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Brewski in one hand, chicken wing in the other, football on the flat screen: Americans everywhere follow this recipe every Super Bowl Sunday—many without recognizing the true scope of the shared experience for which they’d just enlisted.

We began our search before the chapel of chicken: Buffalo Wild Wings.

“I’ve been a chicken wing fan my entire life,” Meridian franchise co-owner Doug Davis said.

Davis identified Super Bowl Sunday as his busiest order-out day of the year. B-dubs-Meridian plans to sell more than 16,000 wings on Sunday alone.

“Until you prepare them,” registered dietitian Sue Linja said, “[wings] can start out being fairly healthy.”

Because Buffalo Wild Wings keeps its recipes secret, with Sue’s help we decided to make our own: oil, wings, Worcestershire, hot sauce, butter, oven at 325, heat up the oil, fry the wings until golden brown.

"You bread it and deep fry it and dip it in blue cheese or ranch dressing,” Linja said.

Then, your 65-calorie wings balloon to a monstrosity in the 200-calorie range and you load up on all the fat and sodium Linja only allows in moderation.

We melted the butter, hot sauce, Worcestershire and whatever else we could find until it bubbled, poured it on the wings, tossed them by hand, threw them in the oven and then waited 15 minutes.
And while we waited, we chewed on some chicken wing facts:

The National Chicken Wing Council looked for Americans to eat 1.23 billion chicken wings this weekend alone.

“I can’t even imagine that many chicken wings,” Linja said.

End to end at an average of three inches in length per wing that’s enough chicken wings to stretch from San Francisco to Baltimore more than 20 times, around the world more than twice.

So, when you sit down for kickoff with your steaming plate of wings in front of you, know you’re neither original nor eating healthfully. But it ain’t no thang. Just 1.23 billion chicken wings.