What happened to chicken.

I can’t say I recommend this essay in the New Yorker. Food is not too cheap or too expensive. It’s too cheap in America and too expensive in the developing world and those two conditions are directly related. Nevertheless, the essay does include a very good explanation of why the chicken you buy in the supermarket these isn’t what it used to be:

Roberts has a powerful passage on industrial chicken, showing how its vile flesh is a direct consequence of its status as economic commodity. In the nineteen-seventies, it took ten weeks to raise a broiler; now it takes forty days in a dark and crowded shed, because farmers are under constant pressure to cut costs and increase productivity. Every cook knows that chicken breast is no longer what it once was—it’s now remarkably flabby and yielding. Roberts reveals that poultry experts have a term for this: P.S.E., or “pale, soft, exudative” meat. Today’s birds, Roberts shows, are bred to be top-heavy, in order to satisfy consumers’ desire for “healthy” white meat at affordable prices. In these Sumo-breasted monsters, a vast volume of lactic acid is released upon death, damaging the proteins—hence the crumbly meat. Poultry firms deal with P.S.E. after the fact, pumping the flaccid breast with salts and phosphates to keep it artificially juicier. What they don’t do is try particularly hard to prevent P.S.E. They can’t afford to. The average U.S. consumer eats eighty-seven pounds of chicken a year—twice as much as in 1980—but this generates a profit of only two cents per pound for the farmer.

Roberts is Paul Roberts, and I’m buying his book The End of Food on the basis of that passage alone. I’ve previously written about problems with chicken at Wal-Mart. It’ll be nice to be able to explain them in better detail.