, notes that chicken was long considered feminine, while beef was considered masculine. According to the humorism system of medicine developed by ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, chicken “was mainly just considered a weak and delicate food suitable for weak and delicate people,” Rude said.
But over time, chicken has changed into the meat of choice for bodybuilders and Paleo dieters, due in part to the rise of nutrition science, which classifies foods by their constituent parts — protein, fat, and carbohydrates. “Chicken contained protein, so it was like other meats, but less fat, so it was superior to them, according to dietary guidelines published in the 1980s,” said Rude. “You can still see this sort of idea of red meat and masculinity.
As much as the chicken has come to be an affordable source of protein, breeding over 9 billion of them for meat in the US each year has proven to be an environmental, labor, andWhat our love for chicken has done to chickens If you went inside one of the industrial barns that are home to America’s 9 billion chickens, you’d find most of them sitting down in their own waste. It’s not because they’re lazy, or that they like to hang out in manure. It’s because most of them simply can’t walk.The Chicken of Tomorrow contests of the 1940s gave way to a new breed of bird so top-heavy that their skinny legs can easily buckle under the weight of their enormous body.
, it took 84 days for chickens to reach their “market weight” of three pounds; today, it takes almost half the time to grow more than twice as big.illustrates just how far poultry companies have pushed chickens’ biology. The researchers took breeds from 1957, 1978, and 2005, and fed each bird the same diet for 56 days. At the end of the experiment, the 1957 breed had reached 2 pounds, the 1978 breed reached 4 pounds, and the 2005 breed reached a gigantic 9.2 pounds.