How Chicken Became the World's Most Eaten Meat

Chicken is now eaten more than any other meat on Earth. According to The Conversation, poultry meat overtook pork to become the world's most consumed and most traded meat around 2017.

A domestication story that starts in Asia, not America

The chicken's journey began long before industrial farming. According to research cited by The Conversation, chickens were first domesticated 3,000 to 4,000 years ago in South Asia, in what is now Thailand, from the red jungle fowl. For most of that history chickens were small, slow-growing birds raised in small numbers for eggs and occasional meat.

Scientific research published on PubMed Central traces a long, slow increase in chicken body size from around 1340 to 1650, followed by several centuries of relative stability. The real transformation did not begin until the mid-20th century.

The U.S. contest that redesigned the chicken

The pivotal moment traces to a competition in the United States. In 1945, the grocery chain A&P — then the country's largest poultry retailer — partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to launch the "Chicken of Tomorrow" contest, seeking a bird that would, in the contest's own terms, grow bigger, faster, and put weight on "in all the right places," according to a history published by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). State and regional heats narrowed roughly 40 finalists down to a 1948 and 1951 winner: the Arbor Acres White Rocks, bred by the Saglio family of Glastonbury, Connecticut.

The winning genetics did not stay in Connecticut. IATP reports that in 1964 Nelson Rockefeller bought Arbor Acres and, through his International Basic Economy Corporation, exported the breed first to Latin America and then, via joint ventures with companies including Charoen Pokphand Foods in Asia, San Miguel Corporation in the Philippines and Mitsui & Co. in Japan, around the world. IATP states that about half of all chicken raised in China today descends from Arbor Acres genetic stock.

From 60 days to 33: the engineering of growth

The biological change behind this spread is stark. The Conversation reports that since the mid-20th century, selective breeding has cut the feed a chicken needs to gain weight roughly in half, nearly doubled breast-meat yield, and reduced the time needed to reach a 2.2-kilogram bird from about 60 days to roughly 33 days.

Independent research in PubMed Central puts the scale of change even more sharply: broiler chickens bred in 1957 weighed only one-fourth to one-fifth as much, at a given age, as 21st-century broiler breeds — an increase researchers describe as up to a fivefold rise in body mass since the mid-20th century. The same research notes that modern broilers reach slaughter weight in five to seven weeks, compared with years for the chickens' wild ancestor, the red jungle fowl, and that their growth rate is now about three times that of the jungle fowl.

This genetic concentration is now global and narrow. The Conversation identifies two companies, the American firm Cobb and the European EW-Group, as dominant suppliers of broiler genetics worldwide, while the PubMed Central research states that three companies supply about 90% of broiler chicks globally and that selective breeding has cost commercial lines 50% or more of the genetic diversity found in ancestral breeds.

An economic model built on shared risk

Chicken's commercial success also rests on how it is raised and paid for. A report by Belgian outlet Matélé on Walloon poultry supply chains (filières) describes a model in which farmers raise chickens for 56 days inside regulated buildings while a cooperative-style filière supplies chicks and feed in advance and handles slaughtering, processing and distribution afterward — reducing the farmer's upfront investment per production cycle.

Under this model, Matélé reports, roughly two-thirds of the retail price goes to the filière to cover processing, packaging and delivery, while the remaining third goes to the farmer, giving producers predictable income and lower financial risk than fully independent operations. One of the four Walloon filières described in the report, Ardenne Volaille, processes about 75,000 chickens a week, around 1% of Belgium's total poultry slaughter volume.

Why chicken wins: price, nutrition and carbon footprint

Beyond genetics and supply chains, The Conversation points to three reasons chicken has displaced other meats on plates worldwide: it is priced slightly below pork and notably below beef; it offers protein levels at least equal to those meats with less fat, along with heme iron and B vitamins; and its production generates far less greenhouse gas per kilogram — an estimated 4.56 kg of CO2-equivalent per kilogram of chicken meat, compared with about 28 kg CO2e per kilogram of beef, according to figures cited in the same analysis.

What is left out of the growth story

The same sources that document chicken's efficiency gains also flag costs to genetic diversity and, in the companion French television documentary referenced by Série News on the France 5 program "Poulet mania," to the gap between low-cost industrial production and farm-labeled chicken aimed at French consumers. The PubMed Central research notes that intensive selective breeding has reduced genetic diversity in commercial broiler lines by 50% or more compared with ancestral breeds, a trade-off that accompanies the speed and scale gains described above.