In 2020, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the global chicken population was over 33 billion. (Note that this number represents chickens alive at any given time; not the total number of chickens raised for food that year—which is even higher.) The global chicken population has dramatically increased from 1990, when chickens numbered 10.62 million.

In 2020, the US raised a total of 9.22 billion broiler chickens over the year. Since chickens are slaughtered at about 42 days old, this means ~1.2 billion broiler chickens are alive in the US at any given time. When we add the number of egg-laying hens in the US (374 million), we get a US population of ~1.5 billion chickens.

The reason we don’t see these billions of chickens is simple: They’re packed tightly into huge warehouses, hidden away from the general public. Contrary to what most product packaging would have you believe (with pictures of red barns, illustrations of healthy-looking birds, and phrases like “happy hens”), the vast majority of chickens in the US are raised on factory farms and subjected to abuses throughout their lives.

In 2022, US residents consumed 97.7 pounds per capita of meat from broiler chickens. This represents a massive increase from 1960 when Americans consumed only 23.6 pounds of meat from broiler chickens each year. In short, per capita chicken consumption has tripled. “Cheap” chicken has become Americans’ meat of choice—with billions of animals, industry workers, countless communities, and our planet bearing the cost.

The rise of the chickens

For most of American history, poultry and eggs were luxury foods. Chicken traditionally was far more expensive than beef or pork—after all, you needed grain to feed chickens, but cows could grow on grass and pigs could grow on garbage. For the first half of the twentieth century, the average person ate twenty pounds of chicken or less per year (approximately six chickens). By 1964, chicken had become more of a staple and people were consuming over a half pound per week—up to twenty-five to thirty pounds per year. Since then, we have continued to increase our chicken consumption almost every single year. As a result, chicken is now the number-one meat in the nation, with the average person consuming an estimated two pounds per person per week, or roughly one hundred pounds (thirty chickens) per year. In 2015, the average household ate chicken three to four times per week.

A lot had to change for chicken to become such a production powerhouse. Up until the mid-1900s, the majority of chickens were raised in small flocks (one to three hundred birds) on small family farms. When old laying hens retired, they became “stewing hens.” Excess young males were sold as “spring chickens.” With very little breast meat, neither of these resembled the chickens we cook today. The stewing hens were tough and required long, slow cooking to make them palatable. The spring chickens, although easier to prepare, produced a paltry two to two-and-a-half pounds of dressed bird for the dinner table. Both were extremely expensive.

Cecile Steele holds a dubious but important place in poultry history for creating commercial poultry production. In 1923, she ordered fifty chicks, but the company sent five hundred by accident! She decided to keep them all, raising them specifically as meat birds. Things went so well that year and in subsequent years that by 1926, Steele had built a barn to house ten thousand birds. Two years later, she raised almost thirty thousand. The industrial chicken was born, and it quickly boomed. A decade later, Delaware alone produced seven million broilers per year. Although Steele’s chickens were tiny things, weighing only around two pounds, people loved them, even with their relatively high price tag. In today’s money, Steele fetched a profitable five dollars per pound for that first batch of five hundred chickens. Such high profits and prices would not last long, however, and the steady decline in chicken prices soon began.

The changes that Steele and others made to chickens’ housing conditions required significant changes to almost everything about a chicken’s diet and life. No longer able to forage, chickens became dependent on artificial food. The timing was right because soy was beginning to provide a standardized, cheap, high-protein feed perfect for confined chickens. Founded in 1919, the American Soybean Association was very happy to have soy become, along with corn, the backbone of the burgeoning confined poultry production model.

Although the poultry production system was starting to solidify, it would take two more decades for everything to come together and for chicken to truly take off. What was needed was the “Chicken of Tomorrow” and the tools to keep it alive. The meteoric rise of the industry that followed is rivaled only by the gargantuan size, never before seen, of the chickens that would come to the market.

Chickens of tomorrow

Before World War II, chicken was reserved for special occasions. If you lived on a farm back then, the arrival of visiting relatives meant roast chicken for dinner. Sunday dinner with the family was often graced with chicken and peas. Farm flocks were generally the domain of women and children to earn some cash selling eggs. Back then, chickens for eating were a by-product of egg production (that is, chickens would be butchered only when their laying days were done), with the modern broiler industry only starting to take shape in the 1920s and 30s in places like the Delmarva Peninsula on the Atlantic coast.

In 1945, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (or the A&P as it was universally known), the country’s largest poultry retailer, sponsored a national contest in partnership with USDA to produce a breed of chicken that would grow bigger, faster, and put on weight in all the right places. The idea that a supermarket and the USDA would partner to develop a breed of chicken seems odd today, but the A&P was no ordinary supermarket chain.

Farmers and breeders from across the country took part, submitting eggs for hatching at specially built facilities where the chicks were hatched and raised in controlled conditions on a standard diet. The chicks were closely tracked and monitored for weight gain, health, and appearance. After 12 weeks, the birds were slaughtered weighed, and judged for edible meat yield. In 1946 and 1947, a series of state and regional contests took place and from them, 40 finalists were chosen to compete for the national title of Chicken of Tomorrow. In 1948, and again in 1951, Arbor Acres White Rocks won in the purebred category. The white-feathered Arbor Acres birds were preferred to the higher-performing dark-feathered Red Cornish crosses from the Vantress Hatchery. Eventually, the two breeds were crossed to become the Arbor Acre breed that came to dominate the genetic stock of chicken worldwide.

Arbor Acres was run by Franks Saglio, an Italian immigrant who grew fruits and vegetables in Glastonbury, Connecticut on a small family farm. His son, Henry, started raising chickens for local sales. It was Henry’s birds that eventually won the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, from which the family went on to build a national breeding business that sent parent stock to all the major broiler companies in the country.

Here is where the story takes a big turn. In 1964, Nelson Rockefeller bought Arbor Acres and took it globally through his company, International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC). With IBEC’s purchase of Arbor Acres, the AA genetic stock—as it is known in the trade—went global, starting in Latin America and moving quickly to Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Gruesome conditions and antibiotics

The United States raises and slaughters almost 10 times more birds than any other type of animal. Approximately 9 billion chickens are killed for their meat every year, while another 300 million chickens are used in egg production. All birds—meat chickens, egg-laying hens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and others—are excluded from all federal animal protection laws. By sheer number, these are the animals most urgently in need of protection.

Many people do not realize that the breed of chicken used for modern egg production is different than the breed used for meat production. If you put them next to each other, they look almost nothing alike! Each has been selectively bred for hyper-production: egg-laying hens for high egg volume, and “meat” chickens for rapid growth and maximum breast meat yield. Both types suffer from physical problems brought on by genetic selection for these traits.

Nearly all meat chickens are raised indoors in large sheds containing 20,000 chickens (or more) crowded together on the shed floor. Due to the high concentration of birds living atop their own waste without adequate ventilation, high ammonia levels develop—irritating eyes, throats, and skin.

Modern chickens look very little like their wild chicken ancestors. Thanks to selective breeding—combined with low-dose antibiotics, excessive feeding, and inadequate exercise—most industrially raised meat chickens grow unnaturally quickly and disproportionately. While their breasts grow large to meet market demand, their skeletons and organs lag behind. Many suffer from heart failure, trouble breathing, leg weakness, and chronic pain. Some cannot support their own weight and become crippled, unable to reach food and water.

To keep them eating and growing, industrial farms restrict chickens’ sleep by keeping the lights on almost all the time. As they grow, meat chickens become crowded together, competing for space. This constant interaction makes sleep even harder. As chickens die, their bodies are sometimes left among the living, adding to the stress and unhygienic conditions.

Yes, it is legal to feed antibiotics to chickens. In 2017, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued rules to ban the use of antibiotics for growth promotion. The European Union’s European Medicines Agency (EMA) had already banned the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in 2005. Between 2011 and 2020, European farmers reduced their use of antibiotics by 43 percent. Instead of admitting to using antibiotics for growth promotion, however, chicken producers can say that they are preventing diseases—and continue routinely feeding antibiotics to their flocks. To close this loophole, the EMA is expected to ban the use of antibiotics for preventive use in 2022.

Chickens are given antibiotics to help their bodies fight back against diseases. Farmed chickens live in overcrowded conditions that are hard to keep clean and where it’s easy for the birds to spread harmful bacteria. Antibiotics are seen as a low-cost, immediate way to stop chickens from getting sick or sicker. This view is increasingly outdated, however, and chicken producers have led the way within the meat industry in significantly reducing antibiotic use from 2016 to 2020. Unfortunately, antibiotic use has increased in other animal industries, despite the new rules against growth promotion.

Chlorine baths and bacteria

Chlorinated chicken is poultry meat that has been washed with chlorine. After slaughter, the chickens are rinsed with an antimicrobial chlorine wash to protect consumers from food-borne diseases. This is done to treat high levels of bacteria, a symptom of poor hygiene and low animal welfare conditions not allowed in UK farming. The practice of chlorine-washing chicken is banned in the UK, but it is common practice in the US poultry industry.

Research from Southampton University found that disease-causing bacteria like listeria and salmonella ‘remain active’ after chlorine washing. Chlorine washing just makes it impossible to detect the bacteria in the lab, giving a false impression that the bacteria have been killed when they haven’t.

This means chlorine-washed chicken could still carry salmonella and other bacteria, which is a clear human health risk. In fact, rates of food poisoning have been recorded several times higher in the US than in the UK. High levels of hygiene and animal welfare promote a healthy farm environment, eliminating the need to wash chickens with chlorine. The practice shouldn’t be necessary. This raises the question – what lower standards in the production process does chlorine washing aim to patch over?

Keeping chickens in large flocks in dirty conditions makes it much more likely that bacteria will develop and spread. On farms like this, chickens are often fed antibiotics as a preventative measure to stop infection and chlorine-washed after slaughter to kill bacteria. However, this doesn’t support a good quality of life for chickens and reliance on antibiotics in farming means these lifesaving drugs are less effective for humans. Chlorine washing and routine use of antibiotics should not be seen as a way to compensate for cramped or dirty conditions on the farm or in the abattoir.

In 2018, the USA suffered a multi-state outbreak of Enteritidis infections, which was traced to eggs from a farm that had not implemented the required egg safety measures after its size reached more than 3,000 hens. These rules were introduced by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2012 through the Egg Safety Rule, which requires preventive measures during the production of eggs in poultry houses and subsequent refrigeration during storage and transportation.

Chicken meat, says the report, is also an important source of Enteritidis infections. In December 2018 the FSIS reported that 22% of establishments that produce chicken parts failed to meet the Salmonella performance standard.

Since 1997, the European Union and the United Kingdom banned the importation of U.S. chickens. The issue? The standard practice in the U.S. poultry industry is to wash the carcasses in chlorinated water to kill bacteria. One of the E.U.’s biggest concerns is that “the use of antimicrobial treatments like chlorine washes compensates for poor hygiene behavior elsewhere in the supply chain.