Today on my favorite Charlotte radio show, The Bob and Sheri Show, Sheri started talking about chickens. And I thought, well that’s an odd conversation to be having on the radio. But it turned out to be absolutely fascinating
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Now that beef has become a luxury item, and since I need to watch my cholesterol (that’s what happens when you get older and retire) I find myself gravitating more toward plant‑based foods. Still, I do enjoy chicken and fish, and I’ll happily eat at least once a week.
So why did this chicken story grab me the way it did?
Apparently, we humans have completely changed the physique and makeup of the everyday “run around in the yard” chicken. Over the last 70 years, large poultry companies have aggressively selected for traits that maximize profit, such as:
• Faster growth
• Bigger breast meat
• Uniform size for processing
And that’s where the story really gets interesting…
It’s selective breeding at an industrial scale. Picture those big, bad‑ass chickens at Costco, the ones so hefty you practically need a spotter to lift them into your cart. There’s enough meat on those birds to feed my family of three for two nights, as long as I prepare the dishes the right way.
But here’s the sad part: their bodies grow so fast that they suffer for it. Leg deformities, heart and lung strain, reduced mobility, chronic pain, it's all baked into the biology of the modern broiler.
You can literally see the change in their bones. Compare a chicken skeleton from the 1950s to one from today and the difference in shape and composition is dramatic. As Sheri pointed out, far into the future, many, many generations from now, whatever version of humans is studying our era will be digging through landfills or what used to be backyards. And what will they find? Chicken bones. Mountains of them.
They’ll examine those bones and be stunned that such a massive physical transformation happened in just 75 years. Then they’ll compare that to the evolution of Homo sapiens—from Neanderthals all the way up to them—and realize that while it took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to show major changes, the humble chicken reinvented itself in less than a century.
And honestly, if those future beings start judging us, they won’t just be studying our technology or our crazy political environment. Oh no. They’ll zero in on the fact that we took a perfectly normal barnyard bird and said, “Nope. Needs more breast.”