The West’s industrial-sized chicken farms could be as dangerous as any wet market

It wasn’t Henri IV’s Sunday poule au pot or Herbert Hoover’s less sexy-sounding chicken in every pot, but even in the mid-20th century chicken was a rare treat, not a cheap meal. What has happened to transform the noble Gallus gallus domesticus into what Paul R. Josephson startlingly calls ‘a genetically formed meat machine’? Chicken is a serious subject, even when it’s not the chlorine-washed kind the US President wants to foist on us.

I can remember buying a distressingly uneviscerated chicken in a Co-op in Cornwall in the late 1960s; and even ordinary supermarket fowl then came with neck and giblets neatly packaged inside them. You can still buy tubs of chicken livers, but what has become of all those gizzards? Mind you, we know where the feet go — the Chinese love them.

Some of you will have noticed that chicken (apart from the expensive poulet de Bresse) doesn’t taste as it used to, and is less firm in texture than before.