The World Eats Six Times More Chickens Than In 1961
The average person now consumes around six times more chicken flesh than someone did in 1961. Global poultry supply rose from less than three kilograms per person to 17 kilograms between 1961 and 2022. “Pork’ supply doubled. Total meat production quadrupled.
Even after accounting for population growth, the amount supplied per person rose from 25 kilograms to 47 kilograms. This is regularly presented as changing consumer preference. It was nothing of the sort.
Chicken flesh consumption exploded because the industry transformed living birds into the cheapest, fastest-growing and most aggressively marketed source of animal flesh available.
Their bodies were redesigned. Their lives were compressed. Their suffering was hidden inside sheds holding tens of thousands of birds. Then chicken was sold to the public as the healthy and environmentally responsible choice.
Bred To Grow And Die
Chickens farmed for their flesh have been selectively bred to grow as much muscle as possible in the shortest possible time.
Commercial growth rates increased by more than 400% between 1957 and 2005. Modern fast-growing chickens can gain more than 60 grams every day and reach slaughter weight at around six weeks old.
Their skeletons and organs cannot keep pace.
Many experience joint pain, skeletal deformities, lameness, heart disease, respiratory distress and fluid around their organs. Some lose the ability to walk. Others struggle to reach food and water. Fast-growing chickens may spend up to 80% of their day sitting because moving has become painful or impossible. Foraging, perching, dust-bathing and exploring are replaced by the physical task of surviving inside a body engineered for somebody else’s profit.
Even their parents suffer.
Chickens used for breeding are deliberately denied enough food because allowing them to eat freely would cause the same rapid growth that their offspring are bred to experience. They live with chronic hunger so the industry can continue producing billions of chicks.
The system did not become cruel while trying to produce cheap chicken. Cruelty is how cheap chicken was produced.
The Healthy Chicken Myth
Chicken has been given a health halo that other forms of animal flesh have largely lost.
It is described as lean, clean and high in protein. People are encouraged to replace cows and pigs with chickens, often without being told that beans, lentils, tofu and other plant proteins are the actual alternative.
A 2026 US poll found that 36% of adults believed chicken could reduce the risk of high cholesterol. Another 18% thought the same about eggs. Chicken does not lower cholesterol. Chicken contains cholesterol.
An Italian study following 4,869 adults for nearly 20 years also found that eating more than 300 grams of poultry each week was associated with twice the risk of dying from gastrointestinal cancer and a 27% higher risk of death overall. The study was observational and cannot prove chicken caused those deaths. The researchers also acknowledged several limitations. But it adds to the evidence that chicken’s reputation as a uniquely healthy food was never as secure as the marketing suggested. The health halo did not simply mislead consumers.
It condemned more chickens.
Environmental advice has created a similar problem.
Cows produce more greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of flesh than chickens. That has encouraged governments, campaigners and consumers to describe chicken as a lower-carbon replacement for beef.
But kilograms are not individuals.
It can take nearly 200 chickens to produce the same quantity of flesh taken from one cow. Replacing one large victim with hundreds of smaller victims may reduce emissions per kilogram while massively increasing the number of animals bred, confined and killed. This is known as the small body problem.
A 2025 meta-analysis found no overall evidence that animal-product reduction campaigns consistently cause people to replace cows and pigs with chickens and fishes. However, the studies were highly inconsistent, some interventions did increase consumption of smaller animals, and many failed to reduce animal consumption at all. The historical trend is less ambiguous.
Chicken consumption has increased sixfold. Around 70 billion chickens are now slaughtered globally every year, vastly outnumbering cows, pigs and sheep combined.
Calling chicken a climate-friendly form of animal flesh does not make those deaths disappear.
The Reform Trap
Norway has committed to phasing out fast-growing chickens by 2027. Similar corporate campaigns across Europe are pushing companies towards slower-growing breeds, reduced crowding and more opportunities for birds to move and behave naturally. These changes can reduce severe suffering. Research has found that slower-growing chickens experience less lameness, fewer cardiovascular problems, lower mortality and dramatically less extreme pain. Antibiotic use may also fall sharply. But maintaining the same demand for chicken creates another problem.
Slower-growing birds remain on farms for longer and require more feed, land, housing and energy. One European analysis found that moving to slower-growing birds increased land use by 14% and greenhouse gas emissions by up to 11% after processing. Another study estimated emissions increases of between 15% and 30%, depending on the breed.
A farm-scale model found that switching to slower-growing chickens could reduce excruciating pain by 91%. Yet meeting unchanged demand could require 48% more birds and increase the total time chickens spend on farms by 69%.
This is the trap.
Breed chickens for extreme growth and their bodies collapse.
Allow them to grow more slowly and the industry uses more land, feed and animals to produce the same quantity of flesh.
Neither option gives chickens freedom. Both begin from the assumption that their bodies belong to us.
The Pollution Leaves The Shed
The sixfold increase in consumption also required a physical transformation of the countryside.
More than 24,000 intensive pig and poultry farms now operate across Europe. The UK has 1,553 industrial poultry units holding at least 40,000 birds at a time.
In the Severn and Wye Valleys, there are reportedly 79 chickens for every human. Their waste does not disappear when supermarket packaging hides the farm. Chicken manure contains high concentrations of phosphorus, which can strip oxygen from rivers and contribute to the destruction of aquatic ecosystems. Industrial farms in England have recorded nearly 7,000 environmental breaches since 2015. Environment Agency inspectors found some form of non-compliance during three-quarters of inspections, yet recommended prosecution in fewer than 1% of cases.
Cheap chicken means crowded sheds, broken bodies, polluted rivers and regulators repeatedly asking the industry to please behave itself.
The FAO Finds Everything Except The Answer
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has now documented the rise in animal consumption, the regional inequality, the climate consequences and the likelihood that production will continue growing. Its own framework recognises that consumption is shaped by availability, price, marketing, convenience and regulation. Food choices do not emerge from nowhere. Governments and corporations construct the environment in which those choices are made.
Yet the FAO report stops short of telling wealthy countries to reduce animal consumption.
Instead, the preferred response remains innovation, efficiency and attempts to reduce the damage caused by production.
This is particularly absurd as another joint FAO report warns that extreme heat is already damaging agriculture, threatening workers and creating a feedback loop in which production losses encourage expansion, generating more emissions and even more warming. The organisation can identify every stage of the crisis.
It just cannot bring itself to challenge the industry causing it.
Replace Chicken With Plants
The UK Climate Change Committee is less evasive.
Its pathway to Net Zero assumes that, by 2040, 25% of meat and 20% of dairy will be replaced with lower-carbon foods, including legumes and plant-based alternatives. The aim is to reduce the number of animals farmed and release land for woodland and other forms of ecological restoration. That transition will not happen through vague appeals to eat “less red meat”. It requires governments, retailers, restaurants and public institutions to make plant-based food cheaper, more visible and more convenient.
Research into the small body problem found that choice architecture was the most promising approach. Making plant-based meals prominent, normal or default reduced the selection of smaller animals without encouraging substitution between species.
People do not need another supposedly responsible animal to consume. They need access to food that does not require an animal at all.
Chicken consumption has increased sixfold because chickens were engineered for rapid growth, hidden inside industrial farms and marketed as a healthy climate solution.
They are none of those things.
They are individuals whose bodies have been redesigned to serve an industry.
The answer is not a more efficient chicken, a slower-growing chicken or a chicken with a greener label. The answer is to stop eating them.