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

twitter.com

50 pointsdoener23 comments

Discussed previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31058636

I remember coming to the US for the first time in 2014 as a tourist and went to KFC, assuming it would be the ultimate version of what we, the Poles, had known and liked since the 90s. There were two surprises:

1) it tasted way, WAY worse than Polish version, we couldn't even finish it. When I asked for the spicy ones while ordering, I was given a weird look and told in response that they had 'hot sauces available if I wanted it hot'. Later, after moving to the US, I found Popeye's more akin to the taste from the homeland,

2) the US chicken tenders were the size of EU chicken breast. Now this Twitter thread stresses the breed, but that breed could be also grown in EU, so I wonder what's the actual explanation for the difference?

I'm no expert, but my assumption for both is more liberal antibiotic use and the quality of the feedstock. Free ranging chickens (in my experience) taste better than battery-farmed ones. I don't think the chicken KFC buys is free-ranging. As for your second point, antibiotics are often used to get chickens fatter than they can get naturally within a very short timeframe. This publication[1] (from 2018) goes into some detail about the entire practice.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29537307/

assuming it would be the ultimate version of what we, the Poles, had known and liked since the 90s

That's generally not how fast food chains work. When expanding to a new country they don't just sell the same recipe they use at home. They do market testing and tailor the recipe for maximum appeal to local tastes. For most people fast food is always going to taste best at home.

> That's generally not how fast food chains work

Well, the KFC brand is a franchise in this part of the world, so they probably had even more freedom in their recipe. But it's not just "taste best at home" thing, the difference in quality is staggering. As I said, Popeye's tastes way better than US KFC, and it's rather a common opinion in the US.

Chicken tenders don't have anything to do with the size of the chicken - they're basically chicken nuggets which are made from... "pink slime" is the the term I've heard used but that's clearly pejorative though probably descriptively accurate. Anyhow it's liquified chicken poured into a mold, take of that what you will.

I cook whole chickens very frequently, 1-2 times a week for the past few years, and the sizes of the birds described is not something I have ever even seen on the market. The average whole chicken I see is about 3 1/2 lbs, or 1.6 kg. Some are under 3 lbs and the largest I see in stores is about 5 lbs/2.2 kg. Certainly not over 4 kg - a 9 lb chicken would be massive, more like a small turkey. It could be that I buy organic/free-range chickens, but I haven't ever seen a 9 lb chicken for sale or any parts that would appear to come from a 9 lb chicken.

You’re talking about dress weight, whereas most of the stats and infographics in that Twitter thread are about live weight. You lose plenty of mass (often a quarter) when you pluck, gut, and dress a chicken.

Of course that doesn’t account for the whole difference. I have looked into raising Cornish Cross in my small farm, the “Frankenstein” breed the thread derides. And the expected live weight at slaughter age for the specific ones [1] I’m considering is 4.5lb for hens and 6lb for cockerels.

1: https://www.cacklehatchery.com/product/jumbo-cornish-cross/

I forgot to reply earlier, but that's a good point and I didn't think of that. I would imagine that the live chicken weighed about 4.5-5 lbs too.

I've noticed a substantial difference between the breast size of whole chickens vs the boneless chicken breasts that you see in large packs in common grocery stores. A boneless breast will sometimes have more than twice the meat as a bone-in breast.

The whole chickens I get from a local farmer look more like the "1978 model", but I've often wondered what the chickens providing those massive boneless breasts look like.

> I've often wondered what the chickens providing those massive boneless breasts look like.

They are twisted mutants that in some cases literally cannot walk: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/chickens-cant-w/

I buy a lot of whole chickens, too. The biggest birds I find from industrial farms (like Perdue) hover around 5lb max. The birds from smaller farms hover around 3lb, basically what you see.

I do see some chicken leg quarters and split breasts that seem to be suspiciously large, but not nearly twice as large as the Perdue 5 pounders! The big birds might just get sold to fast food/fast casual restaurants and not to regular joes like us. I also think it is possible that they buy enough more chickens than we do to weigh any averages towards them as well.

My wife and I try to keep our meat intake very low, but we do occasionally buy whole free range chickens (yes, they are smaller) and beef that is 100% grass fed (no feed lots just before slaughter) that is noticeably different because it is incredibly lower fat than industrially raised beef. $Expensive$

People get to make their own choices. For myself, I feel better physically if I eat meat about once a week, just a small portion. I would like to be a vegan or vegetarian, but I think I do better with a tiny amount of meat in my diet.

When we buy meat, I like to cook it all and immediately freeze some portions for future use, mostly in soups. That really saves shopping and prep time.

Even twitter threads are headlined by clickbait!

Here is what this means for your health.

All those tweets and not one was about what this means for our health...

Morgan Spurlock did a sequel to Super Size Me (Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken) and it's a great deep dive into the chicken industry. He describes the growth of chickens that this article touches upon, but you can see the size differences with the chickens he raises. He buys the broilers as chicks and raises them for a few weeks until slaughter, touching upon "cage free", "free range" and all the other buzzwords. Most surprising to me was just a few minutes where they talk about the chickens becoming so big, so fast, that a few dozen die before slaughter from heart attacks, broken legs, or just suffocation from their sheer size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me_2:_Holy_Chicken!

If you love chicken, find a local farmer. I grew up raising chickens for 4H, and we never bought meat or eggs. Go down to your county fair this year and buy a few for the freezer. It is absolutely a night and day difference from anything you will find at the store.

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

This thread does hit on one thing that's actually really important here and it's the age of the chicken. There's an optimal age to hit for flavor. For anyone that cares about this, it's of course a good idea to get a more standard chicken at the store, but if you can find a local farm to buy chicken from you're much better off because you can often specify slaughter windows. The difference in flavor is massive, and it makes a significant difference in recipes.

A lot of what is unhealthy about meat in current times is that for flavor reasons it has to have a very large amount of salt used when preparing it. This is true across different meat types, but perhaps most true for chicken. Chicken is often injected with flavoring components or with salt water, or brine bathed prior to cooking as part of the process to make it taste good. All of this is unnecessary if you buy quality chickens from a farm. Instead, you need just a pinch or so of salt under the skin on each side of the bird before you cook it (salt won't penetrate the skin) and you can dry brine it for a few hours in the fridge like you would with a good steak. Salt, of course, is a critical flavoring component for nearly any type of cooking, but the amount of salt in our food continues to increase over time to make up for the complete lack of flavor in the raw ingredients.

They have a mention of Julia Child in the thread. IF you ever get into classic French cooking, it's all about focusing on "using the best ingredients possible and then trying not to mess it up." That is, if you use high quality and flavorful ingredients, you don't need to drown them out in strong flavors. Just some fresh green herbs and a small amount of sea salt is all that's needed to season chicken if it's good, and the subtle flavors of the herbs will really enhance the chicken flavor without overpowering it.

Considering chickens are basically small dinosaurs, I wonder what will happen if we continue to make them bigger.

They waddle when walking now. Another 50 years and chickens will be entirely immobile. Thats good news for Tyson since a bird that gets no exercise will consume less energy and need less food.

We've been getting weekly deliveries in Toronto from The Stubborn Farmer [1] for many years and have found their chicken to be both delicious and not freakishly oversized.

[1]: https://stubbornfarmer.com/

Free range (truly) locally sourced chicken continues to be much smaller than the pumped up big-name-brand-owned factory farmed chicken. We purchase a few months supply at a time from a local poultry and pork farmer that doesn't work with the big conglomerates. They're increasingly hard to find, but if you can find them, and your income allows, do consider supporting them. I find flavor and how that meat cooks to be superior to the factory farmed stuff, but as always YMMV.

There was a relevant podcast from The Guardian today about the chicken industry.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2022/apr/18/the-real-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com