ur society reached a point where everyone fills their shopping trolleys without paying much attention to the changes in products or prices over the years. Consumerism has been a positive social and economic trend that had boosted the global economy, but the negative side is making people so demanding in terms of what they consume that it is destroying our world.
The packaging of most products may have stayed somewhat similar for the past 60 years, but the small text that no one reads has changed drastically. The best example of this is the change of an average chicken’s weight over the years. Don’t think that the change in weight had occurred naturally through some form of evolution, this was pushed by farmers who are pushed on their ends to meet consumers’ demands and for corporations to make bigger profit margins.
The rarity of a natural chicken
The ideology of consumerism started being applied for the first time in America during the 1950s, but this was mainly with highly processed products. Once the economy started to develop and inflation would take its toll, corporations realized that their profit margins would start to stagger. Therefore, these corporations came up with a very clever marketing concept of increasing the size of a product by lowering its nutritional values (which initially is what makes it expensive to produce) and replacing it with different types of fats.
This would follow to have a psychological effect on consumers who would be more willing to purchase something if they saw that they would pay the same price but receive more of the produce, but are they in reality? The same thing was done with chicken because it had always been the most consumed animal around the world.
If you think that a label saying that your chicken is bred in a “friendly farm”, then you are a victim of consumerism. One interesting aspect is the changes that humans forcefully made to animals. The original ancestor of the modern chicken is the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) which was extremely similar to the chickens served on tables before the 1960s.
The difference between today’s chickens and the red junglefowl from 2000 years ago is its natural weight as well as appearance. Your average chicken didn’t use to be white, not even in the early 20th century. The color that you see in the picture above of the red junglefowl is the natural pigment of a chicken, the white is something imposed by corporations for farmers to breed-specific species in order to be more attractive to consumers! A similar aspect is done with vegetables that grow in an odd shape. Did you know that 40% of vegetables don’t make it to the shelves because of this?
Besides the imposed color of the chicken, the most important factor is weight:
- The average weight of a chicken 2000 years ago was 900 grams.
- The average weight of a chicken 60 years ago was 900 grams.
- The average weight of a chicken 40 years ago was 2,000 grams.
- The average weight of a chicken today is 4,500 grams…
What happened? The imposed changes of consumerism. Consumers wanted more products or more “value for their money”, corporations wanted more profits, and farmers were sadly caught in the middle. Farmers need to respect the desires of big companies, otherwise, they will eventually go out of business. Most farmers are not happy to turn their farms into factories, but there isn’t much of a rational choice.
The unnatural evolution of chickens
What farmers started doing around 1955 is stuffing their chickens with as much food as possible in order to fatten them since the first day they hatch. This worked for a few years, until inflation hit harder, once again lowering the power of purchase for consumers and the profit margins. This is where corporations started playing with the genetics of chickens, making them gain weight much quicker since they hatch.
An old study shows how a chicken that just hatched gained weight gradually at different stages. The study mentions that the average weight of a chick on day 1 would be around 38 grams, after two weeks 60 grams and after a month about 115 grams. Another study published in 2011 showed how chickens have been genetically altered to gain weight much quicker. The chick would have 38 grams on day one, but after two weeks it would weigh 300 grams.
by the late 1990s, the genes of some species of chickens would be edited in order to produce more eggs so that corporations could obtain more products with less investment. It is not just the weight, that is gained, but the way these chickens grow with abnormal breasts (the most demanded part of the chicken). Besides raising the possibility of the chicken becoming sick, this also brings a lot more pain as the chicken’s legs weren’t made to support four to five times their natural weight.
It is estimated that chickens will end up reaching the average size of a small turkey by 2030 (around 7,800 grams) at the rate consumerism keeps creating more demand. We might actually end up seeing chickens reaching a larger size than roosters, now wouldn’t that be abnormal? Not that things are very normal lately. Overall, all these changes lower the quality of life for chickens, but that is something no one cares about, because if they did they would stop purchasing.
Changes in our World
Although corporations are the main reason for this happening, we are part of the blame as we are the ones who support consumerism. Modern life has gotten quite complicated, to the point where society sometimes does not give us the time to think about these small factors such as what we purchase to consume, which in reality aren’t small factors as it is changing the world as we know it.
Since ancient times, chickens have been the most consumed meat because they are the easiest to raise and require the lowest amount of resources. According to data gathered by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the world consumes an average of 50 billion chickens per year since 2017. Just to give you a comparison, pigs come in second place with only 1.2 billion consumed every year worldwide. We are the ones raising the demand and they profit from it big time.
This vicious circle is growing exponentially every year, but we don’t realize the harm it does not only to those poor chickens but to our planet. Besides the social factors, it is interesting to see how we play God by enforcing evolution based on our demands and the wish for profitability. I think humans are the only organism that is naturally evolving into selfish and evil beings, however, if we look back in history, they have always been like that.
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