Outside In | Thanksgiving brings up this uncomfortable issue about our food supply
We are creating dangers for ourselves in the industrial scale production of chicken and turkey
Thanksgiving week gives us cause to think about chickens. Yes, turkeys too, but I want to think about chickens, and the sad but awesome role they play – in feeding a planet of more than 7 billion people, in ridiculous trade politics, and in creating a clear and present human danger because of their gigantic forced appetite for antibiotics.
Awesome because the 60 billion chickens now slaughtered every year to feed us provide more meat for human consumption than any other animal except pigs. And that is not counting the 380 billion eggs they lay.
Sad, because the nasty, brutish and short life of this bird – more an industrial commodity than an animal – is just 42 days. That is, long enough to be fattened to an average of 2.5kg.
Given that chickens have been pecking around peoples’ backyards all over the world for literally thousands of years, what surprises me most about their story is the extreme modesty of their culinary contribution until so very recently. Just 120 years ago they were consumed rarely – too scrawny and fiddly – more valued for their eggs, for their sometimes spectacular plumage, and their bloody belligerence in cock pits around the world.
The tipping point seems to have been around the first world war, when “real” meat – beef, lamb and pork – was being fed to soldiers fighting in the trenches. This led to significant meat shortages for families left back home, and no choice but to resort to chicken meat.
The same occurred again into the second world war, by which time food technologies had revolutionised the industry. Back in 1880 the world raised about 100 million chickens for meat. Today worldwide production has soared to 60 billion a year. When America’s poultry farmers in 1946 held their now-famous nationwide “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest, the average weight of a chicken at slaughter was little more than 1.5kg – and it took 86 days to get there, according to Maryn McKenna, author of a fascinating new book, Big Chicken.
