The Birds and The Bugs

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This chicken is uniquely delicious.

And at first, the first time I had it, I thought maybe it's uniquely delicious just because it's Paris and so everything is heightened.

It's a beautiful, bronzed, crispy skinned chicken that's been basted by the fat of the chickens above it, and it's got pepper and thyme and salt, and the skin is like glass.

It shatters when you bite into it.

I'd be willing to go to Paris to eat chicken like that.

Oh, come on, Cynthia.

How hard do I have to twist your arm to go to Paris anyway?

But yes, I am drooling right now.

The skin shattering when you bite into it?

I want that chicken.

And just so you know, you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And the person describing this delectable bird is journalist and author Maren McKenna.

And this fabulous fowl set her off on a detective story.

After I'd eaten this a couple of times and gotten over my initial shock at how delicious it was, I realized that there actually was something unique about the chicken itself, that the chicken was a type of chicken that we wouldn't have in the United States, that it was raised without the routine use of antibiotics, which is a feature of the raising of most meat animals in most places on the planet.

And that choice to not use antibiotics had driven a bunch of other choices in the raising of that chicken that combined to make it as delicious as I found it.

Marin McKenna is the author of a new book called Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats.

And we spoke to her about little chicken, big chicken, and of course, the looming specter of antibiotic resistance.

Why does Parisian chicken taste so good?

When did American chicken stop tasting like that for the most part?

And what do nuggets have to do with urinary tract infections?

And is there any way we can have antibiotic-free, beautiful, bronzed, crispy-skinned chickens again without moving to Paris?

Although, to be honest, I am willing to relocate.

So, if you go back really not very far,

say 100 years or so, chickens were a feature of every backyard or back garden.

Every family had some chickens.

And interestingly, they were usually the province of women.

Women would raise chickens primarily for eggs, and then secondarily for the meat of the chicken once the hens were kind of exhausted from laying the eggs.

But raising chickens primarily for eggs first gives you a not very delicious chicken at the end because the chickens are kind of old and stringy and it also locks you into a particular production cycle.

This is what chicken in America was like all the way up to the Second World War.

The lady chickens were not slaughtered until late fall after they were worn out from a lifetime of egg laying.

And the gentleman chickens, which were slaughtered younger, they didn't taste much better because they came from a breed of chicken that was optimized for egg laying, not for deliciousness.

Unsurprisingly, chicken was not what was for dinner.

It was seasonal, it was expensive, and it didn't taste that great.

Chicken started to change in the early 1900s because of a few different innovations.

The first is that people start to figure out an artificial diet to give chickens, a diet that is made not just of the things that they pick up in the barnyard, but also of grains that have been specifically grown for it, and also vitamins that have been synthesized to be added to it so they can be raised all year round.

The second is that people come up with incubators, electric incubators for chickens.

So farmers no longer have to rely on the natural production cycle of a hen laying eggs, sitting on the eggs, hatching the eggs, and then getting ready to do that again.

They can keep hatching eggs all year round.

So now chicken is not seasonal, but it's still got the stringiness problem.

And then people start thinking about what would be the tastiest chicken?

What would a chicken look like if we raised it for meat instead of just for eggs?

And that's really where modern chicken production begins.

You don't really think of modern chicken production beginning in a particular place, but it did.

So, there's a couple of locations in the United States that are weirdly important to the history of chicken.

The first location is near where I grew up, and in fact, it's where I occasionally went on vacation in the summer, the Delmarva Peninsula.

The name describes exactly what it is: a little jut of coastal land made up of parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.

And before the Second World War, people who lived on the Delmarva Peninsula had market gardens.

They did what was called truck farming to supply East Coast cities with produce.

So, truck farming and farming for fruit and farming for vegetables is very subject to the weather.

And in the way that farmers do, people on Delmarva are always looking for alternatives.

One of those farmers who was looking for an alternative was named Cecile Steele.

In 1923, an order that she had sent in for chicks to grow up into hens, to grow up into egg layers, somehow got misinterpreted.

and instead of 50 chicks she got 500.

That was way more hens and eggs than she was ever going to need so she decided what she would do instead is to grow them up and try to sell them for meat.

Now you might be wondering wait, these are chickens bred to pump out eggs, not make delicious tasting meat, so why does anyone buy Cecile's chicken meat?

Turns out there was a big Jewish community on the East Coast, primarily in New York, and they needed kosher meat for a special celebratory Shabbat dinner every week.

That meat was almost always always chicken because, obviously, pork isn't kosher, and beef has to be slaughtered correctly, which was hard for New York Jews to verify.

Chicken could be slaughtered in front of the customer, so chicken became the Shabbat dinner custom for East Coast Jews.

I ate it literally every Friday night growing up.

And New York's Jewish community, they snapped up Cecile's chicken.

And this was so successful and so unusual that she did it again and again, and her neighbors noticed.

And Delmarva, within a remarkably short period of time, converts from a truck farming place into a place that is the start of the meat chicken industry in the United States.

After the Second World War and all the disruption that it caused to the U.S.

food supply, Americans were ready to celebrate peace by eating meat and a lot of it.

And people started to think in the 1940s that perhaps what would be useful was to have a chicken that actually was meaty.

And so there was a competition, sponsored by the ANP supermarkets, supported by the U.S.

Department of Agriculture, and by all the extension services around the country that they called the Chicken of Tomorrow Contest.

The Chicken of Tomorrow.

A broad-breasted bird with bigger drumsticks, plumper thighs, and layers of white meat, like the wax model on the right.

And the Chicken of Tomorrow Contest famously wanted to produce a chicken with a breast that could be sliced like a steak, a chicken that would feed a a family and still have enough left over.

40 breeders sent their contestants in.

These breeds they hoped would win the prize.

Judges examined 2,000 birds according to 18 criteria, such as body structure, skin color, how early they developed feathers, how efficiently they converted their food into muscle.

Uniformity of size, pin feathers, skin texture, conformation, and other factors affecting edible meat yields.

The winners were announced at a special event in June 1948.

There was a parade, a broiler queen, and cross-sections of the top-ranked birds on display.

New Hampshire's entered by Schenck Hatchery, Harrisonburg, Virginia, showed the best feathering.

And White Rocks from the Shalbina Hatchery, Shalbina, Missouri, were tops in uniformity of size.

By just 10 years later,

the Chicken of Tomorrow contest-winning chicken had feathered 60% of all meat chickens in America.

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And even today, the major genetics companies, the major lines of chicken that are grown in the United States all trace back to that Chicken of Tomorrow contest in the 1940s.

Another major change that happened in the 1940s is that the chicken industry in America becomes vertically integrated.

Which is that there's one company that owns everything from the births of the chicken, to the feed of the chicken, to the chickens themselves, to the slaughterhouses, and to the production networks.

And the only thing that's left for the farmers, the people who are actually doing the raising of the birds, is the buildings, the land, the waste, the manure, the debt.

They don't actually own the chickens themselves.

But what it also means is that chicken farming scales up.

All of a sudden, there are a lot more chickens being raised for meat in America.

But there are still some problems marketing and selling those chickens to Americans.

So a funny thing about chicken, if you think about it, is that chickens are kind of an odd size.

It might be too big if there were only two people in the household for a single meal, and it might be too small if there were four or five or six people in the household.

But in addition to having a size problem, chicken had what I think of as a predictability problem.

If you think of historically what we've done with cows or with pigs after we slaughter them, there are a lot of things that you make out of a pig, right?

You make loins and chops, but you also make hams and sausages and bacon.

And similarly for beef, we do a lot of different things with beef.

Chicken was always just kind of chicken.

It was a roast chicken, or it was a fried chicken, or it was a sauteed chicken, but it was always just that flesh.

And the combination of the difficult size and especially the predictability meant that the chicken industry, which was now pumping out more and more chicken, had a lot of trouble persuading people to eat more chicken.

And what they needed to do was to find an analog to the bacon and ham and sausages of pork with chicken.

And in the 1960s, this happens.

And to tell that story, we'll take a trip from the Del Marva Peninsula to another surprisingly important location in the history of American chicken, Ithaca, New York, where a Cornell University professor called Bob Baker is charged with figuring out how to raise the income of chicken farmers.

And he did that by thinking up lots and lots of different things that you can make with chicken.

Chicken bologna, chicken meatballs, chicken sausage, chicken hot dogs.

But his most enduring invention is what he at the time called a chicken stick and what we now know as the chicken nugget.

It didn't quite catch on at first, but then in 1977, a Senate Committee on Nutrition published the first dietary guidelines and recommended that people eat less saturated fat, which meant less red meat.

Only three years later, McDonald's introduced the chicken McNugget.

They're here.

They're here!

Chicken consumption has never looked back.

Basically, the McNugget McRuled.

In 1960, when Bob Baker started his chicken manipulation up at Cornell, Americans ate an average of 28 pounds of chicken a year.

Last year, we ate more than triple that.

There's another crucial piece of this story, and that's the fact that antibiotics were also being developed just as the chicken industry was starting to be transformed.

So I think it's hard for all of us to realize, because we were born within it, that the antibiotic era isn't actually very old.

Depending on when you start counting, antibiotics date back to 1928 or to about 1940.

Obviously, antibiotics were not developed for chickens.

The first antibiotic, penicillin, was famously discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928, and it started being tested on humans in the 1940s.

And it completely changed our lives, all our lives.

Penicillin was now for the world.

Everywhere, curing the sick, everywhere, saving lives.

As long as we had been a species, infectious disease had been one of the major ways by which we died.

I mean, people didn't die in the pre-antibiotic era of the things that kill us now.

They didn't die of chronic diseases for the most part, and they didn't die of cancer because they didn't live long enough to develop those.

And the reasons they didn't live long enough was because of infectious disease.

Not just because you caught pneumonia or measles or smallpox, but also because if you were shot on a battlefield, or if you lost control of your oxen when you were plowing and they ran over you, or if you were one of the workers of the new factories of the Industrial Revolution and you fell into the works and got smushed, you would develop an infection and you would die.

And antibiotics put an end to all that.

And so we get penicillin first and then streptomycin and then the tetracyclines and then chloramphenicol all before the early 1950s.

And that starts the antibiotic era that we're still living in today.

Millions of lives are saved by antibiotics.

From treating common infections to allowing organ transplants, antibiotics have extended average lifespans by decades.

So this is exciting.

But what does it have to do with chickens?

Meet Thomas Jukes.

He was a British scientist who'd moved to the U.S.

And Jukes ends up working for a company that has another one of the early antibiotics.

So here's the context.

It's the late 1940s.

Chickens are hot.

There's the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, the vertical integration of chicken farming.

America is beginning to care about chicken.

So there's this huge interest in how, what can be added to the diets of chicken that will make them grow faster, will keep them robust, will start getting more chicken into this growing chicken economy.

And people are trying a lot of different things.

They're trying things like cod liver oil and different vitamins.

And Jukes, working for a place that manufactures one of the new antibiotics, gets the idea.

based on some research that's been done by some other scientists, but hasn't really been followed up on in any way, that maybe the antibiotic that they're making might have an effect on the chickens.

And so at the end of 1948, he sets up an experiment in which he chooses a particular batch of chickens and chicks, and he feeds them a very particular diet.

Jukes has starved his chickens in advance so that whatever he feeds them in the actual experiment, it'll be totally obvious what effect it has.

And of course, like any good scientist, he's divided the chickens up into groups.

One stays on the normal diet, others get different additives in their feed.

And he lets this go for just a couple of weeks, weeks, and then he goes in on Christmas Day, 1948.

He goes into his laboratory and he goes himself because since it's a holiday, he's given his lab tech the day off.

He goes in to weigh the chickens.

This is the day on which he's going to discover which of the many additives, including the antibiotic that his company makes, is going to make the most difference.

And he weighs them all.

So he weighs the ones that get the cod liver oil.

They're a little heavier than the control diet.

And he weighs the ones that get the vitamins.

They're a little heavier too.

The vitamins do make a difference.

But the one that makes the most difference is his antibiotic.

The birds that receive just a tiny, tiny fraction of the antibiotic weigh two and a half times what the control group of chicks do.

These results are astonishing.

This tiny dose of antibiotic has caused the chickens to more than double in weight.

In fact, It's so astonishing that Jukes needs to repeat the experiment a couple of times to make sure what he thinks he's seeing really is true.

And then he announces his findings at a conference in 1950.

And it happens that a New York Times reporter was covering that scientific meeting and put the story on the front page the next day.

Wonder drug oreomycin found to spur growth 50%.

And from there, everything changed.

Other scientists quickly copy his work.

Everyone is obsessed with how antibiotics might transform agriculture in America.

By By 1955, there were almost 400 scientific papers published on the topic, and American farmers were giving their livestock nearly half a million pounds of antibiotics a year.

So the interesting thing about all of this is that no one at the time actually knew how antibiotics increased the chicken's growth, how this miracle drug worked.

They knew that animals were putting on weight, but even though they did, some experimenting with the lab tools they had available at the time, they really couldn't understand why this effect was happening.

Some scientists theorized that animals were just retaining water, or maybe they were having a change in how fat was distributed around their bodies, or maybe in some way the antibiotics were affecting their metabolisms.

What we know now is that what was going on is it was affecting what we would call their gut microbiome, but that's not even a concept that existed at the time.

But really, who cares?

This was an amazing new tool.

It saved either time or money or both.

So you could either give an animal the same amount of feed and move it faster through the process of production, or you could use less feed and get them to their market weight at the same time.

And that was the first use of antibiotics, but as with anything, there's category creep.

And so farmers start to realize that if a little antibiotic is good because it makes a healthy animal put on weight faster, then a little bit more antibiotic is better because it also protects a healthy animal from picking up any of the diseases that might be present in the confines of farming.

And because at the same time, these other innovations are happening, changes in chickens' diets, more demand for chicken, there's this confluence of factors that makes it very, very interesting to suddenly create very large farms with very large amounts of animals on them.

And when you put thousands of chickens together in a relatively small, confined space, it means there's a a lot of waste that doesn't get cleaned quickly.

It means that diseases pass easily from bird to bird.

So antibiotics become not just a thing that encourages weight, but also a thing that is used to protect them.

Important side note here, neither of these uses are the way we use antibiotics in people.

Antibiotics in people are used to cure infection.

That's the smallest use for antibiotics in animals.

In the evolution of giving antibiotics to animals, I think that every step must have seemed completely rational at the time.

They'd done something, it worked, they tried the next thing, that worked, they just kept going.

And it's only in looking back that I think that we can see that some of these things were crazy, and it is impossible almost to understand that anyone ever tried them.

And probably the most outlaw example of this is this process acronizing.

This sounds totally and completely bizarre today when we know that it's a horrible idea to use too many antibiotics.

But companies came up up with what they thought was a brilliant plan.

Just dunk all chicken meat.

In fact, let's dunk all meat into huge vats of liquid antibiotics.

Like Maren said, it was called acronizing.

And so in the 1950s and for about 10 years, vast amounts of chicken flesh and pork flesh and fish flesh in the United States gets dipped in a solution of antibiotics after the animal is killed, butchered, and as it's on its way to being packaged.

And it goes out into the open market with a film of antibiotics clinging to the meat.

The point of this is to slow down spoilage.

It's to create an environment in which the spoilage organisms that naturally accumulate on a fresh piece of meat are suppressed by the antibiotic so that instead of a shelf life of two or three or four days, a piece of meat might have a shelf life of two or three or four weeks.

There are ads in all the lifestyle sections of the papers telling women to go buy acronized chicken, that it was fresher and tastier, in fact, wholesome and country sweet for up to a month.

Companies bragged that they could truck refrigerated rather than frozen chickens across nearly the entire country without worrying that the meat would spoil.

By 1958, nearly half the country's slaughterhouses were acronizing their chickens.

Again, remember, these chickens are being completely dunked in antibiotics.

And all of this seems completely rational and normal at the time.

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Okay, so by the 1970s, almost every food animal in America was receiving antibiotics.

Their meat may not have been dipped in a bath of antibiotics anymore.

Acronizing had been phased out by then.

But pretty much 100% of chicken and turkeys, 90% of pigs, and 60% of cattle were being given antibiotics in their food all the time.

So the question is, how much antibiotics are those animals getting?

So the easiest answer to this is lots and lots.

Marin has to be vague here because most countries don't keep good numbers.

But one good set of numbers is that in the United States, 70 to 80%

of all of the antibiotics sold in a calendar year are used in animals, not in humans.

70 to 80% is going to livestock, not people.

So you might wonder, did nobody think that giving farm animals this enormous quantity of antibiotics would be a problem?

Because the signs were there.

As early as the 1950s, doctors were reporting a rise in penicillin allergies in humans.

That's a warning sign.

And when the FDA sampled the nation's milk supply, more than a tenth of their samples had enough penicillin in them from the cows that the milk could have been prescribed as a drug.

That definitely sounds like a problem.

You know, it's interesting to me to think that it's only in the past couple of years, really, at least in the United States, that antibiotic use in agriculture has become a big public policy issue.

And so I think we assume that the voices against this use must be relatively new, too.

But in fact, if you look back, as I did while I was working on this book, there were some prescient alarmed scientists who, almost from the beginning, like from the mid-1950s when antibiotic use was really burgeoning, we're starting to say this is going to be a mistake.

This is a misuse of antibiotics and it's going to stimulate the development of antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic resistance.

This is the huge, huge price that we're paying now for the overuse of antibiotics.

So let's tease this out.

What is resistance?

Well, first, what are antibiotics?

What they really are.

are effectively chemical weapons that bacteria have manufactured against and directed against each other for as long as bacteria have existed.

Bacteria shoot out these chemicals to kill other bacteria around them so they can have all the living space and food available.

It's like Game of Thrones out there in the microbial world, and there's kind of an arms race going on with these compounds.

Bacteria spent all those millennia learning to defend against each other's chemical weapons, and those defenses are antibiotic resistance.

Bacteria can change their shape to dodge these weapons.

They can strengthen their outer walls.

It's war.

This happens all the time in nature.

Bacteria figure out how to defend themselves against each other's chemical weapons.

And it was kind of naive of us, I think, not to imagine that when we took their chemical weapons and we improved them and we sent them back out into the world against disease bacteria, that disease bacteria were not going to develop defenses against those compounds in the same way that bacteria always had.

When antibiotics are used in medicine, the great question is always: is this use justified?

Because any use of an antibiotic compound runs the risk of stimulating resistance.

And this resistance means the antibiotic will no longer work against that particular disease, which means the disease can come back and kill us.

The benefit of curing an infection is worth that risk.

But the benefit of growing chicken a little faster just to make a little more money?

Well...

That's debatable.

When bacteria develop resistance against antibiotics, the first thing to know is they can spread that resistance to to their neighboring bacteria.

But then how does it get from the animal to people?

The first and really kind of most obvious is that we give antibiotics to animals in their feed, and so it goes into their guts, and then it exits their bodies through their manure.

So manure is a really rich source of antibiotic resistance in a couple of different ways.

First, if resistant bacteria are in an animal's guts and that animal goes to slaughter, then as the animal is disassembled and becomes meat, there's a risk that the gut contents are going to end up on the meat.

So that's how the manure in an animal's guts when it goes to slaughter can end up smearing antibiotic resistant bacteria all over your chicken breast.

But the manure left on the farm is a problem too.

And then that becomes a source for resistant bacteria spreading through the environment, through storm runoff, into groundwater, into surface water.

If it's a manure lagoon that's liquid and dries out on the surface through through dust that blows off on the wind.

And then people can also spread antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Myron writes about a young pregnant woman who caught resistant salmonella from a calf and then passed the infection to her newborn baby in the hospital and then her baby transferred it to other newborns there.

In the 1970s and 80s, some scientists were starting to notice that people were dying of farm-related resistant strains of salmonella.

If you caught the resistant strain, you were 21 times more likely to die than someone who caught a strain that still responded to antibiotics.

The number of people coming down with antibiotic-resistant bacterial disease has been just going up and up in the past decades.

In 2013, the CDC said that at least 2 million people per year come down with an antibiotic-resistant disease.

Not all of those people die, of course.

Oftentimes, the resistant bacteria can be treated by an older, more toxic antibiotic that the infection-causing bacteria haven't had the chance to develop resistance to.

But particularly if you're old or young, or have an immune system that's already weak for some reason, then yeah, picking up an infection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria can easily be fatal.

But of course, this all leads to yet another question.

If there are so many antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world, why are we not all sick?

You know, for the same reason that there are a lot of disease bacteria in the world, and we're not all sick from those either.

So, one thing that happens, for instance, is that if these antibiotic-resistant bacteria that are traveling on meat, for instance, take up residence in our guts, guts.

They might be there for a while.

They become part of the mix of bacteria, that gut microbiome that lives within all of us.

And then something happens to change that stable relationship.

Maybe those bacteria escape from the intestine and they get into another part of the body, like the urinary tract, and they cause an infection there.

New and alarming.

They say that superbug in the bird is now infecting women.

Or maybe someone takes an antibiotic for a different, unrelated problem, and the antibiotic kills so much bacteria in the gut that the dangerous resistant bacteria, they suddenly have more space and they grow and grow and they cause an infection, a disease.

It's one of the problems of proving that antibiotic use in agriculture is responsible for antibiotic-resistant illness is that sometimes the illness can be pretty separated in place or time or both from consuming the antibiotic-resistant bacteria and even more from the use of the antibiotic in the animal that that started all this.

And it's precisely this difficulty in proving a direct connection between giving farm animals antibiotics and people dying from antibiotic-resistant infections.

This is why the US government didn't do anything to deal with this problem for decades.

Meanwhile, in Europe, they started to move on this issue much more quickly than we did here.

There are a number of reasons why, but the most important one is this.

They act much more on the precautionary principle.

If something looks like it's going to be injurious, they make a decision in advance not to do it.

In the United States, we're much more empirical.

We allow something to be tried, and then if it turns out it has a negative effect, then we try to regulate it afterward.

In my home country, Britain, the government had banned the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in farm animals as early as 1971.

And by the 1990s, all of Europe had followed suit.

The U.S., we didn't ban the use of antibiotics as growth promoters until 2017, this very year.

And there are still loopholes.

Drugs can be given for preventative use, meaning to prevent disease, and some have no limits on how long they can be used that way.

I should point out that, of course, many Europeans have been using these loopholes as well.

But particularly in the U.S., Big Chicken and Big Pharma teamed up and spent decades pushing back against any regulation on antibiotic use on the farm.

They used Big Tobacco's playbook, and they argued that the science wasn't conclusive.

Until the science just kept getting stronger and stronger, and enough people died.

A multi-state salmonella outbreak linked to raw chicken involves several strains of the disease, including several antibiotic-resistant strains, which have put 42% of victims in the hospital.

More reported cases of the deadly superbug.

Seven patients were infected, contributing to two of their deaths.

And finally, the government and industry couldn't ignore the data anymore.

It turns out that the company that kind of volunteered to lead the parade, to lead meat production in the United States into a different consideration of antibiotics, is the chicken company Purdue.

Purdue saw the writing on the wall.

In secret, they started phasing out antibiotics in 2007, figuring out if they could actually raise chickens industrially without them.

By 2014, they were ready to announce that they no longer used growth-promoting antibiotics.

But there was something else going on at Purdue, too.

It would be nice to think that poultry production turned against routine antibiotic use because they understood that this was a public health danger.

And I do think that's true for some of the companies.

But it probably also is because, at least for growth promotion, which is what the regulation in Europe and in the United States has addressed, it really didn't work as well as it used to.

Purdue did an internal study on 7 million chickens, and they found that those that had been given antibiotics as a growth promoter, the benefit was only in the hundreds of a decimal point, basically not worth the cost of the drugs.

But why would antibiotics, which were these wonder drugs when Thomas Dukes first gave them to chickens in the late 1940s, why would they have stopped working?

It's as though growth promoters filled in a deficit in the way the chickens were raised.

And all the other things that the industry did in the years that growth promoters were being used also filled in that deficit.

It got cleaner, it got faster, it got better for the animals.

And so it rose to the point where maybe growth promoters weren't working, and therefore the expense, small as it was, of buying growth promoters, turned out not to be worthwhile.

Okay, so why hasn't everyone quit using them?

So, even if growth promotion doesn't work anymore because the animals are better, because nutrition's better, there's still that problem of you've got a lot of animals in a confined space.

And those conditions, the way animals are raised on industrial farms, are pretty nasty and give rise to a lot of diseases.

That's another key reason for using antibiotics, so that you can raise lots of animals together in a confined space and still keep them alive.

And it turns out that you can do that without the use of antibiotics.

Purdue and now other companies, what they found is you can stimulate the birds' own immune systems instead.

So they give them probiotics, they give them prebiotics, they've improved their diets so that they no longer eat various kinds of sort of food industrial waste and they no longer eat waste from earlier slaughter of chickens.

They have given them more space, they've given them more light.

Purdue has a pilot project in which they build windows into the walls of what were formerly completely solid-walled barns.

And they've started to tinker with the genetic makeup of the chickens so that they're allowed to grow a little more slowly so that their immune systems and their muscles and their bones are more in balance as they grow up to the size at which you want to slaughter them.

And it's really interesting.

Jim Perdue, the head of Purdue, said to me during one of my conversations with them that reconsidering antibiotics led them into a reconsideration of the entire way that they raise chickens.

And in some ways, they feel like they're going back to practices that his grandfather, the founder of the company, would have honored, things that look kind of old-fashioned to us, but turn out to have a more enduring benefit than the quick fix of antibiotics did.

They've basically had to transform the way they raise chickens to do so without antibiotics, but they can, it works.

In weaning themselves off antibiotics, these companies have started to change the way we raise chickens in America, and they've even started to change the birds themselves.

But let's slow down for a minute.

It's not all old-fashioned goodness in big chicken land yet, even at Purdue.

And not all companies are on board with the extra work that goes into raising chickens without antibiotics.

Lots of companies are continuing to use antibiotics through the life of the chicken and just labeling it as preventative use rather than growth promotion.

And then there's us and our taste preferences.

We're also the ones keeping most of America's chickens indoors.

There's a parallel movement to return chickens to the outdoors.

You can think of them as sort of grass-fed chickens, though what most people call them is actually pasture-raised or pasture-based chickens.

But to have a chicken that can put up with climbing across a cow pasture, catching its own insects, hiding from a predator, you need a bird that has more stuff in it than the bird that lives inside a solid-walled chicken house.

You need a bird that maybe has different colored feathers, that has stronger muscles, that is more able to flap and is more able to run.

Now, we may love those because they look more like the chicken of our imagination, but the reality is they also taste different because they're out in a field running around.

They're getting exercise, they're eating bugs, their diets are always different.

We love the way they look.

They're flapping around outside, but most of us aren't used to the way their meat looks on our plate.

It's going to have had more exercise.

And if it's had more exercise, then its muscles are going to have a different texture.

They're probably also going to be a different color as well because as they exercise more and their muscles get more perfused with blood, there's more of a change in the color of the muscle itself.

And that persists after you kill the chicken and cook it.

And that may be something that people have to learn to like.

It's kind of like grass-fed beef.

If you're used to those soft as butter steaks, the texture and the mineral notes in grass-fed beef aren't aren't necessarily tasty to you.

And chicken has been bred to be bland.

That's what consumers want or wanted in the past, white breasts that frankly don't have much flavor.

That's been chicken's unique selling point for decades.

It's bland.

But these newer heritage pastured birds have darker meat overall, and that meat has a richer taste.

Personally, I think it's a huge improvement, but it's something consumers have to learn to appreciate.

They're richer, the meat is darker, it's chewier, but it is uniquely delicious.

So here's my question.

Even if big chicken quits antibiotics and even if the chicken industry reforms itself as a result, if it improves welfare and we all start craving pastured meat, is it too late?

Is the resistance genie out of the bottle?

Well, we have to hope not.

Even if we stopped all agricultural use of antibiotics tomorrow, all routine antibiotic use, the microbial world would not respond instantly.

This is a very complex system, and it took us 75 years to get where we are.

However, there are early signs that this is worth doing.

The Netherlands provides one of those early signs.

They banned growth-promoting antibiotics a while back, but that still wasn't enough until the government worked out agreements with farm organizations in 2014.

After that, the country cut its antibiotic use in half, and the benefits showed up really quickly.

Not only have they had really significant drops in the amount of antibiotic-resistant bacteria showing up in their animals, but they also are starting to see declines in antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their human patients.

And that's really where we want to go.

It's a great side benefit that cutting antibiotic use leads to improved chicken welfare.

But in the end, we want to go to less antibiotic use because it reduces the chances of antibiotic resistance, which the United Nations has called a global health threat, one of the greatest health threats of our time.

Antibiotic resistance could force us back into a world like the one Marin described at the beginning of the show, where strep throat or even a simple infection from a bad cut could kill you.

And reducing antibiotic use in animals is key.

I know I now make sure to buy antibiotic-free milk and meat.

But I live in New York, and this story we've been telling with Marin's help, it's being focused entirely on the U.S.

and Europe.

The big challenge moving forward for antibiotic use in agriculture is

what happens with the agriculture of the developing world, the agriculture of the global south?

And so the question is, as the populations of India and China and South America rise, can we persuade those economies to embrace forms of animal agriculture that don't rely on routine antibiotic use?

It's really another version of the climate change dilemma.

How do we allow countries to have those same enjoyments that we indulged in in the industrialized north while not making the mistakes in production that we made that got us to this situation.

Countries like India and China have to be persuaded to give up antibiotic use, too.

And certainly, a recent study showed that things are not looking so good in India.

94%

of meat chickens tested in India harbored multi-drug-resistant bacteria.

But there's a glimmer of good news here, too.

There's an important antibiotic we need.

It's called a drug of last resort because it can be used when other ones don't work.

And China banned its use for agriculture so that the drug can be saved for human patients.

If a country as big and complex as China can make a change that significant because it recognizes the danger of antibiotic overuse in agriculture, then I have to feel like there is cause for hope.

Marin McKenna's book, Big Chicken, comes out on September 12th.

You can pre-order a copy, go to our website, Castropod.com, and buy it.

It's a really fascinating look at how chickens became, well, chickens, and the impact and peril of antibiotics.

Totally worth a read.

Big thanks to our volunteer, Ari Lebowitz, for finding lots of the documentary footage we use this episode.

Go to our website, gastropod.com, for an awesome acronized chicken ad and more.

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