owing to a summer 2019 crisis in Amazonia. And few people have embraced vegetarianism among the major meat-producing countries and regions – the EU, China, the US and Brazil. People want their chicken, and they want it now. They often care little about, or are unaware of, the additional costs to the globe of factory production of meat. Or perhaps they have become inured to factory-farm food because what they see in advertisements is gorgeously contrived steaming hot food to gobble, and what they see in stores comes in neat, clean, convenient packages. Over 7 billion people demand protein, and they eat a lot of chicken to get it. They want their chicken breasts breaded, fried, with parmesan, kung pao; their legs and thighs baked; their strips lightly floured, and so on – just as they enjoy eggs over-easy, sunny side up, coddled and poached. In many places, consumers have embraced foodie culture that has resulted in the glorification of oral gratification, but that some people believe provides moral cover to gluttony, and here, too, chicken is a presence.
Chicken has grown in demand and consumption for a variety of other reasons. In the 1970s and 1980s, doctors recommended that their patients eat less meat with saturated fat; the knowledge for patients that a diet high in fatty foods contributed to heart disease, arterial sclerosis and cancer had been available decades earlier.3 But, after Senator George McGovern’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs published the Dietary Goals for the United States in 1977, many more physicians and citizens took notice. The National Academy of Sciences followed this in 1982 with the publication of Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer. Chicken provided an alternative safer and less fatty than beef and pork, and chicken production businesses took advantage of this situation in advertising campaigns. Some people argue that, as a result, many people turned to another kind of diet high in sugars (carbohydrates) that led to the epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes that has affected a growing number of countries since the 1990s. But Dietary Goals in fact called for a substantial reduction in sugar consumption and an increase in consumption of carbohydrates from fruits, vegetables and grains. In any event, in addition to sugars – not fruits, vegetables and grains – chicken was a winner.
Second, chicken is cheaper to produce than other animal meats. The broiler has been developed into a highly efficient meat-producing machine. According to some estimates, it takes 5 kilograms of grain to produce a kilogram of beef, ungulate land and water use requirements are higher than for chickens, and labor inputs are more extensive than for chickens. Chicken meat is produced at a 2-to-1 ratio of feed to bird. And the bigger, meatier birds that mature within six weeks are simply cheaper to produce than cattle who take months and years to reach slaughter weight. Finally, even if people in many countries are eating somewhat less beef, at times there has been an oversupply of chicken, which has helped to force prices down, and this in turn provides an additional incentive for those meat-eating consumers to buy more chicken product in all its forms.
The world’s citizens are eating more meat. To put numbers on this meat, in the mid-1960s, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, annual world meat consumption was 24.2 kg/capita by “carcass weight equivalent,” in the mid-1990s this had reached 34.6 kg/capita, and in 2015 stood at 41.3 kg/capita, with a forecast of 45.3 kg/capita by 2030 – or nearly a 100 percent increase in 70 years. Of course, industrial countries are the major consumers, with consumption growing from 61.5 kg/capita in the 1960s to 95.7 kg/capita in 2015, or a 60 percent increase. Consumption has grown even more quickly in “developing” nations, even if it remains far behind wealthier countries: from 10.2 kg/capita in the mid-1960s to three times more in 2015 at 31.6 kg/capita. Much of the increase has come from poultry products, where, from the mid-1960s to the present day, poultry meat consumption has grown from 3.2 kg/capita to 17.2 kg/capita, over a five-fold increase, and with international trade very important in meeting demand. In this book, we focus on many of the leading poultry-meat consuming countries and areas that are – rounded roughly – in order: China in the first position at 19 million tons annually, followed by the US at 18 million, the EU at 14 million, Brazil at 9 million and Russia at 5 million.4
But in this book, I focus not on consumers, but on other important actors. They are the entrepreneurs who first recognized market possibilities for chicken meat, not only eggs; agricultural scientists who developed broilers; lobbyists who pushed for reasonable and favorable regulations; government officials at local, state and national levels, including legislators, and also personnel of various international agencies involved in research, standards and trade concerns; and animal rights activists, social reformers and moral critics and others who worry about the nature of factory farms.
Chicken analyzes the state of factory chicken farms in comparative perspective across the globe, including how chicken meat has become a major international trade commodity, with a focus on the major chicken nations. Readers will note some emphasis on the history of this industry in the United States. The reason for this is that the chicken CAFO in essence originated in the United States and has spread – like a farmed bird with wings – to the EU, Brazil and Asia, especially to China. No country has been immune to the pressure of industrial farming, and it is instructive to understand the nuances of its practices from one country to the next owing to greater or less sensitivity to environmental problems, questions of feeds and additives – including the use of antibiotics – how to deal with disease, efforts to keep costs down – perhaps at the expense of the welfare of animals, and farm laborers, and so on. In this comparison, one discovers that, almost universally, the greater the regulatory impetus to manage factory farms well, the safer, cleaner and more animal-friendly are the production facilities; the US is at the “less regulation” end of the spectrum.
It should also be remembered that there is ultimately little difference between one kind of animal factory farm and another: all are geared to generating meat as quickly as possible, minimizing inputs, uniformity in production from birth to slaughter, and result in similar environmental, social and other problems. Broilers are only one kind of chicken, and factory farming is only one way to raise animals. Urban farming has blossomed in a number of places. Backyard, humane raising techniques are proliferating, and chickens of a wide variety of breeds and purposes – meat and eggs – are raised in small-scale settings. But it is a relatively small number of chickens raised this way – hence, my focus on factory-farmed broilers. Here and there, I shall mention ungulates, pigs and other kinds of farm animals to highlight concerns about factory farms generally.
The chicken industrialization process is going on throughout the world, and this means that, if the United States may have been the originator of the chicken factory farm, then the other nations of the world – and the producers, regulators and consumers in those other nations – share in the moral, social and environmental problems created by the expansion of those farms. Unfettered capitalism is, in essence, the source of the factory farm: it is the driving force behind the industrial ethos of the broiler, and it is evident in the prevailing profit motive of the farms and in the logic of production. All of these countries therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, are responsible for the brutal, international system of food production that has resulted, and hardly the US alone.5
Chickens are treated as egg producers, meat producers, and dualpurpose types. The broiler – a meat producer – is most often a cross of the White Rock and Cornish breeds. There are others: red broilers, Delaware broilers (crossing Rhode Island Red hens with Barred Plymouth Rock roosters) and others. Plymouth Rock, New Hampshire, Langshans, Jersey Black Giant and Brahmas have also been introduced to the mix. And, finally, breeders have worked to make the broilers white-feathered. All this means that today’s broiler is quite a hybrid animal, and very productive from the point of view of rapid muscle tissue gain. Other breeds do not reach meat slaughter age as quickly, so most operations go with the White Rock / Cornish breed. As will be noted below, the intensive breeding has led the broiler to be at risk for a variety of maladies, and particularly skeletal malformation and dysfunction, skin and eye lesions and congestive heart conditions.
The broiler made a long, scientific and industrial business trip over the century that is the focus of the book; early chapters consider the cultural history of the chicken and its “pre-industrial” history. An early bible of poultry published in 1914 indicated the growing importance of fowl to
