Thursday, January 11, 2024

The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

You might think the headline promises science and agriculture coming together to help reform the way we raise and process chickens. It doesn’t. Instead, Boyce Upholt tells of the 20th-century quest that changed our food system irrevocably—and how the consequences of that “progress” continue to ripple across the world. An accomplished blend of history and present-day reporting.

Is it possible to build a system of animal agriculture that deepens rather than distances our relationship with animals? One potential ideal might be a future where anyone who chooses to eat meat keeps a handful of chickens clucking through their backyards. When I raised this possibility with one epidemiologist, though, she cautioned that an expansion of such “small-holder” poultry farms could be its own pandemic risk: Now that influenza is endemic in wild birds, a more dispersed poultry production system means more potential sites for spillover.



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