America Is Divided Over Everything...Except Chicken

We Americans love beef, which is a fact that will surprise exactly no one. The US is, after all, the biggest producer and consumer of beef products in the world, and yet beef is not, in fact the meat Americans choose most. That distinction belongs to chicken. We eat way more chicken and chicken wings, chicken sandwiches, chicken nuggets than

You can get a bird to market now in about seven weeks, and it's twice as big as it was in the twenties and thirties.

And how the nune to two please beef industry is working to climb back.

They need more of different products to get beef into people's stomachs because right now people aren't going out and eating steaks as much as they used to, and things like that.

And a little later we'll also hear from historian Emmelyn Roode. She's written a book about America's chicken obsession.

I had to see the chicken industry growing bigger, expanding abroad, producing ever more chicken.

Endless chicken is what I predict.

I'm West Kasova today on the Big take the battle for center place on your dinner plate, Matt. This is not actually the story you set out to write, is it.

It's not. The initial story was very simply gen z, which are you know? Twenty somethings weren't really eating beef as much, and Leslie had talked to I think an executive at Taco Bell basically saying we're doing everything we can to get more chicken in front of our customers. And then we sort of had that story and it was like a nice story, was interesting, but I started thinking, well, why is chicken so popular? How did it even get to this place? And the next step was, well, what

Just to paint the picture, I mean, in terms of consumption, we eat about double chicken as we do beef per capitall, I mean roughly fifty pounds of beef per person and one hundred pounds of chicken per person every year. It's not even close. And chicken has been taking share from beef and arguably from pork too.

For a while.

And the size of the beef industry is about eighty five billion dollars, which is a huge industry, and that doesn't even include the meat packing industry. That's another three hundred billion dollars. Granted, that's all kinds of meat that they process, so chicken, beef, and pork.

And this decline in beef is kind of a big deal in the US, right because the US is the biggest beef producer in the world.

Yes, the biggest beef producer, it's also the biggest beef consumer. The companies or the entities raising cattle are these little, mostly cattle farms run by a single family. There's roughly seven hundred thousand of them in the United States. It's a big industry, but it's dominated by these small, little family run farms.

And that's different from the chicken industry.

That's right.

The chicken industry is largely vertically integrated, so you have the same companies handling everything from the hatcheries all the way up to bringing it to market in the grocery store.

So here's the big question, why has there been this generational shift away from beef in toward chicken.

The meat industry, whatever they produce, whether it be beef, chicken, pork, we eat it.

So a lot of it boils down to how much is there.

And these chicken companies have been able to just ramp up production with bigger birds faster to market. You can get a bird to market now in about seven weeks and it's twice as big as it was in the twenties and thirties. So a lot of it is just a supply thing.

Yeah, And if you look at the beef industry, I mean, it was the dominant meat consumption industry in America for decades. The consumption pattern goes up and up and up until the seventies when the US government for the first time puts out these nutritional guidelines, and what they basically say is Americans should eat less red meat, eat less beef to reduce the risk of heart disease, and also eat

And lessly when that was happening, when beef was kind of slowly riding down. The beef industry made this big push to try to make America want to eat more beef again.

Yeah, and the big one that I think most people can remember is the Beef It's What's for Dinner ad.

You can have a great beef dinner and lo time at all, well, with almost no time at all.

Beef It's What's for Dinner.

The ad really drove home the message that beef is part of this kind of like American way of life. It was versatile too, with everything you could flavor it however you wanted. You could eat a Kung pal steak, you could have burgers on the grill, you could have a casual ribi here and there. It was a versatile meat too, which is kind of interesting. Now arguably, I think chicken has taken over that kind of versatility type message.

It was definitely a big marketing effort. And the Beef Board is this sort of quasi government entity where it's funded by each purchase of a cow. Dollar goes to the Beef Board. And these boards exist for all different kinds of products. They're overseen by the Department of Agriculture. It's everything from cheese to pork, to avocados to popcorn, and the big goal is to increase the consumption and demand for these products, these US made products, these US produced products.

Well, what's really interesting about the Beef Board too, is like here you have the US government saying, hey, Americans, don't eat as much meat because it's not good for you, and then you have this quasi governmental body pushing meat, advertising meat to the very same people. And so it seems like the US government was giving very mixed messages about what Americans should be eating.

Yeah, that point has been made for sure that it seems hypocritical to say, you know, this thing is potentially bad for you, but hey, we're going to create this entity that will fund campaigns and commercials and you know, educational programs to get people more interested in beef.

Leslie. At the same time that beef is becoming less popular and the US government is warning people off of it, chicken is like rising really quickly, and they too, were really pushing to make that happen. It wasn't just like an accident.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean a lot of it comes down to again, that supply factor.

So these companies are breeding chickens to be bigger faster basically, so they have giant breasts. Now it comes down to like an animal welfare issue. Then at some point and people are realizing this more and more that these chickens are grown so big so quickly that they're not able to have proper organ function and their lives are horrible.

Yeah, and if you look at restaurants, I mean the hottest thing in restaurants is chicken. And we have the fried chicken sandwich, wars.

Guys New Buffalo Rans chicken sandwiches, get or sells things up.

Yeah, tainly McDonald's spicy Crispy chicken sandwich donald.

The choice is yours, the hoard yourself with any of the all new Royal Chrisby chicken sandwiches today, all the Egburger key.

And a lot of that is because won the price. But also it's like chicken can be put into anything. That's another advantage that it has over beef and beef you know, through its marketing and some of the other things. Is trying to lessen that gap and say like, hey, we're versattle too, but chicken still dominates in that respect as well.

So here we are. We've come to this place where chicken is just so much more popular than beef, and you auctually have the results of a survey that kind of explained why can you just tell us what do people say about why they're eating so much more chicken than they are beef?

Right now, let's start with hells right, that's one of the biggest things in our poll.

We found that fifty eight percent of people said chicken was healthier, seven percent said beef, about twenty three percent said it was equal. So you can see there that chicken has a clear advantage for health.

Yeah, and the other thing is cost. And the scary part for beef is that beef has always sold itself on taste and experience, and people still say in this poll that they think beef is tastier than chicken or the reason why they eat beef, the biggest reason is taste. The takeaway is, I mean, that's an opportunity for beef because people still really like beef, but they're just eating more chicken, which is kind of the whole situation here.

After the break, have a Second World War shifted the American diet from beef to chicken. I want to keep talking with Matt and Leslie in just a bit, but first let's take a step back. Here. We're hearing all about how popular chicken has become despite Americans' love of beef. But when exactly did that happen and why? No one knows better than Emmeline Rude. He's an historian and author of the book Tastes Like Chicken, A History of America's favorite bird.

Chicken for most of American history, which is sort of a random bird that people had in their farmyard. They largely kept it for eggs. Eggs are very convenient, good protein. Chickens conveniently lay a lot of them repeatedly, so it was great to have chickens around, people rarely ate them because a then if you killed all your chickens, you would not have eggs anymore. And also, it's just very hard to keep large flocks of chickens for the purpose

So what changed that over the course.

Of the twentieth century.

Firstly, veterinarians and breeders and farmers solved the problem of the fact that chickens would always die. I mean, they're vaccinated for disease. They were kept in enclosed spaces that prevented the transfer of avian flues. They also discovered vitamin D, so when you keep animals inside without light, they'll to develop what is called rickets, so joint issues. So when they figured that if you could supplement chickens with vitamin D, they could keep them indoors. Thus you can have a

During World War Two is really when chickens started to come forward in American's diets.

Why was that so Initially it was rationing.

So as part of the war effort, US government thought that the only thing that they needed to feed to their fighting men was red meat, and they also sent a huge amount of red meat abroad to help the Allies.

And so red meat was rationed.

Americans not in the armed forces. We'll get less of the common foods to which they are accustomed. But by rationing, by sharing what we have and by using our food supply wisely, our nation at war can still support our healthy, active people.

And so initially chicken was not and so people were very excited about eating chicken. There was a huge growth in chicken production, huge growth in chicken consumption. By the end of the war, there was so much demand for meat that chicken was actually rationed as well and taken by the US government.

But that initial period really marked a huge growth in chicken productions.

There was a huge investment in it, which probably in turn sparked the reason why the US government was so concerned at the end of World War Two that the chicken economy just sort of plummeted. So they had all this money invested, so many people who worked in the industry, and so when the war economy ended, they were obviously concerned about said industry, thus giving all of this technical, agricultural all this research knowledge to the chicken firms. The

You also get this huge advances in breeding. A lot of it was driven by the US government.

There was this, I find quite hilarious program called the Chicken of Tomorrow Contests.

Right after World War Two.

The committee made plans for a series of state and regional Chicken of Tomorrow contests, end with a national contest in June nineteen forty eight, A and p all for ten thousand dollars in.

Five thousand dollars for the national champion.

The ultimate aim was to produce chickens with large breasts. This is the era of barbecue culture. They wanted to find a part of the chicken that could beat with a steak with a pork chop on the grill the every American could enjoy. And the winner of that contest is actually the ancestor of the majority of the chickens that we eat today.

So it had a huge, huge effect on breeding. Combined with this with.

Huge discoveries and nutrition, namely the fact that corn, soy and antibiotics were basically chicken super fuel, and then you get a massive explosion in chicken productivity and later on a massive growth in chicken eating.

So one of the names we tend to associate with the rise of chicken and this change of people's attitude toward chicken was Frank Purdue. Can you tell us about him and why he was so important to changing the way Americans think about chicken.

Yeah, So, Frank Purdue his family were chicken farmers. They owned a farm in Maryland. He inherited the farm sometime in the middle of the century. His innovation was that he basically branded chicken. He went on TV and sold his brand of Purdue Chicken.

I thought my.

Purdue fresh carny scheme, he was tender like no rock cornish game Hen. So I decided to see if I was right. I had my fresh cornish scheme in tested it against all the frozen competition and found my cornish is at least forty more tender than any of them. If you thought a frozen rocke cornish game Hen made good eating, way do you taste the one? It doesn't come frozen like a rock.

His big innovation was making this mass commodity into a product of a brand name, and a result, he could sell it for higher prices. So, starting in the nineteen seventies is when Purdue comes out as America's favorite chicken producer.

And will be so special about his ads because I remember even as a kid, they were everywhere.

People really connected with him. Just as a spokesperson.

I read a lot of articles about him, and half the people are calling him a huckster. Half the people are calling him sort of America's darling. I think he was just very honest. He was very frank. He often told people to call him if there were issues with their chicken.

If you're not completely satisfied, write me and I'll give you your money back.

The other big trend I suppose is the chicken nugget and really the rise of fast food embracing chicken and increasing demand. How important has fast food been to changing the way people eat?

The more chicken people eat, I think it has really promoted chicken consumption to obscene levels.

I mean, it's ironic because most people.

They had all these consumer reports in the nineteen eighties asking people why they're eating more chicken, and they'd always say for health reasons, for health reasons, this is a healthier option. And then they had corresponding surveys to see what chicken products people were actually eating, and the number one products were chicken nuggets and fried chicken. Fast food definitely was bolstered by this wave of chicken being the new healthy product.

And it also helped that chicken is.

A food that doesn't really have any religious bands on it.

It's not like pork, where a lot of people see it as unclean.

So Emmelyn, where do you think the industry goes from here?

Honestly, I've been asked this question a lot, mainly people hoping that we'll have a lovely food system with all local farmers and everyone.

Will be very happy.

But I honestly think the chicken industry will just continue to grow because, I mean, chicken comes in this very unique place in our modern discourse. So obviously beef and pork are getting a lot of flack for their environmental impact. Chicken does have its own environmental impact, but it's not quite to the same level as beef and pork, so

So honestly, I just.

See the chicken industry growing bigger, expanding abroad, producing ever more chicken.

At ever more low prices. Endless chicken is what I predict Emmelin Rude.

Thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

When we return. Matt Townsend and Leslie Patten on how the beef industry is trying to make a comeback. So, Leslie, is there anything that the beef industry can actually do to balance the scales? Chicken was able to kind of reinvent itself. Is beef trying to reinvent itself?

Well, the Beef Board, the Beef checkof that does a lot of the marketing for the industry. They're really targeting right now. It seems like millennials and that's a big demographic obviously, with a lot of spending power, and a lot of these people are parents, and the beef industry realizes that they have this ad campaign it's called Beef in the Early Years, and it basically says, you should be giving your baby beef as young as six months old.

We want to give our babies the best experts agree the iron, zinc, coaline, and high quality protein packed into every bite of beef supports the fast growing bodies and developing brains of babies and toddlers.

It's interesting because these millennial parents then they're really shaping the diet, habits and taste preferences of their children so young. So could this be a potential growth theory.

Maybe they really.

Want to promote that this health idea and versatility innovation in the beef industry, there hasn't been a lot of it. One of the successes they have had is beef jerky. One of the things that beef has struggled in is that it hasn't gotten into like the snack category. If you think about chicken I mean chicken nuggets, I mean like the perfect.

Snack, especially chicken fries.

Now that's something that the industry will point to, is like, look what we've done with beef jerky, which has always sort of been a thing, I mean think about slim gems and things like that. But now it's actually there's a decent size of a category around it. But they need more of that. They need more sort of different products to get beef into people's stomachs because right now people aren't going out and eating steaks as much as they used to and things like that.

Leslie, does chicken beef have anything to fear from plant based meats.

As of right now? No, not really.

Plant based is just a tiny drop in the bucket at this point. It garnered a lot of buzz and hype and excitement when it first came out for what it was and what it was able to do, and I'm not trying to discount that at all, but people just aren't buying it right now, like these big companies like Beyond Meat Impossible foods like they thought, and a lot of it is costs. They haven't gotten the cost

Matt, One thing I wanted to ask you about too, is you know, we're talking all about beef consumption in the US, but what about overseas? Is that a potential for like a growth market. Chicken is really popular overseas too, but what about beef?

It is yeah, that the beef industry actually signals that increase the exports is sort of their biggest opportunity or their biggest goal to increase demand for their products. Again, the beef industry in the US is the biggest exporter of meat in the world. The biggest markets are you know, in Asia, it's China, It's Korea, and China looks like obviously because the growing metal cluster, that's the biggest opportunity. That's where the most growth has been in beef consumption globally.

China's really a big opportunity for beef and for meat in general, because meat consumption per capita in China lags most of the Western countries, including the US, so there's the possibility for sure of higher consumption, including of beef, especially with urbanization and higher income levels that are making meat more affordable for more people. But the thing is, beef is really a distant third right now, after pork and chicken. I mean, pork is really the dominant meat in China.

Still and has been for a long time.

But one interesting thing I saw from a Mackensey study is that for people in China who can afford to pay for meat, they consider beef healthier than pork. Not necessarily healthier than chicken, but they consider it healthier than pork. So maybe there's room for beef to take a little share from pork in China.

Obviously there's a lot of effort being put into trying to either increase the popularity of chicken further or to bring beef back up. Five years from now, ten years from now, do you think they're going to have moved the needle on people's tastes if.

We look out five or ten years, I think what we're going to see as things are roughly the same in terms of trends, right, so, chickens continuing to take share from beef. Pork is hanging in there, probably pretty stable like.

Where it has been.

You know one area that could change that is potentially if beef comes up with some great innovation or really hops on that protein trend that it's kind of forgot about, forgot to advertise itself as high protein during all these high protein diet trends. That could help the industry. But it's hard to see these trends changing too much. But that being said, if they come up with the new beef jerky, maybe we'll see that change.

Leslie Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for thinking of us, Thank you.

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