preface

Part 1: How Chickens Became So Important
01 Disease and an unlucky year
02 A better life through chemistry
03 Meat for the price of bread
04 Introspection begins
05 Identifying the Problem

Part 2: How Chickens Became Dangerous
06 Epidemics as evidence
07 Crossbreed dog
08 The Price of Pollution
09 Unpredictable Risks

Part 3: How Chickens Have Changed
10 The Value of Smallness
11 Choose cooperation
12 Perspectives from the Livestock Shed
13 Market Opens Its Mouth
14 Seeing the future from the past

Conclusion
Acknowledgements
main
Translator's Note
References
Search

The title of the book, 'Big Chicken', tells you what the book is trying to say without any further explanation.
Like the term 'Big Pharma', which refers to global pharmaceutical giants.
Big Chicken is a term used to describe today's giant poultry enterprises, characterized by factory farming, and the fast-growing, meaty, so-called "puffed chickens" they produce.
So, in a nutshell, this book contains the story of how Big Chicken emerged in the midst of the wave of industrialization, the light and shadow of Big Chicken, and the fruits of reflective efforts to counter it.

Some people have said that after reading this book, you will never look at chicken nuggets the same way again, and that is absolutely true.
Before reading this book, most people, despite consuming chicken almost every day, probably never thought deeply about how chickens are raised, slaughtered, and processed to end up on our tables.
You can find videos on YouTube of the factory-style poultry farms and automated slaughterhouses mentioned in this book. You can see the bewildered and miserable start to life of newly hatched chicks being tossed around on conveyor belts, the pitiful sight of unhealthy-looking chickens being raised in unsanitary factory-style chicken farms, and the sight of them being hung upside down by shackles on the ankles, still alive, as they are carried along the conveyor belt until they reach slaughter weight, slowly transforming into chickens, their original destination.
First of all, one cannot help but be amazed by the fact that this entire process is almost completely automated and that the machinery operates so precisely and beautifully(?).
To match this, it is understandable that chickens must be raised as a product with a certain weight and height.
But the most important emotion is still discomfort.
But that's not all.
There was a more serious problem: antibiotics.

1
Parts 1 and 2 answer the questions: How did we come to use antibiotics and question them, and how did we come to produce industrial chicken and rethink it?
So, it reads as if the process of industrialization that runs through modern and contemporary history has been reconstructed around chickens.
Industrialization, which emphasized mass production, mass consumption, mechanization, speed, efficiency, consistency, and uniformity, was carried out, and in the process, numerous side effects were revealed, such as environmental destruction and pollution, the collapse of traditional values, the downfall of small and medium-sized or independent businesses due to the monopoly of a small number of large corporations, and the destruction of community-oriented sensibilities. This is the process of reflection and introspection that followed.
The author explains that the industrialization of chickens was made possible entirely by antibiotics, and that the reflection and introspection on this stemmed from the realization that the antibiotics routinely used on farms had created resistance, posing an unexpected risk to human health.

In the past, there were far more cases of people losing their lives, by today's standards, due to trauma-related infections than to lifestyle-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
This situation changed dramatically in 1943, when penicillin became widely available and the antibiotic era began.
The epidemic that was like a death sentence was finally defeated in a matter of days.
People cheered antibiotics enthusiastically, calling them miracle drugs.

But now, just over 70 years later, we are faced with the prospect of a post-antibiotic era.
This is the price we pay for recklessly consuming the benefits of antibiotics.
The price was antibiotic resistance.
All living things that survived the evolutionary process are the fittest who succeeded in developing new defense systems to counter attacks directed at them.
Bacteria also responded in the same way they always did to protect themselves against antibiotics that attacked them.
We humans have been engaged in a kind of jumping game, an arms race, with bacteria.
In other words, when humans develop a drug, organisms develop resistance to it, and when humans develop a new drug to counter it, bacteria develop resistance to it again, and this process is repeated endlessly.
With the emergence of superbugs due to the misuse of antibiotics, situations may arise that are impossible to treat with even new drugs.

Antibiotic resistance seems like a stern warning from nature to humans who have tried to go against nature.
If we don't stop the routine use of antibiotics, we will only continue to feed the bacteria, and humans will never be able to win the fight against them through the development of new drugs.
Because evolution always wins.
It is said that there has never been a single drug that has not developed resistance.
Moreover, pharmaceutical companies have to invest 10 to 15 years and an astronomical amount of money, 1 billion dollars, to develop a single new drug, but all that effort is in vain as resistance develops, rendering the drug useless in an instant. As a result, they have lost the will to develop new drugs.
It was determined that the production of antibiotics was no longer profitable because bacteria were developing resistance too quickly.
This is a fatal conclusion for the treatment of human diseases.

This is largely a human-caused problem.
Introspection is an inevitable product of evolution, demonstrating in real time that natural selection is taking place, but we are responsible for hastening the process.
By using antibiotics when they are not absolutely necessary, humans have provided bacteria with countless opportunities to breach the defenses we have created.
While the overuse of antibiotics for human treatment is problematic, what is even more serious is the fact that they are routinely used to promote the growth of meat animals and prevent diseases that may spread in their unsanitary factory farms.
It is said that 80 percent of antibiotics sold in the United States and more than half of antibiotics sold worldwide are consumed by livestock, not humans.
Without even carefully considering the possible consequences, it was done haphazardly.
Penicillin was available over-the-counter until the 1950s, and many antibiotics are still available over-the-counter in many developing countries.
Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, said this in an interview a few months before receiving the Nobel Prize:

The most common mistake in self-medication is using too little.
This would teach microbes to resist penicillin without being able to fight the infection.
Many penicillin-resistant bacteria can reproduce through cross-breeding and spread to other organisms, ultimately leading to pneumonia or sepsis.
In the end, penicillin cannot save them.
Those thoughtless people who played with penicillin treatment like this are morally responsible for the deaths of people infected with penicillin-resistant bacteria.
I just hope that such harm does not occur.

People did not heed his prescient warnings, and as a result, we ended up in the situation he feared.
As we indiscriminately suck up the benefits of that drug, we are now on the verge of the advent of the 'post-antibiotic era'.
What can we do to put the brakes on that flow, or at least slow it down?

2
Part 3 covers the multi-layered, multi-level efforts to crack the massive wall of traditional poultry production built on antibiotics.
A group of farmers realized that the conclusion of a scientist who tried to release cheap protein into the world at the risk of sickening the world with resistant bacteria was wrong from the beginning.
And finally, with the support of scientists, government officials, consumers, and chefs, we have shown from various angles that it is possible to produce poultry without antibiotic resistance and to practice intensive farming without destroying the environment.
Dutch farmers willingly giving up antibiotics, and several American companies, including Purdue, have demonstrated that industrial-scale production is possible without the use of growth promoters or preventative antibiotics.
The success of Maizadur, Rue, and White Oak demonstrates that even small and medium-sized farms can gain a foothold in the newly restructured meat economy.
Whole Foods' return to slow-growing chicken breeds has proven that eliminating antibiotics can restore diversity in poultry production.
New models may be high-tech, like those in the Netherlands, or built on less intensive systems, like a Third World version of the Labellouze farm.
All these efforts amount to nothing more than a declaration that antibiotics will be used as sparingly as possible, not to fatten animals or vaguely protect them, but only to treat them when they are sick.
The authors argue that this is the only way to ensure that antibiotics can be used to treat human diseases while reducing the risk of antibiotic resistance.

The author shows deep insight by adding this at the end of the concluding remarks:

Antibiotic resistance is similar to the problem of climate change in three ways:
First, it is a serious threat, created over decades by the decisions of millions of individuals and reinforced by industry actions.
Second, this is because emerging economies in Africa, Latin America, and Asia are creating discord with advanced Western countries.
A quarter of the planet that has already enjoyed cheap protein from factory farming is now regretting it.
But the remaining three-quarters would not want to give up without even trying that opportunity.
Third, it is insufficient to simply observe a polar bear falling into water and take personal action, such as buying a fluorescent light bulb.

Just as with climate change, we have no time to waste on antibiotic resistance.
Because the merciless pace of bacterial evolution tells us so.

The considerable space devoted to the bibliography and acknowledgments is a testament to the book's rigorous research and diligent on-the-ground reporting.
This book also reveals the intense effort made to guard against the sensationalism that investigative reporting can easily fall into.
We can see through dozens of pages of notes that the author bases his arguments on evidence or observations on every page.
The names of the farmers revealed in the book and the farms where they raise poultry and other meat animals can also be viewed on YouTube.
If you read the text while thinking about their faces, the content will become much more realistic.

Marine McKenna says:
“Chicken is the most popular meat in the industrialized world and will soon become the most sought-after meat worldwide.
“Efforts to transform the chicken industry are about transforming the planet’s meat economy and everything it affects—land use, water use, waste disposal, resource consumption, the role of labor, the concept of animal rights, and the diets of billions of people on this planet.” Her assessment that she is a modern-day Upton Sinclair is no exaggeration.