6 Facts About Chicken That Will Make You Seriously Rethink Your Dinner
Nuggets, strips, filet, soup, stock, casserole, cordon bleu, a la king—chicken is the meat of infinite possibilities, and Americans eat 37 billion pounds of the versatile fowl every year.
It wasn’t always this way: Chicken was only recently crowned the unofficial king of animal proteins. In the last 50 years, the country’s per capita chicken consumption has almost tripled, thanks in part to the anti–saturated fat craze of the 1980s, which scared consumers away from red meat. Technological advances in factory farms, combined with a cheap price tag for wholesale buyers in the restaurant industry, only increased chicken’s stranglehold on the market.
Now the industry makes $50 billion every year, has increased its lobbying budget tenfold since 2006, and tends toward monopolistic practices, making it tougher to separate fact from the propagandized fiction thrown at you via Tyson Any’tizers commercials.
These six chicken stats that have flown under the radar should help shed some light.