Trump, Chicken Welfare, MAHA, And The Battle for Chickens’ Souls
Chickens are stuck in the middle of a cultural and political war they never deserved to be a part of
Poor little chicken. All it wants is to live its life the way God intended, scratching about and trying not to get eaten by foxes.
They certainly didn’t mean to become part of cultural and political warfare.
Yet, they are.
Trump is using them as a political bargaining chip.
“Make America Healthy Again” types have co-opted chickens as the poster animal for the ultimate homesteading lifestyle. At the same time, chickens — especially factory farmed birds reared in appalling, torturous conditions — embody exactly what is wrong with our food systems.
Yet chicken is the most popular meat in the world. We slaughter 74 billion of them a year. Health enthusiasts love them for their protein content. Anyone who grew up with Sunday roasts loves them for their nostalgia. And 87% of Americans eat eggs at least once a week.
They are the symbol of everything from the darkest side of modern food systems to tradwifery, to capitalism, to health.
Chickens are not just chickens. They stand for something.
With that is a battle for their very souls. And none of them are getting out alive.
The battle between battery and backyard chicken lore
Think about a chicken. How does that look to you?
You could think about the worst side of chicken welfare. The factory farm where 99% of the US’s meat is reared. Profits from pain. High stocking densities. Chickens so diseased in the US they dip their carcasses in chlorine to kill bacteria. A process banned in other parts of the world, including the EU.
Perhaps you’re thinking about the latest bird flu outbreak which, as the excellent
writes, was probably always on the cards:An outbreak of some kind of zoonotic disease that would decimate our factory farms has been forecast by scientists for decades because of the unsanitary and cruel conditions we keep the animals in.
Or perhaps your brain went a different way. Maybe it thought of the backyard chicken. Happy, free-range birds chased by children in overalls. Coops to keep families in a healthy supply of eggs.
Who is overseeing those happy chickens? Is it a “crunchy” hippie-type who protests for animal rights on the weekends? Or is it a MAHA-loving tradwife who doesn’t trust Big Chicken? Thanks to the crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline, it could be either.
Maybe your brain went to the chickens’ position in politics. Like Trump’s agriculture secretary, who recently said it would be “awesome” if more Americans had personal chicken coops to help mitigate those rising egg and meat costs, conveniently ignoring how expensive it is to rear chickens. Not to mention impossible for those living with little to no outside space.
Or Trump’s recent indication that Britain could have relief from sweeping tariffs if they agree to import that chlorinated chicken.
This is the strange position the chicken occupies in our cultural zeitgeist. It isn’t just an animal, it’s a symbol. If you rear them, what does that say about you as a person? If you buy them in the store, how much suffering are you prepared for your chicken to go through for their meat or eggs?
Or as the meme goes:
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One of the weirdest parts about being in modern society is standing at the egg aisle in a grocery store and trying to figure out what level of chicken happiness you can afford.
It’s hardly surprising that chickens — arguably more than any other reared-for-meat animal — occupy this cultural and political space. They are popular. The most popular.
Chicken’s fate was sealed with a mistake
One of the most interesting things I found in my research for this story is how chickens became so popular in the first place. Back in the early 1900s, a small Delaware farm accidentally ordered 500 chickens instead of 50. Because chickens back then were kept primarily for eggs —and no farm needed thousands of eggs per day — they raised them for meat instead. Five months later, they were sold for a massive profit.
Farmers in the area followed suit, and a new chicken boom was born.
A few decades later in the 1940s, the US launched the Chicken of Tomorrow contest. This encouraged farmers to breed faster-growing chickens with bigger breasts and more meat per bird. These breeds are still used today.
Thanks to the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, chickens became the next big thing in meat. They were such an easy, quick and relatively inexpensive source of protein that their popularity soared in the coming decades.
In 1961, poultry totalled 7.5 million tonnes. Now, it’s 140 million. Prices have been slashed, too. Food consumer journalist
explains exactly how much in a recent podcast for The Times:In 1974, an oven-ready chicken cost 66p per kilo (£8.69 per kilo adjusted for inflation)…now, Aldi, the cheapest chicken I can find is £2.55 per kilo.
We cannot get enough, but that is hardly a surprise. For a start, chicken has health professionals on its side. We’ve long been told that white meat is healthier than red meat. It is also accepted in most major religions, the same of which can’t be said for pork or beef.
Chickens are not only relatively healthy, cheap and religion-approved, they are also nostalgic. The Sunday roast is arguably the ultimate symbol of comfort. Simon Hopkinson’s book Roast Chicken and Other Stories is hugely popular for a reason.
What home cooking started, food corporations ran with. KFC has around 32,000 branches worldwide. Here in Portugal, the churrasqueira — restaurants and takeaway outlets where chickens are roasted over coals — is big business. You only have to ask Nando’s how big the churrasqueira model can become with a little bit of branding and business strategy.
Then there is the recent protein boom. We are a world obsessed with getting our protein intake. Chicken breasts have some of the highest levels of protein per gram in the food world. Eggs have forever been referenced by the medical community as a high-protein source. They are so popular that egg pots — two unadorned boiled eggs — are now the most popular snack in UK supermarket Tesco’s meal deal.
These egg pots used to contain free-range eggs, but shoppers have noticed that is no longer the case. Demand, it seems, has outstripped welfare concerns.
Whoever has been doing chicken’s PR for the last 30 years has been doing something right. And because of that, the poor little chicken has landed itself right in the middle of that cultural and political war.
One it never asked for and frankly, never deserved.
As with all macro problems, there is no single answer to the chicken conundrum.
Buying better can be prohibitively expensive. A regular supermarket chicken in the UK, for instance, costs around £3.88 a kilo. A free-range bird? That’ll be £7.50 a kilo. More, if you want organic or a specialist breed.
The same goes for eggs, especially in light of the recent bird flu epidemic, which has seen average egg prices hit a record $6.22 a dozen. Not that everyone believes high prices are entirely bird flu’s fault. The US’s largest egg corporation recently posted massive profits after all:
Farmer and food justice advocates have accused Cal-Maine, and other egg companies, of exploiting the latest bird flu outbreak to raise prices well above what supply and demand would predict.
Keeping chickens may sound idyllic, but I looked after some for a couple of months, so I know how hard that can be. Whilst gathering your own chickens’ eggs in the morning is life-affirming, chickens are both expensive and time-consuming to keep, not to mention impossible if you don’t have land.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do something. To mitigate Big Chicken, chlorinated chicken imports and MAHA chicken appropriation.
Like doing as our parents did and eating chicken as a treat, not as an everyday convenience. Like finding alternative protein sources. Like buying better chicken meat and eggs when we can. Like petitioning for Britain to hold firm against chicken-based political blackmail.
Chickens — and their souls — deserve more than the lot they’ve been given on this earth. Only we can make amends the best we can.
Yeah, we kept watch over chickens for a bit and it was mostly fine, but a bit nerve-wracking at time. And, roast chicken is probably the most common food we buy -- usually locally! -- as we travel the world. (I even devoted a newsletter to it -- and how bad the Costco chicken is.)
I won't pretend to have any answers, especially when I already feel overwhelmed by soooo many of the world's problems.
Great article! There are a few really enlightening documentaries out there about how chickens are treated and raised here in the US. It’s terrifying in the conditions they are raised in, the way they are treated to grow fast, and the processing of the meat that Americans eat. For multiple reasons, we have chosen to forego meat products in our diet.