Of plagues and chickens: How can someone be so skeptical in one place and so credulous somewhere else?

I was reading the London Review of Books and came across this letter:

Tom Shippey doesn’t question the opinion that plague carried off half the West European population during the Black Death (LRB, 7 November). As a microbiologist, I have reservations. And contemporary accounts mislead. John Wyclif claimed that the Black Death had caused the number of students at Oxford to fall from six thousand to three thousand. Hastings Rashdall in his classic history of medieval universities poured cold water on Wyclif, commenting that ‘the medieval mind was prone to exaggeration, especially where figures are concerned. It delighted in good round numbers, and was accustomed to make confident statements entirely without adequate data.’ And when another plague returned, Daniel Defoe wrote of ‘People being more addicted to Prophesies and Astrological Computations, Dreams, and Old Wives’ Tales’. There is nothing new under the sun.

Hugh Pennington Aberdeen

I don’t know nuttin bout no plague, but, yeah, I could well imagine that contemporary sources could’ve overestimated the death toll. When you’re told a number, you want to see its source.

But . . . there was something about that name, “Hugh Pennington,” that rang a bell.

I did a blog search and found this, from 2011:

A review by Hugh Pennington of some books about supermarkets that contained the arresting (to me) line:

Consumption [of chicken] in the US has increased steadily since Herbert Hoover’s promise of ‘a chicken in every pot’ in 1928; it rose a hundredfold between 1934 and 1994, from a quarter of a chicken a year to half a chicken a week.

A hundredfold–that’s a lot! I thought it best to look this one up so I Googled “chicken consumption usda” and came up with this document by Jean Buzby and Hodan Farah, which contains this delightfully-titled graph:

OK, so it wasn’t a hundredfold increase, actually only sixfold. People were eating way more than a quarter of a chicken a year in 1934. And chicken consumption did not increase steadily since 1928. The curve is flat until the early 1940s.

This got me curious: who is Hugh Pennington, exactly? In that issue of the LRB, it says he “sits on committees that advise the World Food Programme and the Food Standards Agency. I guess he was just having a bad day, or maybe his assistant gave him some bad figures. Too bad they didn’t have Google back in 1994 or he could’ve looked up the numbers directly. “A hundredfold” . . . didn’t that strike him as a big number??

Anyone can have a bad day–I’m sure I’ve promoted some too-good-to-be-true numbers in my time–; still, it’s funny to see how Pennington expressed such strong skepticism about the plague death counts while just swallowing whole that outlandish claim regarding chicken consumption.

Or maybe there’s more to the chicken story that I haven’t heard, or more to the plague story that Pennington hasn’t heard.