The real cost of cheap chicken

In the unrelenting search for cheap meat, today’s intensively-raised, hormone-fueled chickens gain so much weight so quickly that their organs start to collapse just weeks after birth. How did we get here?

Source: The Economist

Watch the full story above.

In the 1940s, competitions were held across America to breed a new type of chicken – fat chicken that grew quickly.

Today, chicken is the most-consumed meat in the world and the factory-raised ‘broiler chicken’, as it became known, is four times the size of a standard barnyard-raised chicken from the 1940s.

“These birds can’t sustain that rapid weight growth beyond the point they’re normally slaughtered,” says Dr Richard Thomas, a co-investigator in the University of Leicester’s Chicken Project.

“Their bodies can’t cope with it. It puts a huge amount of pressure on the internal organs as well.”

As an alternative to intensively reared farming, free range and organic have emerged as practices that offer chickens a greater quality of life. Consumers, however, are largely driven by cost.

In the UK, one kilogram of intensively reared chicken is £2, while it is £4 for free range and £7 for organic. As a result, 95 per cent of the UK’s broiler chickens are intensively reared.

Copyright 2019, The Economist Newspaper Limited.  All rights reserved.