How has a small bird from the jungles of southeast Asia gone on to be the most popular source of protein in the world?
In this episode, we are going to talk about the economics of chicken, and how farmers have managed to drastically reduce its price.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Chicken.
[00:00:25] And more specifically, the economics of chicken.
[00:00:29] How has a small bird from the jungles of Southeast Asia gone on to be the most popular source of protein in the world, and how have farmers managed to reduce the price for a chicken to such an extent that, pound for pound, chickens are often more than 5 times cheaper now than they were at the start of the 20th century.
[00:00:49] Now, I guess this episode should have some kind of animal-cruelty warning, as we will be talking about the business of how chickens are raised and killed for human consumption.
[00:01:00] So, if that isn’t your cup of tea, then I would recommend pausing now.
[00:01:04] OK then, the economics of chicken.
[00:01:09] If you stopped 100 people in the street and asked them, “Excuse me, if you could be reincarnated as any animal, what would it be?”, I wonder what sorts of animals you’d hear the most.
[00:01:22] I say “I wonder” because we did try to find some kind of semi-legitimate survey on this, but it seems that none has been done.
[00:01:33] If one had been done, I imagine you might find dogs, cats, perhaps lions, or eagles up there.
[00:01:41] Personally, I quite like the idea of being reincarnated as a panda.
[00:01:46] In any case, one animal that I imagine you wouldn’t find many people saying they want to be reincarnated as is a chicken.
[00:01:54] And especially something called a broiler chicken, a chicken bred specifically for human consumption.
[00:02:03] The life of a broiler chicken, as you may know, is as unpleasant as it is short.
[00:02:10] These are animals that have been specifically designed with one purpose and one purpose only: to be turned into animal protein, meat, as quickly and cost-efficiently as possible.
[00:02:24] That might be quite a grisly and direct way of putting it, but it’s true.
[00:02:31] And the end result is that chicken has gone from a relatively luxury good to one of the cheapest sources of protein available.
[00:02:40] 100 years ago, in 1923, a kilo of chicken in the USA cost around €20, and today it can be as low as €3.
[00:02:53] And in many supermarkets you can go in and buy a fully roasted chicken, already cooked, enough to feed a family, for €5 or so.
[00:03:04] So the question we are going to be addressing in the next 15 minutes is…how?
[00:03:10] How is this possible?
[00:03:11] How has chicken gone from something of a luxury to something that costs barely more than a cup of coffee, at least if you are the kind of person who drinks particularly expensive coffee?
[00:03:23] To address this question, we need to go back and do a little bit of chicken history.
[00:03:29] I say a little bit because the super long term fans and listeners among you might remember that we already did an episode on the history of chickens back in March of 2020, it was episode number 34.
[00:03:43] Anyway, if you haven’t listened to that episode, and to give you some brief history, chickens are thought to have originated in the jungles of southeast Asia. The fact that they are relatively easy to keep and transport from one place to another, plus the fact that you can eat them and eat their eggs, this all meant that they became domesticated relatively early on, and brought by merchants along trade routes. There are records of chickens dating back to 2000 BC in Syria, and even in Europe by around 100 BC.
[00:04:20] The point is, people have raised chickens for thousands of years.
[00:04:25] But, the chickens that might have been pottering about in Damascus or Rome or London many hundreds or even thousands of years ago, these were very different beasts to the ones you or I might think of when we imagine a chicken.
[00:04:41] Even going back to the start of the 20th century, chickens were very different.
[00:04:47] They were much smaller, with most breeds typically weighing in at just under a kilo, less than a quarter of what the heaviest of broiler chickens weigh today.
[00:04:58] In the US, at least, a chicken would typically be raised for its eggs, and then when it was no longer so good at producing eggs, or if it was a male chicken, well it would be killed and eaten for its meat.
[00:05:11] It was a dual purpose bird; it kept on producing something you could eat, in the form of eggs, and when it stopped producing that, well you could eat it yourself or sell it for its meat.
[00:05:23] And, again, using the United States as an example, almost all farms kept chickens, but they weren’t chicken farms per se.
[00:05:33] Chickens were birds that existed alongside other animals, they didn’t require huge amounts of maintenance, just some grain, somewhere to lay their eggs and sleep for the night, and to be kept out of reach of a hungry fox, that was more or less all that they needed.
[00:05:51] This versatility might have seemed like a positive, a good thing, but it meant that the chicken was destined to be a sort of “ancillary” livestock, something that farmers kept because they could, rather than as the core focus of a farm.
[00:06:08] Because they were small, and didn’t contain much meat, their real value was in their egg-laying ability.
[00:06:16] And chicken meat was something of a luxury, it was expensive.
[00:06:21] Pound for pound, in 1900 chicken was 30% more expensive than beef or pork.
[00:06:30] And in case you weren’t aware, the opposite tends to be true nowadays; chicken is almost always cheaper than beef or pork.
[00:06:39] So, what happened?
[00:06:41] Well, the creation of the modern chicken is really a miracle of technology.
[00:06:46] The first important step came in the 1920s with the creation of the electrical egg incubator, essentially a machine that keeps eggs at the right warmth and humidity, as well as turning them gently, so that they hatch without a chicken sitting on them.
[00:07:04] A chicken egg typically takes around 3 weeks to hatch, so under “normal” conditions, a hen sits on the egg for 3 weeks or so.
[00:07:15] This is how an egg is incubated in the natural world, but the problem with this is that the chicken is “out of action” for all of that time, not producing any more eggs.
[00:07:26] An incubator means that a hen no longer needs to do this, so she can be put to work laying more eggs.
[00:07:34] And to clarify, artificial incubation wasn’t invented in the 1920s; humans have tried various sorts of artificial incubation going back to the Ancient Egyptians, using ovens and so on, but using electricity meant that these incubators were far more efficient, and could be built far bigger, incubating thousands of eggs at a time.
[00:07:59] So, this was the first step.
[00:08:02] The second step towards modernising the chicken, or at least turning this small jungle bird into something eaten by hundreds of millions of people every day, came in the post-war period.
[00:08:15] In 1947 there was a competition announced in America. Anyone could take part, and the objective was to create a new breed of chicken that would be bigger and cheaper.
[00:08:28] Or, to quote the advert from the original announcement, the objective was to breed “one bird chunky enough for the whole family—a chicken with breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks, with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead of more.”
[00:08:50] In other words, the aim was to breed a massive chicken that could feed an entire family, not a scrawny bird that was only good for laying eggs, and to make it cheaper than any chicken that had come before it.
[00:09:04] It was a huge effort, and to cut a long story short, a man from California called Charles Vantress took the first prize with a mix of different breeds of chicken.
[00:09:17] There were some further developments, tinkering, but the result was that the variety of chickens found on farms in America had gone from hundreds to a handful.
[00:09:29] And these chickens, and indeed the chickens of today that come directly from this original competition, were very different from the chickens of the past.
[00:09:40] These “upgraded” chickens were designed to be able to grow much bigger and meatier than normal chickens, and their bodies able to withstand doing this in a very short space of time.
[00:09:52] In practical terms, modern broiler chickens can weigh 4 times what “normal” chickens weighed 100 years ago.
[00:10:01] And they put on this weight incredibly fast, going from a tiny chick to their target weight of about 2.5kg in only six or seven weeks.
[00:10:12] And in some cases, in the most efficient broiler chicken farms, this can be as little as five weeks.
[00:10:20] To put that in perspective, and even adjusting for the fact that the normal lifespan of a chicken is typically between 3 and 10 years, this would be like a human baby going from being born to weighing something like 180 kilograms by the age of 2.
[00:10:39] This isn’t only due to the fact that they have been engineered so that they can grow this fast, it’s also due to the hormones and in some cases genetically modified organisms that their food is pumped with.
[00:10:52] Everything about the short life of a broiler chicken has been engineered to allow it to put on as much weight as possible as quickly as possible.
[00:11:01] It is a quite astonishing feat of engineering, but, as you will know, it is not a wonderful life.
[00:11:09] Although the worst of the “battery” cages have been banned in many parts of the world, chicken’s bodies are put under enormous pressure during this growth..
[00:11:19] Even life for “free range” or “organic” chickens doesn’t tend to be much better.
[00:11:26] Yes, they might get a whiff of fresh air or be fed slightly better food, but free range chickens only live for around 56 days while organic chickens manage to live no longer than 81. And they still need to put on a vast amount of weight in this slightly-longer-but-still-very-short lifespan.
[00:11:47] It is a miserable life but what this has meant, bringing us closer to the stated topic of the “economics of chicken”, is that the price of chicken has fallen dramatically, in some cases it’s 5 times less expensive than it was 100 years ago.
[00:12:03] In fact, 100 years ago it was relatively rare for chicken to be eaten for its meat, in the UK and the US at least.
[00:12:12] It was expensive, you didn’t get much meat on a chicken, so it was the equivalent of cooking duck or something like that today: a bit complicated, quite expensive, a lot of effort for not that many calories in return.
[00:12:28] And now it is literally the most popular source of animal protein in the world, and is projected to reach 41% of all meat consumption by 2030, according to a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
[00:12:44] The major reason for this is, of course, price.
[00:12:49] I decided to call this episode The Economics of Chicken because, for better or for worse, and certainly for worse if you’re a chicken, the question of the modern chicken is a question of economic efficiency.
[00:13:02] The process of taking an egg and turning it into a huge chicken, from the fact that it is incubated artificially through to how it is raised very fast and to weigh a vast amount before it is slaughtered, every element has been pushed to its maximum in terms of efficiency, with a resulting low price tag and a boom in chicken consumption.
[00:13:24] And while many people may say that the lives of chickens are awful and it is terrible to raise them in this way, the truth remains that these kinds of low-cost intensively-farmed broiler chickens are overwhelmingly the most popular type of chicken.
[00:13:41] According to one report published by The Economist, in the UK, intensively farmed chickens make up 95.5% of all chickens, while free range makes up 3.5% and organic chickens account for the remaining 1%.
[00:13:59] Long story short, when it comes to chicken, there is one factor that matters more than anything else: price.
[00:14:07] Now, there’s one more element of chicken economics I want to cover today, and that is a question of why a particular type of chicken is so cheap, or at least is so cheap in the UK and in the US but from my experience seems to be similarly cheap in most countries.
[00:14:25] Here I’m talking about rotisserie chicken, the chicken that comes pre-cooked and you can buy in supermarkets already roasted and flavoured.
[00:14:35] In the American warehouse supermarket Costco, for example, it costs $4.99, and in UK supermarkets they can be found for as little as £4, so under €5, the same price and sometimes even lower than the price they are uncooked.
[00:14:56] How, you might be thinking? If it’s still a chicken, and then it has to be cooked and then sold separately, surely it should be more expensive, not the same price or even cheaper.
[00:15:09] Well, there are a few theories about why this is, why rotisserie chicken is so cheap.
[00:15:16] Firstly, in many cases they are what’s called a loss-leader for the shop, meaning that the shop loses money on each one it sells, but it continues to sell them because it knows that people will buy other more profitable things to go along with it. In many stores, you’ll find rotisserie chicken close to higher margin items, like wine, so someone buys a “cheap” rotisserie chicken, thinks they got a good deal and then buys something more expensive that they might not have bought otherwise.
[00:15:51] Secondly, rotisserie chickens are often smaller than the uncooked chickens. You don’t see this when the chickens are in the roaster, in the oven, because the weight isn’t generally visible, and you probably don’t care to weigh it when you are actually eating one, but you often get less chicken for your money than if you were buying it uncooked.
[00:16:15] Thirdly, and this one is a little more controversial, but it has been suggested that some supermarkets move their chickens that are about to go bad from the fridge into the rotisserie, knowing that people are unlikely to buy a chicken that is going bad that day but if it’s cooked already, then they have a better chance of selling it.
[00:16:36] So, if you are a chicken lover, or a lover of eating chicken perhaps I should say, and you have ever wondered how the price of rotisserie chicken is so low, this is why.
[00:16:47] Now, I want to finish by briefly touching on some of the ethical questions of eating chicken, as we've only really skirted around these until now.
[00:16:57] Chicken, as you’ve heard, is the most popular meat on the planet by levels of consumption, and it is only growing more popular.
[00:17:07] As you’ve heard here, and as I’m sure you knew already, almost all of the 34 billion chickens worldwide live in these intensive broiler farms, where they live lives that are as miserable as they are short.
[00:17:22] Sure, there are alternatives, it’s perfectly possible to buy free range or organic chicken, chickens that have lived slightly longer and slightly happier lives. But these chickens are expensive, in many cases more than double the price of an intensively reared chicken.
[00:17:42] As an economist might say, the market has spoken.
[00:17:46] For most people, 95.5% of consumers in the UK at least, this simply isn’t a price that we are willing to pay…
[00:17:57] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the economics of chicken.
[00:18:01] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:18:05] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:09] How has the popularity of chicken changed in your country?
[00:18:12] Do you eat more or less chicken than before? If you don’t eat chicken for ethical reasons, what was the one thing that made you stop?
[00:18:20] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:24] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:31] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:36] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Chicken.
[00:00:25] And more specifically, the economics of chicken.
[00:00:29] How has a small bird from the jungles of Southeast Asia gone on to be the most popular source of protein in the world, and how have farmers managed to reduce the price for a chicken to such an extent that, pound for pound, chickens are often more than 5 times cheaper now than they were at the start of the 20th century.
[00:00:49] Now, I guess this episode should have some kind of animal-cruelty warning, as we will be talking about the business of how chickens are raised and killed for human consumption.
[00:01:00] So, if that isn’t your cup of tea, then I would recommend pausing now.
[00:01:04] OK then, the economics of chicken.
[00:01:09] If you stopped 100 people in the street and asked them, “Excuse me, if you could be reincarnated as any animal, what would it be?”, I wonder what sorts of animals you’d hear the most.
[00:01:22] I say “I wonder” because we did try to find some kind of semi-legitimate survey on this, but it seems that none has been done.
[00:01:33] If one had been done, I imagine you might find dogs, cats, perhaps lions, or eagles up there.
[00:01:41] Personally, I quite like the idea of being reincarnated as a panda.
[00:01:46] In any case, one animal that I imagine you wouldn’t find many people saying they want to be reincarnated as is a chicken.
[00:01:54] And especially something called a broiler chicken, a chicken bred specifically for human consumption.
[00:02:03] The life of a broiler chicken, as you may know, is as unpleasant as it is short.
[00:02:10] These are animals that have been specifically designed with one purpose and one purpose only: to be turned into animal protein, meat, as quickly and cost-efficiently as possible.
[00:02:24] That might be quite a grisly and direct way of putting it, but it’s true.
[00:02:31] And the end result is that chicken has gone from a relatively luxury good to one of the cheapest sources of protein available.
[00:02:40] 100 years ago, in 1923, a kilo of chicken in the USA cost around €20, and today it can be as low as €3.
[00:02:53] And in many supermarkets you can go in and buy a fully roasted chicken, already cooked, enough to feed a family, for €5 or so.
[00:03:04] So the question we are going to be addressing in the next 15 minutes is…how?
[00:03:10] How is this possible?
[00:03:11] How has chicken gone from something of a luxury to something that costs barely more than a cup of coffee, at least if you are the kind of person who drinks particularly expensive coffee?
[00:03:23] To address this question, we need to go back and do a little bit of chicken history.
[00:03:29] I say a little bit because the super long term fans and listeners among you might remember that we already did an episode on the history of chickens back in March of 2020, it was episode number 34.
[00:03:43] Anyway, if you haven’t listened to that episode, and to give you some brief history, chickens are thought to have originated in the jungles of southeast Asia. The fact that they are relatively easy to keep and transport from one place to another, plus the fact that you can eat them and eat their eggs, this all meant that they became domesticated relatively early on, and brought by merchants along trade routes. There are records of chickens dating back to 2000 BC in Syria, and even in Europe by around 100 BC.
[00:04:20] The point is, people have raised chickens for thousands of years.
[00:04:25] But, the chickens that might have been pottering about in Damascus or Rome or London many hundreds or even thousands of years ago, these were very different beasts to the ones you or I might think of when we imagine a chicken.
[00:04:41] Even going back to the start of the 20th century, chickens were very different.
[00:04:47] They were much smaller, with most breeds typically weighing in at just under a kilo, less than a quarter of what the heaviest of broiler chickens weigh today.
[00:04:58] In the US, at least, a chicken would typically be raised for its eggs, and then when it was no longer so good at producing eggs, or if it was a male chicken, well it would be killed and eaten for its meat.
[00:05:11] It was a dual purpose bird; it kept on producing something you could eat, in the form of eggs, and when it stopped producing that, well you could eat it yourself or sell it for its meat.
[00:05:23] And, again, using the United States as an example, almost all farms kept chickens, but they weren’t chicken farms per se.
[00:05:33] Chickens were birds that existed alongside other animals, they didn’t require huge amounts of maintenance, just some grain, somewhere to lay their eggs and sleep for the night, and to be kept out of reach of a hungry fox, that was more or less all that they needed.
[00:05:51] This versatility might have seemed like a positive, a good thing, but it meant that the chicken was destined to be a sort of “ancillary” livestock, something that farmers kept because they could, rather than as the core focus of a farm.
[00:06:08] Because they were small, and didn’t contain much meat, their real value was in their egg-laying ability.
[00:06:16] And chicken meat was something of a luxury, it was expensive.
[00:06:21] Pound for pound, in 1900 chicken was 30% more expensive than beef or pork.
[00:06:30] And in case you weren’t aware, the opposite tends to be true nowadays; chicken is almost always cheaper than beef or pork.
[00:06:39] So, what happened?
[00:06:41] Well, the creation of the modern chicken is really a miracle of technology.
[00:06:46] The first important step came in the 1920s with the creation of the electrical egg incubator, essentially a machine that keeps eggs at the right warmth and humidity, as well as turning them gently, so that they hatch without a chicken sitting on them.
[00:07:04] A chicken egg typically takes around 3 weeks to hatch, so under “normal” conditions, a hen sits on the egg for 3 weeks or so.
[00:07:15] This is how an egg is incubated in the natural world, but the problem with this is that the chicken is “out of action” for all of that time, not producing any more eggs.
[00:07:26] An incubator means that a hen no longer needs to do this, so she can be put to work laying more eggs.
[00:07:34] And to clarify, artificial incubation wasn’t invented in the 1920s; humans have tried various sorts of artificial incubation going back to the Ancient Egyptians, using ovens and so on, but using electricity meant that these incubators were far more efficient, and could be built far bigger, incubating thousands of eggs at a time.
[00:07:59] So, this was the first step.
[00:08:02] The second step towards modernising the chicken, or at least turning this small jungle bird into something eaten by hundreds of millions of people every day, came in the post-war period.
[00:08:15] In 1947 there was a competition announced in America. Anyone could take part, and the objective was to create a new breed of chicken that would be bigger and cheaper.
[00:08:28] Or, to quote the advert from the original announcement, the objective was to breed “one bird chunky enough for the whole family—a chicken with breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks, with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead of more.”
[00:08:50] In other words, the aim was to breed a massive chicken that could feed an entire family, not a scrawny bird that was only good for laying eggs, and to make it cheaper than any chicken that had come before it.
[00:09:04] It was a huge effort, and to cut a long story short, a man from California called Charles Vantress took the first prize with a mix of different breeds of chicken.
[00:09:17] There were some further developments, tinkering, but the result was that the variety of chickens found on farms in America had gone from hundreds to a handful.
[00:09:29] And these chickens, and indeed the chickens of today that come directly from this original competition, were very different from the chickens of the past.
[00:09:40] These “upgraded” chickens were designed to be able to grow much bigger and meatier than normal chickens, and their bodies able to withstand doing this in a very short space of time.
[00:09:52] In practical terms, modern broiler chickens can weigh 4 times what “normal” chickens weighed 100 years ago.
[00:10:01] And they put on this weight incredibly fast, going from a tiny chick to their target weight of about 2.5kg in only six or seven weeks.
[00:10:12] And in some cases, in the most efficient broiler chicken farms, this can be as little as five weeks.
[00:10:20] To put that in perspective, and even adjusting for the fact that the normal lifespan of a chicken is typically between 3 and 10 years, this would be like a human baby going from being born to weighing something like 180 kilograms by the age of 2.
[00:10:39] This isn’t only due to the fact that they have been engineered so that they can grow this fast, it’s also due to the hormones and in some cases genetically modified organisms that their food is pumped with.
[00:10:52] Everything about the short life of a broiler chicken has been engineered to allow it to put on as much weight as possible as quickly as possible.
[00:11:01] It is a quite astonishing feat of engineering, but, as you will know, it is not a wonderful life.
[00:11:09] Although the worst of the “battery” cages have been banned in many parts of the world, chicken’s bodies are put under enormous pressure during this growth..
[00:11:19] Even life for “free range” or “organic” chickens doesn’t tend to be much better.
[00:11:26] Yes, they might get a whiff of fresh air or be fed slightly better food, but free range chickens only live for around 56 days while organic chickens manage to live no longer than 81. And they still need to put on a vast amount of weight in this slightly-longer-but-still-very-short lifespan.
[00:11:47] It is a miserable life but what this has meant, bringing us closer to the stated topic of the “economics of chicken”, is that the price of chicken has fallen dramatically, in some cases it’s 5 times less expensive than it was 100 years ago.
[00:12:03] In fact, 100 years ago it was relatively rare for chicken to be eaten for its meat, in the UK and the US at least.
[00:12:12] It was expensive, you didn’t get much meat on a chicken, so it was the equivalent of cooking duck or something like that today: a bit complicated, quite expensive, a lot of effort for not that many calories in return.
[00:12:28] And now it is literally the most popular source of animal protein in the world, and is projected to reach 41% of all meat consumption by 2030, according to a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
[00:12:44] The major reason for this is, of course, price.
[00:12:49] I decided to call this episode The Economics of Chicken because, for better or for worse, and certainly for worse if you’re a chicken, the question of the modern chicken is a question of economic efficiency.
[00:13:02] The process of taking an egg and turning it into a huge chicken, from the fact that it is incubated artificially through to how it is raised very fast and to weigh a vast amount before it is slaughtered, every element has been pushed to its maximum in terms of efficiency, with a resulting low price tag and a boom in chicken consumption.
[00:13:24] And while many people may say that the lives of chickens are awful and it is terrible to raise them in this way, the truth remains that these kinds of low-cost intensively-farmed broiler chickens are overwhelmingly the most popular type of chicken.
[00:13:41] According to one report published by The Economist, in the UK, intensively farmed chickens make up 95.5% of all chickens, while free range makes up 3.5% and organic chickens account for the remaining 1%.
[00:13:59] Long story short, when it comes to chicken, there is one factor that matters more than anything else: price.
[00:14:07] Now, there’s one more element of chicken economics I want to cover today, and that is a question of why a particular type of chicken is so cheap, or at least is so cheap in the UK and in the US but from my experience seems to be similarly cheap in most countries.
[00:14:25] Here I’m talking about rotisserie chicken, the chicken that comes pre-cooked and you can buy in supermarkets already roasted and flavoured.
[00:14:35] In the American warehouse supermarket Costco, for example, it costs $4.99, and in UK supermarkets they can be found for as little as £4, so under €5, the same price and sometimes even lower than the price they are uncooked.
[00:14:56] How, you might be thinking? If it’s still a chicken, and then it has to be cooked and then sold separately, surely it should be more expensive, not the same price or even cheaper.
[00:15:09] Well, there are a few theories about why this is, why rotisserie chicken is so cheap.
[00:15:16] Firstly, in many cases they are what’s called a loss-leader for the shop, meaning that the shop loses money on each one it sells, but it continues to sell them because it knows that people will buy other more profitable things to go along with it. In many stores, you’ll find rotisserie chicken close to higher margin items, like wine, so someone buys a “cheap” rotisserie chicken, thinks they got a good deal and then buys something more expensive that they might not have bought otherwise.
[00:15:51] Secondly, rotisserie chickens are often smaller than the uncooked chickens. You don’t see this when the chickens are in the roaster, in the oven, because the weight isn’t generally visible, and you probably don’t care to weigh it when you are actually eating one, but you often get less chicken for your money than if you were buying it uncooked.
[00:16:15] Thirdly, and this one is a little more controversial, but it has been suggested that some supermarkets move their chickens that are about to go bad from the fridge into the rotisserie, knowing that people are unlikely to buy a chicken that is going bad that day but if it’s cooked already, then they have a better chance of selling it.
[00:16:36] So, if you are a chicken lover, or a lover of eating chicken perhaps I should say, and you have ever wondered how the price of rotisserie chicken is so low, this is why.
[00:16:47] Now, I want to finish by briefly touching on some of the ethical questions of eating chicken, as we've only really skirted around these until now.
[00:16:57] Chicken, as you’ve heard, is the most popular meat on the planet by levels of consumption, and it is only growing more popular.
[00:17:07] As you’ve heard here, and as I’m sure you knew already, almost all of the 34 billion chickens worldwide live in these intensive broiler farms, where they live lives that are as miserable as they are short.
[00:17:22] Sure, there are alternatives, it’s perfectly possible to buy free range or organic chicken, chickens that have lived slightly longer and slightly happier lives. But these chickens are expensive, in many cases more than double the price of an intensively reared chicken.
[00:17:42] As an economist might say, the market has spoken.
[00:17:46] For most people, 95.5% of consumers in the UK at least, this simply isn’t a price that we are willing to pay…
[00:17:57] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the economics of chicken.
[00:18:01] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:18:05] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:09] How has the popularity of chicken changed in your country?
[00:18:12] Do you eat more or less chicken than before? If you don’t eat chicken for ethical reasons, what was the one thing that made you stop?
[00:18:20] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:24] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:31] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:36] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Chicken.
[00:00:25] And more specifically, the economics of chicken.
[00:00:29] How has a small bird from the jungles of Southeast Asia gone on to be the most popular source of protein in the world, and how have farmers managed to reduce the price for a chicken to such an extent that, pound for pound, chickens are often more than 5 times cheaper now than they were at the start of the 20th century.
[00:00:49] Now, I guess this episode should have some kind of animal-cruelty warning, as we will be talking about the business of how chickens are raised and killed for human consumption.
[00:01:00] So, if that isn’t your cup of tea, then I would recommend pausing now.
[00:01:04] OK then, the economics of chicken.
[00:01:09] If you stopped 100 people in the street and asked them, “Excuse me, if you could be reincarnated as any animal, what would it be?”, I wonder what sorts of animals you’d hear the most.
[00:01:22] I say “I wonder” because we did try to find some kind of semi-legitimate survey on this, but it seems that none has been done.
[00:01:33] If one had been done, I imagine you might find dogs, cats, perhaps lions, or eagles up there.
[00:01:41] Personally, I quite like the idea of being reincarnated as a panda.
[00:01:46] In any case, one animal that I imagine you wouldn’t find many people saying they want to be reincarnated as is a chicken.
[00:01:54] And especially something called a broiler chicken, a chicken bred specifically for human consumption.
[00:02:03] The life of a broiler chicken, as you may know, is as unpleasant as it is short.
[00:02:10] These are animals that have been specifically designed with one purpose and one purpose only: to be turned into animal protein, meat, as quickly and cost-efficiently as possible.
[00:02:24] That might be quite a grisly and direct way of putting it, but it’s true.
[00:02:31] And the end result is that chicken has gone from a relatively luxury good to one of the cheapest sources of protein available.
[00:02:40] 100 years ago, in 1923, a kilo of chicken in the USA cost around €20, and today it can be as low as €3.
[00:02:53] And in many supermarkets you can go in and buy a fully roasted chicken, already cooked, enough to feed a family, for €5 or so.
[00:03:04] So the question we are going to be addressing in the next 15 minutes is…how?
[00:03:10] How is this possible?
[00:03:11] How has chicken gone from something of a luxury to something that costs barely more than a cup of coffee, at least if you are the kind of person who drinks particularly expensive coffee?
[00:03:23] To address this question, we need to go back and do a little bit of chicken history.
[00:03:29] I say a little bit because the super long term fans and listeners among you might remember that we already did an episode on the history of chickens back in March of 2020, it was episode number 34.
[00:03:43] Anyway, if you haven’t listened to that episode, and to give you some brief history, chickens are thought to have originated in the jungles of southeast Asia. The fact that they are relatively easy to keep and transport from one place to another, plus the fact that you can eat them and eat their eggs, this all meant that they became domesticated relatively early on, and brought by merchants along trade routes. There are records of chickens dating back to 2000 BC in Syria, and even in Europe by around 100 BC.
[00:04:20] The point is, people have raised chickens for thousands of years.
[00:04:25] But, the chickens that might have been pottering about in Damascus or Rome or London many hundreds or even thousands of years ago, these were very different beasts to the ones you or I might think of when we imagine a chicken.
[00:04:41] Even going back to the start of the 20th century, chickens were very different.
[00:04:47] They were much smaller, with most breeds typically weighing in at just under a kilo, less than a quarter of what the heaviest of broiler chickens weigh today.
[00:04:58] In the US, at least, a chicken would typically be raised for its eggs, and then when it was no longer so good at producing eggs, or if it was a male chicken, well it would be killed and eaten for its meat.
[00:05:11] It was a dual purpose bird; it kept on producing something you could eat, in the form of eggs, and when it stopped producing that, well you could eat it yourself or sell it for its meat.
[00:05:23] And, again, using the United States as an example, almost all farms kept chickens, but they weren’t chicken farms per se.
[00:05:33] Chickens were birds that existed alongside other animals, they didn’t require huge amounts of maintenance, just some grain, somewhere to lay their eggs and sleep for the night, and to be kept out of reach of a hungry fox, that was more or less all that they needed.
[00:05:51] This versatility might have seemed like a positive, a good thing, but it meant that the chicken was destined to be a sort of “ancillary” livestock, something that farmers kept because they could, rather than as the core focus of a farm.
[00:06:08] Because they were small, and didn’t contain much meat, their real value was in their egg-laying ability.
[00:06:16] And chicken meat was something of a luxury, it was expensive.
[00:06:21] Pound for pound, in 1900 chicken was 30% more expensive than beef or pork.
[00:06:30] And in case you weren’t aware, the opposite tends to be true nowadays; chicken is almost always cheaper than beef or pork.
[00:06:39] So, what happened?
[00:06:41] Well, the creation of the modern chicken is really a miracle of technology.
[00:06:46] The first important step came in the 1920s with the creation of the electrical egg incubator, essentially a machine that keeps eggs at the right warmth and humidity, as well as turning them gently, so that they hatch without a chicken sitting on them.
[00:07:04] A chicken egg typically takes around 3 weeks to hatch, so under “normal” conditions, a hen sits on the egg for 3 weeks or so.
[00:07:15] This is how an egg is incubated in the natural world, but the problem with this is that the chicken is “out of action” for all of that time, not producing any more eggs.
[00:07:26] An incubator means that a hen no longer needs to do this, so she can be put to work laying more eggs.
[00:07:34] And to clarify, artificial incubation wasn’t invented in the 1920s; humans have tried various sorts of artificial incubation going back to the Ancient Egyptians, using ovens and so on, but using electricity meant that these incubators were far more efficient, and could be built far bigger, incubating thousands of eggs at a time.
[00:07:59] So, this was the first step.
[00:08:02] The second step towards modernising the chicken, or at least turning this small jungle bird into something eaten by hundreds of millions of people every day, came in the post-war period.
[00:08:15] In 1947 there was a competition announced in America. Anyone could take part, and the objective was to create a new breed of chicken that would be bigger and cheaper.
[00:08:28] Or, to quote the advert from the original announcement, the objective was to breed “one bird chunky enough for the whole family—a chicken with breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks, with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead of more.”
[00:08:50] In other words, the aim was to breed a massive chicken that could feed an entire family, not a scrawny bird that was only good for laying eggs, and to make it cheaper than any chicken that had come before it.
[00:09:04] It was a huge effort, and to cut a long story short, a man from California called Charles Vantress took the first prize with a mix of different breeds of chicken.
[00:09:17] There were some further developments, tinkering, but the result was that the variety of chickens found on farms in America had gone from hundreds to a handful.
[00:09:29] And these chickens, and indeed the chickens of today that come directly from this original competition, were very different from the chickens of the past.
[00:09:40] These “upgraded” chickens were designed to be able to grow much bigger and meatier than normal chickens, and their bodies able to withstand doing this in a very short space of time.
[00:09:52] In practical terms, modern broiler chickens can weigh 4 times what “normal” chickens weighed 100 years ago.
[00:10:01] And they put on this weight incredibly fast, going from a tiny chick to their target weight of about 2.5kg in only six or seven weeks.
[00:10:12] And in some cases, in the most efficient broiler chicken farms, this can be as little as five weeks.
[00:10:20] To put that in perspective, and even adjusting for the fact that the normal lifespan of a chicken is typically between 3 and 10 years, this would be like a human baby going from being born to weighing something like 180 kilograms by the age of 2.
[00:10:39] This isn’t only due to the fact that they have been engineered so that they can grow this fast, it’s also due to the hormones and in some cases genetically modified organisms that their food is pumped with.
[00:10:52] Everything about the short life of a broiler chicken has been engineered to allow it to put on as much weight as possible as quickly as possible.
[00:11:01] It is a quite astonishing feat of engineering, but, as you will know, it is not a wonderful life.
[00:11:09] Although the worst of the “battery” cages have been banned in many parts of the world, chicken’s bodies are put under enormous pressure during this growth..
[00:11:19] Even life for “free range” or “organic” chickens doesn’t tend to be much better.
[00:11:26] Yes, they might get a whiff of fresh air or be fed slightly better food, but free range chickens only live for around 56 days while organic chickens manage to live no longer than 81. And they still need to put on a vast amount of weight in this slightly-longer-but-still-very-short lifespan.
[00:11:47] It is a miserable life but what this has meant, bringing us closer to the stated topic of the “economics of chicken”, is that the price of chicken has fallen dramatically, in some cases it’s 5 times less expensive than it was 100 years ago.
[00:12:03] In fact, 100 years ago it was relatively rare for chicken to be eaten for its meat, in the UK and the US at least.
[00:12:12] It was expensive, you didn’t get much meat on a chicken, so it was the equivalent of cooking duck or something like that today: a bit complicated, quite expensive, a lot of effort for not that many calories in return.
[00:12:28] And now it is literally the most popular source of animal protein in the world, and is projected to reach 41% of all meat consumption by 2030, according to a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
[00:12:44] The major reason for this is, of course, price.
[00:12:49] I decided to call this episode The Economics of Chicken because, for better or for worse, and certainly for worse if you’re a chicken, the question of the modern chicken is a question of economic efficiency.
[00:13:02] The process of taking an egg and turning it into a huge chicken, from the fact that it is incubated artificially through to how it is raised very fast and to weigh a vast amount before it is slaughtered, every element has been pushed to its maximum in terms of efficiency, with a resulting low price tag and a boom in chicken consumption.
[00:13:24] And while many people may say that the lives of chickens are awful and it is terrible to raise them in this way, the truth remains that these kinds of low-cost intensively-farmed broiler chickens are overwhelmingly the most popular type of chicken.
[00:13:41] According to one report published by The Economist, in the UK, intensively farmed chickens make up 95.5% of all chickens, while free range makes up 3.5% and organic chickens account for the remaining 1%.
[00:13:59] Long story short, when it comes to chicken, there is one factor that matters more than anything else: price.
[00:14:07] Now, there’s one more element of chicken economics I want to cover today, and that is a question of why a particular type of chicken is so cheap, or at least is so cheap in the UK and in the US but from my experience seems to be similarly cheap in most countries.
[00:14:25] Here I’m talking about rotisserie chicken, the chicken that comes pre-cooked and you can buy in supermarkets already roasted and flavoured.
[00:14:35] In the American warehouse supermarket Costco, for example, it costs $4.99, and in UK supermarkets they can be found for as little as £4, so under €5, the same price and sometimes even lower than the price they are uncooked.
[00:14:56] How, you might be thinking? If it’s still a chicken, and then it has to be cooked and then sold separately, surely it should be more expensive, not the same price or even cheaper.
[00:15:09] Well, there are a few theories about why this is, why rotisserie chicken is so cheap.
[00:15:16] Firstly, in many cases they are what’s called a loss-leader for the shop, meaning that the shop loses money on each one it sells, but it continues to sell them because it knows that people will buy other more profitable things to go along with it. In many stores, you’ll find rotisserie chicken close to higher margin items, like wine, so someone buys a “cheap” rotisserie chicken, thinks they got a good deal and then buys something more expensive that they might not have bought otherwise.
[00:15:51] Secondly, rotisserie chickens are often smaller than the uncooked chickens. You don’t see this when the chickens are in the roaster, in the oven, because the weight isn’t generally visible, and you probably don’t care to weigh it when you are actually eating one, but you often get less chicken for your money than if you were buying it uncooked.
[00:16:15] Thirdly, and this one is a little more controversial, but it has been suggested that some supermarkets move their chickens that are about to go bad from the fridge into the rotisserie, knowing that people are unlikely to buy a chicken that is going bad that day but if it’s cooked already, then they have a better chance of selling it.
[00:16:36] So, if you are a chicken lover, or a lover of eating chicken perhaps I should say, and you have ever wondered how the price of rotisserie chicken is so low, this is why.
[00:16:47] Now, I want to finish by briefly touching on some of the ethical questions of eating chicken, as we've only really skirted around these until now.
[00:16:57] Chicken, as you’ve heard, is the most popular meat on the planet by levels of consumption, and it is only growing more popular.
[00:17:07] As you’ve heard here, and as I’m sure you knew already, almost all of the 34 billion chickens worldwide live in these intensive broiler farms, where they live lives that are as miserable as they are short.
[00:17:22] Sure, there are alternatives, it’s perfectly possible to buy free range or organic chicken, chickens that have lived slightly longer and slightly happier lives. But these chickens are expensive, in many cases more than double the price of an intensively reared chicken.
[00:17:42] As an economist might say, the market has spoken.
[00:17:46] For most people, 95.5% of consumers in the UK at least, this simply isn’t a price that we are willing to pay…
[00:17:57] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the economics of chicken.
[00:18:01] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:18:05] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:09] How has the popularity of chicken changed in your country?
[00:18:12] Do you eat more or less chicken than before? If you don’t eat chicken for ethical reasons, what was the one thing that made you stop?
[00:18:20] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:24] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:31] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:36] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
