How the Chicken Dominated the American Diet
And why that’s a problem
Reading Mark Bittman’s fascinating book Animal, Vegetable, Junk the other day, I happened across this disturbing fact: 3/4 of the Earth’s bird biomass is chickens on farms. That’s right: if you weighed all of the birds on this planet, 75% of the weight would come from chickens. We eat nine billion chickens a year in this country. That’s 74 chickens for every pig killed last year for food, and 231 for every cow that became beef. Chicken flesh is everywhere in American cooking — sometimes as a prized ingredient, but often as bland filler.
The chicken has come to occupy a role unlike any other species within our industrial agricultural system. The proliferation of the chicken and the food system that boosted it are both quite recent developments, as it turns out. So, why does the chicken play such a key role in our food system, when did this start, and how have humans changed chickens themselves?
Why do we eat chickens?
There are a lot of birds out there that humans could be eating — ducks, geese, emus, robins. But almost all the poultry consumed by humans comes from one…
