Beak Capitalism, Part 2: The Chickenization of Everything

Maren McKenna (0:03)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Tracy Alloway (0:05)

Podcasts, radio, news.

SPEAKER_4 (0:15)

But besides being a good egg layer, the chicken of tomorrow will be an improved meat producer. Here's an example of the progress that's been made already.

Notice how breeding has increased the amount of meat on the breast. Look at that drumstick. This bird was fattened in the same length of time and on the same amount of feed as the other one. Make your own guess as to which is the more profitable to raise.

Tracy Alloway (0:47)

For much of America's history, chickens look different to the way they do today. They were thin, elegant even. Slim and upright, the average bird weighed about two and a half pounds in the 1920s, and chickens were raised differently too. On small farms and homesteads, the birds and their eggs provided a valuable source of extra protein and the occasional Sunday roast for millions of Americans.

Joe Weisenthal (1:15)

But today, chickens are front-loaded feathered freaks. After years of commercial breeding, the weight of your one-of-the-mill roaster has more than doubled to a chunky five or six pounds, way more than chickens of the past.

Maren McKenna (1:28)

Chickens as our great grandparents would have understood them looked very different from chickens today.

They were scrawny, they were rangier, they could move around a barnyard, and they could flap up into trees and avoid predators. And that's almost nothing like the chickens that we eat today. So if you went back to the time of, I guess, our great grandparents, let's say at the beginning of the 20th century, people didn't eat chicken that often. And that seems very bizarre to us now in the era when there are a million forms of chicken nuggets in the cold case at the supermarket, and there's a chicken sandwich on every corner. But chicken used to be kind of special.

Tracy Alloway (2:21)

Welcome to the second installment of Beak Capitalism, our Odd Lots special series in which we are examining the US economy through the lens of chicken. If you haven't listened to our first episode where we talked about chicken prices and the consumer experience of eating chickens and eggs, you should definitely go back and do that.

Joe Weisenthal (2:40)

In this episode, we're gonna focus on the birds themselves and the people that grow them. Because chicken actually has a lot to say about the structure of the labor market too, and the relationship between big companies and their workers. And a lot has changed from the backyard birds of yesteryear.

Tracy Alloway (3:04)

To understand what's happened to chickens and the people who grow them, it helps to consider where they started from. Maren McKenna is a journalist and author who specializes in public health, and she wrote a book called, appropriately enough, Big Chicken.

Joe Weisenthal (3:19)

As we said, chickens used to be a lot smaller. Families might keep a few egg layers in their backyards, and once the birds reach the end of their laying life, they might be put in the proverbial pot. One key thing is that chicken meat for a long time was a tree, not a staple.

Tracy Alloway (3:33)

Now, as a rule, older chickens that have been running around a backyard don't usually taste as good. They're leaner, they're chewier, and there just aren't that many of them compared to today's industrial scale farming. But things started to change in the 1920s and 1930s. To satisfy increased demand for chicken meat, farmers started scaling up and raising their birds in big chicken houses. We'll talk more about those in just a little bit.

Joe Weisenthal (3:59)

Then, in the 1940s, after the Second World War, something big happened on the way to big chicken.

Maren McKenna (4:06)

To understand where the industrialization of chicken comes from, and after that, the industrialization of almost all the other proteins that we eat, you really have to go back to the middle to the end of World War II. And a couple of things are happening at the same time. The first is that there's a war on, and there's a lot of soldiers and sailors deployed around the globe who need to be fed. So there's a great deal of pressure on meat producers to increase their production. Pressure that goes away when the war is over and when that guaranteed market from the military forces suddenly vanishes, leaving them pretty overextended. The second is that immediately after World War II, kind of extraordinarily, there are a number of extreme weather events in growing areas around the globe. There are typhoons and there are storms and this is added to the destruction of growing areas that occurred during the war and the destruction of naval fleets and of fishing vessels. So there's both an overextension of meat production and also a sense of fragility of the food system.