Here’s what I mean. Go back 150 years or so, and there were dozens of breeds of chicken grown for meat (and others for egg production). They varied from farm to farm, and region to region, according to the farmer’s preference and the tastes of the local market. But go back about 100 years, to the 1920s, and the poultry industry begins to consolidate. Poultry production turns from a horizontal array of many farms owned independently, to a vertical structure of everything you need to grow and sell a chicken—feed milling, raising, slaughtering, and packing—being owned by single corporations.

It’s not just the business structure that becomes industrialized through the decades: The raw material, chicken, does too. That wide variety of