LOEBS: Beak Capitalism, Part 2: The Chickenization of Everything

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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. For

much of America's history, chickens looked 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 nineteen twenties. 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.

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

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 would I guess our great grandparents, let's say at the beginning of the twentieth 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,

Welcome to the second installment of Beat 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. 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.

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, Baked Chicken.

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 treat, not a staple.