The chicken you are eating has increased 364% in size over the last 50 years | Hacker News Reader

The chicken you are eating has increased 364% in size over the last 50 years

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104 pointskaycebasques90 comments

When I was a kid we raised chickens for a long time and they were pretty small. I remember getting a new variety that were huge in comparison (they finished around 8lb sometimes!) and they ended up looking great but being incredibly disappointing to eat. They tasted a lot like store-bought chicken. Big chickens are definitely less interesting on the plate in my experience.

As I recall my dad picked them because the feed to meat ratio was crazy. The chickens ended up like 2-3lb heavier on average (maybe 1/3 increase) but finished way faster and ate about the same amount. It was a no-brainer for cutting costs, and we were really poor.

Popular commercial duck breeds are similar. They're easier to turn into things you like eating I suppose, like smoked breast or confit, but flavours and textures are far less enticing and lack character. If you have the opportunity to raise your own, seek out older and more interesting breeds – there's a whole other world to explore that you'll never see in a grocery store.

I'm betting they are probably less nutritious too.

I've suspected for a long time that we are missing major stuff from out diet due to changes in both the plants and animals we eat. I look at fruit in the grocery store and it just looks unnatural to me.

Well, we are at the point where farmers have to add nutrients to soil.

Studies have found decreases over time, from the mid 20th century, to now, in vitamins and minerals in fruits and vegetables. It's due to changes in varieties, soil depletion, and increased atmospheric CO2.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/vanishing-...

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrie...

There is some evidence sugar content has increased, from varietal changes, but that's about it.

People who talk about whether food is “nutritious” are like anti-vaxxers. There’s no scientific basis to these ideas, just feels.

Yet you don't provide any evidence for your bold, asbolutist, and franckly, insulting, claim. Hence I'd say this very form of comment is closer to the proverbial facebook mum style, than somebody suggesting "I'm betting".

But allow me to actually provide some hints that, while not able to remove all doubt about the matter, nevertheless show such a theory is not an undeserving question, nor born from an irrational mind:

https://journals.ashs.org/downloadpdf/journals/hortsci/44/1/...

What are you trying to say here? That nutrition doesn't exist? It's anti-science to state that an apple has more nutritional value than a potato chip?

Specifically what the parent is referencing is the density of nutrients per unit of meat. Are you saying that all meat is uniform in nutrient density?

I'm genuinely flabbergasted by your supremely odd take on this situation.

What “nutrients” are you talking about? Vague unspecific references to “nutrients” is a red flag that you’re talking to an anti-vax type.

Vague unspecific references to anti-vaxing are to me a red-flag that somebody tries to win a debate without having to provide any argument for ones opinion, even when answered approprietly in another comment.

Wanting more information about nutrition is not comparable to being opposed to vaccines.

Nutrition is an area of study which lacks a lot of information. Even as time goes on and agriculture changes, the data we have about the food we consume appears to be out of date. There are many other factors we’re just beginning to become aware of with implications we haven’t begun to unravel.

Nutritional science and the data we have today is completely acceptable to question. Just about everything is, but nutrition seems especially open.

When I went to a Thai food market back in 2011, I was surprised to see that chicken breasts were so tiny. About the size of index and middle finger put together.

But when I got them home and cooked the flavour was so delicious. Don’t even need any sauces. It was just so good on it’s own.

> disappointing to eat

I’m halfway convinced that the recent plant-based goop phenomenon is not a story about environmental or moral concerns, but instead disillusion with the blandness of commodity meat.

Why not both!

Isn’t there an entire flavour industry?

Seems much easier fixed than trying to invent fake meat from scratch.

It's easy to optimise things that we can get numbers for, like how much food the chicken is fed and how much it weighs.

There's no number for taste, even if everyone agrees it's worse.

Similar story with strawberries. The huge ones are quite bland, whereas the small ones pack a punch. I imagine it's mostly the water content that makes them bigger, but at the same time it dilutes the taste.

Same for tomatoes as well. Homegrown tomatoes have a strong taste, whereas store-bought ones are quite weak in taste (as well as weirdly plastic).

Pretty much anything that is produced for profits will be optimized for weight and minimal production costs. Nobody cares about taste.

As far as I am aware the water content reducing flavor is a myth. For fruits and vegtables it comes down to ripening and temperature control. The majority of fruit we purchase from the super market is picked far before it's rip and is either sitting in storage/transport long enough to get acceptable flavor, gassed with certain hormones to speed up rippening before final arrival, or just straight up dyed.

Oranges from warm climates are actually green and are dyed in a lot of cases in the US. A cooler climate is needed to kill of the green pigments in the fall turning them orange.

Fate of food is an interesting book on the food supply chain: https://www.amandalittle.com/fateoffood

Food dying and our perception of flavor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FPnag_rvU8

A fun video with Paul Hollywood trying the most expensive strawberries: https://youtu.be/895DfGuoqvU

I wonder why companies don't sell smaller quantities of pricier variants of fully ripened fruit then.

Well, I know in my own garden that fully ripened food doesn’t last long even with only a 20 meter trip to my refrigerator. It’s so delicate and tends to be prime for breaking and/or decaying.

Strawberries; I used to think that, but it's only true for me locally. The important thing for delicious strawberries is that you pick them ripe. So locally the only tasty strawberries you get are small and in season, because that's local. However if you are in a place more suited for strawberries you can find large tasty strawberries picked ripe. Strawberries in a super market are picked green and ripen in transit.

Tomatoes: small tomatoes have a higher pulp to juice ratio, so are literally less watery. But again, the big ones can be quite tasty, they just need to be reduced more, which has other effects: the long cooking time changes the flavor, which you may or may not want. But the important thing for flavor is to get vine ripened tomatoes, which usually means you need to buy canned, because the time from vine to can is a lot less than from vine to super market.

obligatory: £350 Strawberry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=895DfGuoqvU

I’ve seen this on HN a lot but I just doesn’t match my experience at all.

Large strawberries are generally tastier in my opinion.

I would say there is a place for both. The "village chicken" I have eaten was indeed quite flavourful, but also had a lot of tendons and generally more chewy meat, while "broiler chicken" have more, blander but also more tender meat.

This is also part of Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me 2. Which I didn't realise existed until last week. I found it and an enjoyable/uncomfortable watch although The Guardian were less keen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me_2:_Holy_Chicke...!

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/09/super-size-me-2...

Edit: I've just discovered I probably didn't know about it because the distributor (youtube) pulled it just before release following Spurlock's #MeToo confession.

The Spurlock demise is a rather strange down spiral. He imploded his own company voluntarily based on conjecture

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/09/morgan-spurlock-metoo-conf...

Also chicken meat generally has high estrogen levels in the US, which might promote cancer.

https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/jco.2010.28.15_suppl.15...

Chicken meat in the West also tastes a lot more blander than Asian "boiler" chicken. Try McDonald's nuggets in Brazil or the Middle east or India. Doesn't need as much frying or saucing - much of which is needed for having any decent flavor and leads to obesity

McDonald's in the US only uses white meat for chicken nuggets, which is part of why they're not as tasty anymore. I don't know if that's gone global yet, but when I was in India ten years ago, it certainly wasn't and I had some really tasty McNuggets.

> “ Chicken should be so good in itself that it is an absolute delight to eat as a perfectly plain, butter roast, saute or grill.”

I said something like this to my ”modern” friends, they laughed at me for having low standard. It was something my dad used to say:

“It takes effort to make chicken tastes bad.”

We raised chicken via the natural long process. I miss that taste so much and it’s hard to explain to people.

Now, I will just point them to this tweet.

We have slow grown chicken (as one of many chicken options) here in Australia, not sure if it matches the taste from your experiences

In small scale you are 100% right. Leave them to their natural behavior and they are perfectly able to eat the right amount of grass, insects and small rodents that their egg and meat will taste great (some support grains is needed). Force them to eat only the cheapest animal feed and pick breeds that wouldn't survive in the wild, and the resulting egg and meat will have a distinct worse taste.

For small scale, chickens really are one of the most useful and easiest going animals one can have, and it is one of the things I miss living in a city.

You are right, forgot to add that. We only did this at a small scale (I.e: mostly for our own consumption).

I didn't even know chickens lived for 50 years, much less how big this one got over that time!

:^)

I remember vividly that when we moved here from Bangladesh in 1989, I couldn’t eat the chicken for months. Going from eating non-optimized chickens bought live at the market and slaughtered right before cooking to eating store bought Purdue chicken was a massive downgrade.

A couple years ago a video went viral showing a monster 16.5lb Brahma chicken from Kosovo: https://youtu.be/JWSrXUQNCtg

I buy chicken at a farmer‘s market from a farmer which has different breeds and few chickens. This reduces the amount of medicine used. The chicken is so slim that my wife first complained. Of course I pay 3 times the regular price but although I donˋt earn a FAANG salary I can afford it. Just eat less! I also recommend to visit once a chicken farm and wonder why there are dead chickens. Alternatively watch some YouTube videos.

The chickens you describe are the only ones I find acceptable for soups and stocks. Mass produced broilers just don't have enough flavor for these uses.

is there a culture of "old hen soup" where you live?

In Italy there's a folk saying, "gallina vecchia fa buon brodo" ("and old hen makes for good soup", meaning there's value in old people/stuff), and in Hungary it's relatively easy to buy a literal old hen at farmers' markets, which makes for much better soup than meat-oriented chicken.

They generally prefer the older rooster, non-broiler, heirloom varieties for soup here. You can easily find these in any village, but if you buy them downtown you'll pay about 3x. If you like the countryside it is worth the trip. You can buy other produce while you're there.

Old laying hens are usually cheaper. Not as desirable.

It's surprising that there doesn't seem to be supply meeting the demand for flavorful and nutritious food, or any attempt to manufacture demand. Organic food is similar, but not really the same thing, because organic generally has no discernible differences. For anyone who has been exposed to natural produce and meat, it's obvious that the grocery store varieties are inferior, yet unlike most goods, there are no companies exploiting this luxury market. Instead, you have to go to a farmer's market to get the quality goods. It's very unusual to have to go to a rural/amateur source for quality; more often, the big players in a product space have the quality and are expensive, while the amateurs are cheaper and worse.

I find it really hard to believe that there is no market for things like goat milk, goat ice cream, traditional meat breeds, even a good tomato? Everyone is aware that grocery store tomatoes are horrid, but somehow no stores stock some good cultivars alongside at double the price? How can this be an efficient market?

Of course it's a Twitter thread, and of course the images got accidentally clipped. How embarrassing.

The chickens we raised 40 years ago were usually a good 12-15 pounds, bigger than anything you buy in a store. And much more flavorful.

But that's because it took us 5 months to raise them rather than the 40 days that a modern bird takes.

Better readability

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1515324097223225345.html

I’m assuming this keeps chicken prices lower.

Is this a bad thing?

I guess it could be if it is because of gnarly things they’re doing, but if it is primarily breeding larger chickens, well, that sounds ok.

It really hurts their welfare since their skeletal systems were not designed to handle the additional weight and means they cannot really stand on their own. The chickens will also develop lesions/burns from laying in ammonia-soaked grounds, increasing risk of infection and causing unnecessary suffering.[0]

[0] https://www.aspca.org/sites/default/files/chix_white_paper_n...

If you prefer quantity over quality then probably not. Ever wondered how thousands of chickens can survive in one room. Well this chickens are probably not organic because you need to use something that illnesses dońt spread. And personally I think a chicken that canˋt walk normally is a problem.

The sibling replies here are interesting in that they appeal to personify the chickens

Not sure how "they taste worse" personifies the chicken, nor how pointing out that in fact chickens can suffer personifies the chicken either (well, I guess only people can suffer...).

Chickens are sentient just like us.

> Is this a bad thing?

Thread argues that modern chicken is less tasty:

> Modern chicken is notorious for being "dry, "bland," and "flavorless." Contrast this to the 1960s, where chicken was considered a delicacy. "Chicken should be so good in itself that it is an absolute delight to eat as a perfectly plain, butter roast, saute or grill."

Thread also argues that fat profile is out-of-whack due to modern chickens being fed diets that are different from what they ate in nature:

> Conventional Grain-Fed birds have an Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio that can be as high as 17:1. Contrast this to a pasture-raised chicken, which has an Omega 6 to Omega-3 ratio of 6:1.

I haven't heard of this ratio before. Supposedly a smaller ratio between the 2 types of fat is healthier.

"flavorless" is exactly what the industry wants. This allows easy control of the taste during processing. This is why the chicken "wings" you buy in your well-knownfast food restaurant taste the same everywhere and every single day of the year.

That seems backwards and hard to believe. They could use the same chickens and would need less sauce frying and spice

This is backwards for a cook who tries to enhance the intrinsic taste, texture of some good ingredients.

But the industry wants a constant taste, texture on a massive scale. The only solution is to produce on one side the needed spices (easy to control the taste) an apply it on a relative tasteless substrate. It means that you do not need to adapt the recipe during production.

Source: wife worked a couple of years for Unilever, some of my customers are in the flagrance, food additives industry.

It's important that the chicken breast sandwich from McDonald's has exactly the same taste and texture whether you get it from San Francisco or Toronto. Might not be important to you, but it's important to McDonald's.

It's not that I find these arguments false or anything like that but I always notice a seeming lack of awareness that the extra food produced by these chickens or gmo corn or whatever actually saves lives.

Complaining about taste and fat content is a luxury not everyone can afford and I think a lot of the "natural" foods type of people take that for granted.

As an anecdote, I spent time in that margin-- where the presence of mass-produced, 'optimized' food probably meant the difference between my being able to afford enough food vs not-- but I consistently dreaded these sorts of 'inflated' foods, where nutrients had clearly been deprioritized for quantity. This chicken situation is one case, but they show up in a few forms in the US, and are particularly endemic to food deserts, where it can be genuinely hard to find food that hasn't been preserved or 'optimized' beyond the pale. As you said, yes, it certainly beat starving, but I would've rather had better food distributed more effectively. I believe we can have both.

By this logic, complaining about how inhumane and painful it is for these unnaturally bred chickens is also a class luxury.

Does sacrificing food quality for quantity really save lives, or does it just allow for population increase, with similar levels of suffering at the margins?

This is a controversial question. To pick a popular example, estimates of lives saved by the Green Revolution range from the billions to the hundred thousands, and you don't have to look hard to find arguments that this shift in agricultural technology increased the number of people living in poverty. The advent of agriculture precipated explosions in food production and population growth along side a major decrease in living standards that persisted for millennia. One well-documented side effect of this transition is a vastly increased susceptibility to epidemics.

When presented with a surplus of a resource, humans have an interesting tendency to simply use up more of it until a shortage reappears. Maybe this is why I have to use so many electron apps.

It doesn't save lives, it just allows more breeding. As long as the population is growing, we are in a food surplus. More expensive food would just result in people having ~2 kids instead of 3, and the excess famine would resolve itself quickly and return to equilibrium. Likewise, if all food suddenly became half as expensive today, the only thing that would happen is that people would have more children until the food is back to "saving lives".

The implicit context of this thread (like with a lot of Internet nutrition discussion) is that rising obesity rates over the past half century or so indicate something has gone wrong with our diets. The author is suggesting that this could be one piece of the puzzle.

There is a lot wrong with diets in developed countries, but it's not chicken, or at least chicken is way down the list of offenders.

AIUI the biggest dietary culprit is the insidious infiltration of sugars into the foods that many people eat. Much of the prepared, convenience foods people rely on contain sugars that even dedicated label-readers may not be able to readily identify. A whole laundry list of cane sugar, sucrose, high-fructose syrup, rice syrup, honey, invert syrup, molasses, panela, muscovado, etc.

Unless they're sneaking sugars into chicken, sure doesn't seem that it would be the main problem.

It is a bad thing. We should go back to where only the middle class can afford quality protein like chicken.

Let the poor eat beans I always say!

one could also eat less and receive the same nutritional benefits. today's giant chickens do not seem to be nutritionally dense, flavorful and the unnatural steroids and estrogen levels are certainly worse consumed, than not

Today's chickens have more muscle mass. They are bred for this trait.

Are you arguing this larger muscle isn't made of protein? What is it made out of then?

Are you arguing these chickens somehow survive without the nutrients that others chickens need to live? How is that possible?

Those are some pretty tall claims you need to back up.

Are you implying that malnutrition or a nutrient deficiency results in immediate death? Death quicker than the 50 days it takes to butcher the chicken?

Are you implying farmers raise these fast-growing, extra-large birds through "malnutrition and nutrient deficiency"?

Yes, I am. Because I am active in the weightlifting community, I'm aware that muscle size has absolutely no correlation with nutrition or micronutrients beyond protein intake. This is extremely obvious if you ever took steroids, because you can become huge eating McDonald's and instant noodle, but even without them the same effect is observed.

So you're saying it's possible to gain massive muscle mass while being, to quote you - "malnourished and having nutrient deficiencies"?

Yes, it is. Nutrition is more than calories. Just as you can become obese with nutrient deficiencies, you can also become muscular with them.

“Quality” protein is found in plants as well as animals.

There’s no reason that eating chicken is better for a person than eating plants, especially with current state of plant-based foods and recipes that are available making it easy to eat delicious plant-based foods that aren’t just a bowl of beans.

yeah, but protein-dense plants cause flatulence

I never said it was better, I'm in complete agreement it's a preference.

Are you prepared to have chicken at $10/lb? Make it a luxury only the middle class can afford?

There are quality issues with these chickens: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3277097/

Probably doesn't make a huge difference for your health, but it's not a very nice culinary experience to find a dead/diseased muscle in the chicken you're eating. Consume enough KFC and it will happen.

It looks green, by the way.

What was the 364% grows caused by?

Is this due to selection (like a modern corn we have) or antibiotics being fed to the livestock? (of course, the answer is both but maybe I am missing something).

And a question to a no-tasty-chicken-in-markets adepts, have you (or your farmer/supplier) ever tried to take a modern-genetics chicken and feed them with no antibiotics or other grow-stimulators - what is the taste?

Antibiotics doesn't lead to growth, it prevents infection and diseases.

They are/have been also used to promote growth. That's banned in the EU at least, but I think American producers still do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Gr...

Hmm, probably because the chicken's gut flora doesn't consume the calories.

Most of farmers buying big loads of antibiotics are not doctors/veterinars. Maybe they are just too hacker-minded if they use to convert meds to extra gains from meat. And from my experience chicken are not that vulnerable to diseases, like rabbits for example.

It always feels weird when I pull a chicken breast out for dinner and it is bigger than my own breast muscle; I grew up with chickens and long intuited something was up but didn't know the numbers were that striking. Parallels to what has happened over the past several decades in the vegetable crop; nutrition, flavor and quality vs. sheer quantity.

Chicken breast are injected with lots and lots of water.

On flavour, I've had my share of OG scrawny chickens raised in rural backyards in developing countries that I assume aren't Scientifically Manufactured Frankenbirds and TBH I prefer the latter in terms of dark meat. I don't care much for white meat eitherway.

It's an animal welfare nightmare. Many of these animals are growing too fast to support their own body weight and can barely move by the time they're sent to their deaths.

What do they do with other animals used for food production? Is this only done with chicken? I'm not sure I would dare eat meats produced in the U.S.

I say, if someone eats a chicken for at least 50 years, small wonder that it has increased 364% in size in the meantime.

How much has the egg changed?

And how were the chicken and egg 1000 years ago?

the rallying cry used to be "a chicken in every pot!"....now it will be "a gigantic chicken in every pot!"

Great, love more chicken.

> The chicken you are eating has increased 364% in size over the last 50 years

1) I'm not eating anything, let alone a chicken. 2) There aren't any 50 year old chickens. 3) My size has increased way more than 364% over the last 50 years.

Food today is so much better than in the 60s. You’d have hard time convincing anyone today that heritage chickens are a delicacy. They’re much better than mass produced supermarket chicken, but still fairly bland and flavorless.

I pretty much only buy poulets de Bresse. Far nicer than regular supermarket chicken? Sure. Still boring without extensive preparation? yep.

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