstrable answers. Answers before your value-added products, for all practical purpose invisible to the consumer, are then shipped out to be combined with everything from baby food to cosmetics.

But this is the world we live in now. Not mystery meat, anymore, but a mystery protein bio-product optimized for efficiency and profit. Able take on nearly any shape or flavor, perhaps, but otherwise unrecognizable and perhaps even untraceable to its source.

Yet this will be presented as an advantage, a purity of sorts – a universalized protein solution. We now have the antithesis to the French terrior, itself a concept known since antiquity, that the climate, soil, and general ecological health of a region influence not only food production but food quality.

Wikipedia has denounced “globo-homo” as an alt-right conspiracy theory that “media and business elites seek to impose a homogeneous 'uniculture' on the world.” Too bad, because otherwise Enzymatic Chicken Pulp could serve as a paragon globo-homo food bio-product. Big Macs at least have a cultural identity. Warning: a two-paragraph digressive rant follows.

Start ranty-rant

Your author, a left-behind liberal, remembers when we on the Left were against the Californication of the world, and questioned the neoliberal economic shock policies that went hand in hand with this soft imperialism. Presently, the same Wikipedia article discussing “Globo-homo” also identifies “Cultural Marxism” as an alt-right conspiracy. While in graduate school sometime in the late 1980s to early 1990s, your author studied Frederic Jameson among other major Marxist intellectuals, and did so with professors who openly identified as Cultural Marxists. So they were all alt-right or far-right, wow, who knew? Thank you, Wikipedia.

Among the Wikipedian ideologues, it seems anyone who questions the imposition of Neo-Feudalism should be deemed alt-right, or far right, or a Neo-Nazi, or the like. Hello, Yanis Varoufakis. Hello, Shoshana Zuboff. Whatever, as the young people used to say. Your author once upon a time contributed articles and media to Wikipedia, and taught classes at a campus in West Africa where my students did the same on topics relating to their histories, cultures, and nations. Your author is so disgusted with current dogma that he will accept his status as “alt-right.” Now, back to issue at hand.

End above ranty-rant

The Problem is Real, the Solution Might be Corny

We have an estimated 58 billion to 65 billion chicken carcasses produced per year. That’s just chickens — one protein source among many. If done with appropriate oversight and concern for both human health and the general environment, enzymatic protein hydrolysis might well be a significant part of the solution. 60-some billion chicken carcasses annually — sorry, the time-honored methods of Farmer Brown or even Joel Salatin can’t deal with all of them. Industrial poultry farming, baby, is our reality.

But your author to date has found little to nothing in the literature about safeguards, transparency, and public dialogue. Your author has found much about how we can capture added value and cram this protein by-product into damn near everything which people might eat or even apply to their skin. From shrimp to mascara. Feed it to what we eat, and feed it to us. Then smear it on your face!

So what could go wrong?

Once upon a time and even still today, the USA was and is world’s larger producer of corn (Zea mays mays). Maintaining this dominance was deemed a matter of national security — both for food security and economic reasons. Intense lobbying helped. Through research and technology, we found ways to make multiple by-products from corn and then cram these by-products into a vast variety of food, household, and even some industrial products. Because what could go wrong?

For a list of 184 known corn products and derivatives: Corn, Corn, Everywhere Corn.

Metabolic Syndrome to Other Chronic Illnesses

In fact, according to one research estimate based on biochemistry, more than “50 percent of the typical American diet is derived from corn” (2007; 2020). Our epidemic of chronic diseases, the rise of Type II Diabetes, metabolic syndrome and more — all just coincidence? Guess again.

We know that fructose (typically derived from corn when a food additive) is processed differently than sucrose, and hence can contribute significantly to human metabolic syndrome. We know that for cattle, grass-fed beef has up to six times healthier Omega-3 fatty acids than corn-feed beef. And so on.

No matter anymore. Corn and corn by-products are now so integrated into the American food supply chain as to be inseparable from it. We live with — and some of us, almost certainly, die from — the consequences.

Hit Pause Before Profits, Please

Before enzymatic chicken pulp (ECP) and various other enzymatic carcass pulps (hey, also ECP) become irrevocably integrated into our global food supply chain, your author would like more research, testing, public discussion, and even some assurances about quality control and oversight.

The fresh food locally grown in New Zealand is beyond compare. The by-products, after they have been shipped to China for additional processing and then repackaged as base ingredients and then shipped and sold to various American and European food manufacturers — this your author cannot vouch for.

But New Zealand’s future is tied to China as well to the larger global trade in agricultural and bio-products, and so dead dissolved chickens are coming your way, my fellow Americans, if they are not already on your store shelves. Just think of it as protein-rich bouillon cubes — but crammed into nearly anything and everything without your knowledge or consent. So ultra-processed food as normal, right?

Don’t lose any sleep over it. Until you no longer have a choice as to what your grocery store provides. Or what is provided by the hospital, public-school, day-care center, or senior center, and so on. A solution worthy of Yuval Harari.

Good news: Soylent Green is not (yet) people. Soylent Green is enzymatic chicken pulp (ECP). For now.