Godzilla

I hope you took a look at the Meat Atlas link--it's a fascinating read. If you did, then you learned that global production of poultry meat products was 106.4 million tonnes (that's metric tons or 1000 kg or 2204.6 lbs) in 2013, 34.5% of the global total of animal meat produced. Poultry products are projected to increase to about 126 million tonnes by 2020 and be valued around $1000 per tonne, or $126 billion dollars globally.

That's a lot of chicken nuggets.

At the risk of horrifying you further, I will leave this here:

My advisor is really bad about citing figure sources in class lectures, which really annoys me, so I don't know where this came from. But it depicts a typical broiler chicken in 1957, 1977, and today (which is probably 2002 or so; just guessing). Just as we have genetically selected dogs to have certain body shapes and colors and sizes to please our whims (compare the labrador retreiver and Chinese crested), we have genetically selected broiler chickens to have large, meaty breasts, the part of the bird with the largest market value. As a result, within only 50 years or so, we have created an eating machine: Godzilla, the modern broiler chicken. Three out of four molecules of food that go into the broiler's mouth are converted to muscle.

Back in the 1950s, it often took 10 or 12 weeks for a bird to reach "market weight." Modern broilers reach that now in 6 weeks. They are white because making pigmented feathers wastes energy that could be redirected to muscle tissue--all of the color was selected out of these genetic lines. The same two or three broiler breeds are used worldwide in a sort of poultry monoculture.

Don't think that free range or organic chickens are always better off. There are severe restrictions on the types of feed and supplements that they can receive and most of the free-range broilers destined for market develop severe nutritional deficiencies (most environments are very nutrient poor for foraging chickens, at even small production scales, and you can't supplement their feed with vitamins because those aren't organic) and parasites (can't give drugs either, so forget prophylactic dewormers). No broilers ever receive hormones--chickens don't have the metabolism to use them and it would basically have the opposite effect than that intended--it's a complete myth that chickens receive hormones. Cows, now that's a different story. Even in small production settings, female cows are given multiple hormone shots to force the herd to ovulate at the same time so that the AI servicing can be done on all of the herd in one go.

We selected for chicken Godzilla, generation after generation of broiler chicken, to feed our own insatiable need for nuggets and breast fillets (ironically, I detest both), just as our whimsy led to myriad breeds of dogs.