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1. The global egg industry destroys 6,000,000,000 newborn male chicks every year. (1)

2. Male chicks born to egg-laying hens can not lay eggs, and are not the breed used for meat. Hatcheries separate males from females through a process known as " sexing." Since males are worthless to the egg industry, they are disposed of like trash, either suffocated to death or ground up alive in large industrial macerators.

3. Eggs sold under organic, free-range, and humane labels, and even chicks sold to backyard chicken keepers, also have their origins in these killing hatcheries. (2)

4. Newborn chicks are more intelligent, alert, and aware of their environment than human toddlers, according to recent scientific studies. (3) In fact, many traits that were previously thought to be exclusive to human / primate communication, cognition and social behavior have now been discovered in chickens.

5. Female chicks are sent to egg farms, where, due to decades of genetic manipulation and selective breeding, they produce 250 to 300 eggs per year. In nature, wild hens lay only 10 to 15 eggs annually. (4,5) Like all birds, they lay eggs only during breeding season and only for the purpose of reproducing.

6. This unnaturally high rate of egg-laying results in frequent disease and mortality.

7. 95% of all egg-laying hens in the U.S. - nearly 300 million birds - spend their lives in battery cages so small they cannot even stretch their wings. (6) Packed in at 5-10 birds per cage, they can only stand or crouch on the cages' hard wires, which cut their feet painfully. In these maddening conditions, hens will peck one another from stress, causing injury and even death.

8. Rather than give them more room, farmers cut off a portion of their sensitive beaks without painkiller. A chicken's beak is loaded with nerve endings, more sensitive than a human fingertip. Many birds die of shock on the spot.

9. Most hens on "cage-free" or "free range" operations are also debeaked, as these labels allow producers to confine thousands of birds inside crowded sheds. (7)

10. In a natural environment, chickens can live 10 to 15 years, but chickens bred for egg-laying are slaughtered, gassed or even thrown live onto "dead piles" at just 12 to 18 months of age when their egg production declines. (8)

11. During transport, chickens are roughly stuffed into crates and suffer broken legs and wings, lacerations, hemorrhage, dehydration, heat stroke, hypothermia, and heart failure; millions die before reaching the slaughterhouse. (9)

12. At the slaughterhouse, most chickens bred for egg-laying are still conscious when their throats are slit, and their hearts are still beating as the blood drains out of their mouths. (10) Millions of chickens worldwide are still conscious when plunged into the scalding tank for feather removal. They drown while being boiled alive.

What Can You Do?

There are delicious and "just like the real thing" plant-based alternatives for every egg dish, from scrambles and omelets to quiche and sunny side ups. It's also very easy to replace eggs in baking. Please share information about egg and dairy production with others, and encourage them to go vegan. You can learn more little-known facts about eggs and the hens bred to lay them at our official egg page, Eggs: What Are You Really Eating?

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(1) "How to Do Animal Rights: Chicken Statistics," accessed 7/21/2014 from: http://animalethics.org.uk/i-ch7-2-chickens.html

(2) Rodriguez, Sheila. "The Morally Informed Consumer: Examining Animal Welfare Claims on Egg Labels," Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law, no. 51 (2011). Accessed 7/21/2014 from: http://www.animallaw.info/articles/arus30tempjscitechenvtll51.htm

(3) Accessed 7/21/2014 from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10129124/Chickens-cleverer-than-toddlers.html

(4) "Small and Backyard Flocks: Frequently Asked Questions," University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Poultry Extension. Accessed 2/11/2014 from: http://www2.ca.uky.edu/smallflocks/FAQ.html

(5) "Unlike most domestic hens, who have been selectively bred to lay eggs year-round, wild fowl breed and lay primarily in spring. The Red Jungle Fowl lays 10-15 eggs per year, and the average size of each brood is 4-6 chicks." Cited in "About Chickens," Humane Society of the United States, accessed 2/11/2014 from: http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/farm/about_chickens.pdf

(6) "Animal Husbandry Guidelines for U.S. Egg Laying Flocks, 2010 Edition," United Egg Producers. Accessed 7/21/2014 from: http://www.unitedegg.org/information/pdf/UEP_2010_Animal_Welfare_Guidelines.pdf

(7) "Deciphering Humane Labels and Loopholes," Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. Accessed 7/21/2014

(8) "The Welfare of Animals in the Egg Industry," Humane Society of the United States. Accessed 7/21/2014 from: http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/farm/welfare_egg.pdf

(9) "The Welfare of Animals in the Egg Industry," Humane Society of the United States. Accessed 7/21/2014 from: http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/farm/welfare_egg.pdf

(10) Gail Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse, Prometheus Books: Amherst, New York, 1997, p.166.

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12 Egg Facts the Industry Doesn't Want You to Know

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2. Male chicks born to egg-laying hens can not lay eggs, and are not the breed used for meat. Hatcheries separate males from females through a process known as " sexing." Since males are worthless to the egg industry, they are disposed of like trash, either suffocated to death or ground up alive in large industrial macerators.

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Truth about the chicken meat industry.Animals

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When you buy eggs, do you think about the animal from which it is produced

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Ask people what country they usually buy chicken and eggs

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Have an electronic picture rotation of the conditions of chicken

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Ask people whether they know about chicken-farming scandals

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Send a survery around school seeing if people know where the chickens come from when they eat chicken at home or when the buy McDonalds.

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Do consumers know about the conditions of factory farms when buying chickens.

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McDonald's Chicken in China | Inside China

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McDonald's Chickens in China takes a look at chicken production for McDonald's restaurants in China. CNBC investigates. Subscribe to CNBC International: http://bit.ly/1eiWsDq CNBC's Eunice Yoon visits U.S. food processing firm Cargill's chicken facility in China. The firm raises more than 20 million chickens a year for McDonald's in the world's second largest economy.

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About chickens farmed for meat | Compassion in World Farming

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Chickens farmed for meat are called broiler chickens.

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Footage has emerged which claims to show the horrific conditions endured by 500,000 chickens that lay eggs for the UK's largest egg producer and supermarkets.

Around 140 million eggs are laid each year at Walston Poultry Farm, prompting undercover investigators to obtain covert footage.

Investigators claim to have discovered the farm, which supplies eggs for Noble Foods' Big & Fresh, breached animal welfare laws.

In footage taken at the farm in Blandford Forum, Dorset, chickens can be seen in cages stacked seven high and locked in sheds.

Big & Fresh, a brand of eggs from caged birds, is sold in most of the UK's leading supermarkets, including Tesco and Asda.

Noble Foods said it has launched an internal investigation and audit.

Animal Equality, a leading international animal protection organisation, released the footage after obtaining it by placing hidden cameras at the farm.

They left one camera running for four days, and in that time the hens were checked only once.

Animal welfare law states that birds have to be checked "at least once a day" and inspections should be "sufficiently thorough to detect illness and injury of individual hens, and special attention should be paid to bodily condition".

In the footage, dead hens can be seen lying in cages, and one dead bird was photographed in the same place for two consecutive days.

The footage proves that Noble farm is in breach of the Welfare of Farmed Animals (England) Regulations 2007, the charity claim.

Dr Toni Shephard, the UK director of Animal Equality, said: "The pitiless practice of locking hens inside crowded cages inevitably leads to the frail, featherless birds and high mortality that we found on this farm.

"But the failure to even check on these poor, helpless hens once a day - as the law requires - shows complete disregard for them as living, feeling animals with fundamental needs.

"Consumers paying a premium for Happy Eggs will be horrified to learn they are indirectly supporting these cruel cages used on Noble Foods' other farms. It is time for Noble to go cage-free across all of their brands.

"We wanted to show the conditions inside a typical caged hen farm.

"We know eggs in supermarkets will say from caged hens but for most consumers that doesn't draw up the images to mind of what the practice looks like.

"They don't picture the severity of the suffering.

"The images will be shocking to people, to see just how crowded those cages are and how severely the animals suffer from feather loss and the number of dead animals.

"For me, it's the scale of the operation that is so shocking.

"There can be half a million birds on one farm but to drive past it you would have no idea, there's no windows, no indication that these huge metal sheds contain living animals.

"Caging animals for their entire lives without fresh air, without daylight, never even standing on solid ground, that has got to be the most cruel form of farming that is currently practised in Britain.

"I'm very pleased the different agencies have committed to inspecting the farm, including Dorset trading standards and the British Lion code.

"They have both said they will be investigating the farm after getting our evidence, so we would certainly like to make sure the farm complies with at least the basic protection that farm animals have, to be inspected at least once a day.

"It's going in the right direction, but too slowly for the animals that are suffering in these conditions."

A spokesperson for Noble Foods said: "Noble Foods takes the welfare of poultry on farms supplying the company very seriously.

"The egg industry and its customers require companies to be stringently checked by regular independent auditing procedures including spot checks via unannounced visits.

"All sites supplying Noble Foods are fully compliant with UK Government and European regulations on welfare of poultry.

"Having seen the report produced by Animal Equality, relating to our contract producer 'Walston Poultry' with whom we have a long-standing relationship, we have immediately launched an internal investigation and audit of the site highlighted.

"Separately, the farm will be visited, without notice, by the British Egg Industry Council responsible for the Lion Code of Practice, the officially approved scheme requiring egg producers to maintain the highest possible welfare standards and environmental controls.

"Our investigation into this matter is underway and Noble Foods remains committed and vigilant in demanding the highest standards from all its suppliers."

Walston Poultry Farm did not respond to a request for comment.

According to their website, Walston supply eggs "as far afield as the Falkland Islands" and customers "include national retailers".

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Footage shows 'horrific conditions' endured by 500,000 chickens in farm supplying eggs to major supermarkets

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Footage has emerged which claims to show the horrific conditions endured by 500,000 chickens that lay eggs for the UK's largest egg producer and supermarkets. Around 140 million eggs are laid each year at Walston Poultry Farm, prompting undercover investigators to obtain covert footage.

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Despite the enormous amounts of chicken meat getting churned out daily, few people have any idea what's really involved with raising chickens in a commercial setting.

The Factory Approach to Raising Chickens

While it's easy to imagine that most chickens spend their lives scratching around in lush pasture, the truth is quite different.

To understand the way that 99 percent of chickens are raised in the United States, you need to look closer at the factory farm.

Origins of the Factory Farm

Until the 1950s, raising chickens for meat was a costly process, so most people made do with the occasional chicken dinner as a Sunday treat.

Eggs were the prized commodity, and chicken meat was considered a bonus byproduct of raising eggs. Most coops were small, housing about 60 birds, and these birds had constant access to the outdoors to nest, roost, dust bathe and enjoy other natural chicken behaviors.
By the 1980s, the egg industry scaled up and began to shift from standard coops to massive complexes that often housed a half million birds per coop.
While these measures increased productivity and made economic sense, they came at a cost to the birds' quality of life with overcrowding, disease and high death rates.

Within a matter of decades, chicken moved from a luxury good to a standard meat that most families could afford to eat almost daily.

Conditions on Factory Farms

By nature, chickens are intelligent and social birds.

They prefer to live in groups of 30 in well-defined pecking orders, and they can recognize their flock mates and bond through communal activities like dust baths and prowling pastures in pursuit of bugs.

Hens are also extremely maternal and spend large portions of their lives sitting on eggs and raising their young.

Unborn chicks even chirp to their mothers through their shells.

In almost every way, factory farms stifle natural chicken instincts and force them to live in ways that are highly unpleasant for their physical and psychological health.

Some of the common issues plaguing modern chicken farms are described below.

Overcrowding

Not only does this make it impossible for chickens to roam, scratch or find any privacy, it thwarts their natural tendency to set up a hierarchy. This inevitably causes social tensions, and chickens respond to the stress by pecking each other and fighting.

To prevent the birds from injuring each other, chicken farmers simply debeak baby chicks with a hot blade (without any anesthesia) mere hours after they hatch.

Not only are most chicken farms critically short on floor space, they are also dark, stuffy and even dangerous.

Yet, most factory farms are windowless, meaning that the thousands of birds in each house live out their days in a dusty, ammonia-filled space without ever seeing the sun.

Questionable Breeding Practices

Most chicken eaters tend to prefer white meat, so the breast and thighs are the most valuable part of each bird.

In the past decades, chickens have been bred to capitalize on this trend, and the resulting broilers have drastically enhanced breasts and thighs, to the point that these body parts outpace the growth rates of their leg bones and organs.

While broiler skeletons are only 85 percent formed at six weeks old, their bodies are required to support far more weight than a regular bird.

It's not unheard of for some birds to die of thirst, as their overinflated bodies can make it physically impossible for them to reach their water nozzles.

It turns out that extra fat is bad for the consumer, too.

Pressure in the egg industry to produce cheaper cartons can also lead to physical problems for hens. Because of genetic selection for birds that start laying eggs younger, some hens struggle to lay eggs when their bodies aren't fully developed.

Because of the expense of treating illnesses like this, most prolapsed hens are left to languish until they die.

Animal Abuse

This provides far less room than a hen needs to turn around, flap her wings, preen, or bathe.

These hens are crammed eight or nine in each cage, and the cages are stacked on top of each other, meaning that feces and food spills on the hens below. Fresh laid eggs drop through the wires of the cage for easy collection, therefore stifling the hen's instinct to brood.

The inability to exercise and constant egg production means that calcium leaches from the hen's bones, often causing them to break.

Resting against metal wires also causes injuries to her skin and feet, and most hens get severe skin abrasions on their sides. The combined stress of captivity and copious egg production ensures that most hens live for two years or less.

If the living conditions in egg farms are bad for hens, they are deadly for roosters.

As male chicks can't lay eggs, they are considered to have no value and are suffocated, electrocuted, gassed, or ground up as soon as they are sexed.

Low-Quality Feed

In the wild, chickens spend much of their days foraging for sprouts and insects, meaning that their diet provides them with plenty of nutrition.

Unfortunately, factory farm conditions provide little opportunity for similar diet supplementation.

Antibiotics Overuse

To keep birds healthy in overly crowded and poorly ventilated conditions, they are fed copious amounts of antibiotics.

Spread of Disease

It's naïve to think that the all chickens in the grocery were healthy when they died.

In truth, many factory farm chickens are sick for much of their lives due to living in unsanitary, overcrowded conditions.

These birds spend their lives walking through piles for their own excretion and feathers, burning their eyes from the ammonia that results. This means that factory chickens have weakened immune systems, making them more susceptible to catching diseases from other chickens.

These conditions make the salmonella bacteria easy to spread, occasionally resulting in contamination for humans from uncooked meat.

Sometimes, infections become so out of control that an entire coop of chickens needs to be put down to prevent an outbreak from exploding.

Some of the birds in the 3.8 million flock contracted a case of bird flu, meaning that every bird in the facility was condemned to death and that the facility itself was quarantined indefinitely.

Pollution

Allowing large concentrations of animals to live together in cramped conditions inevitably leads to pollution problems, and commercial chicken farms produce a tremendous amount of waste every year.

According to research, a one million-bird hen house produces 125 tons of wet manure every day, meaning that every truckload of feed that comes on a farm requires another load to carry waste away. This manure is often stored in massive piles where it can leak into the water system and create toxic conditions for nearby ecosystems.

Are 'Free Range' Farms Any Better?

As customers have gotten more informed about the true conditions factory farms provide when raising chickens, many companies have adjusted their poultry and egg production to be "free range."

At first glance, this seems like a victory for chicken welfare, but is it?

In truth, there is no uniform standard about what it means to be raising chickens "free range."

Chickens only need to be kept cage free and have access to the outdoors to qualify, even if they are packed onto overcrowded coop floors and their "outdoor space" is a cement pad that few birds ever venture on.

Video: A Glimpse Inside

Ready to see inside a chicken farm yourself?

Getting photos or video footage inside a chicken coop is never easy, as the large companies that own them find it better that their customers have little idea of what's really going on.

Farmers are often reluctant to speak up, as publicly complaining about the company they are contracted with can leave them in a lot of trouble, and often leads to hefty fines and broken contracts.

That's why this footage from Craig Watts is so valuable.

Risking his business to reveal the truth, Craig allowed a film crew into his coops to get a look at what really goes on inside.

If you want an insider look at the way Perdue is raising chickens, watch this video to see for yourself.

In Summary

Raising chickens cheaply comes at a high cost for the planet, your health, and the well-being of the animals involved.

If you want to make a stand for healthier and more humane poultry practices, it's important to know the reality of the dismal conditions within chicken farms today.

And consider raising your own backyard chickens ... for eggs, meat, or both. (Watch " Raising Meat Chickens - The Film " to see exactly how it's done.)
(This article was originally published on May 8, 2017.)
(Visited 1,184 times, 14 visits today)

This post was written by Merin Porter

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Raising Chickens on Factory Farms-The Awful Truth - The Grow Network

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Despite the enormous amounts of chicken meat getting churned out daily, few people have any idea what's really involved with raising chickens in a commercial setting. While it's easy to imagine that most chickens spend their lives scratching around in lush pasture, the truth is quite different.

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Chickens used for egg production are among the most abused of all farm animals. In order to meet the consumer demand for eggs, 280 million hens laid 77.3 billion eggs in 2007. From hatching to slaughter, egg-laying hens are subjected to mutilation, confinement, and deprivation of the ability to live their lives as the active, social beings they are.

Because male chicks will not grow up to lay eggs and, therefore, have little value to the egg industry, 260 million are killed each year upon hatching. Methods include being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified "kill plate," being ground up alive and fully conscious in a "macerator," or being gassed.

Female chicks are "debeaked" at a young age, most commonly having a portion of their beaks seared off with a hot blade. Debeaking is meant to prevent the abnormal feather-pecking that can result from the stress of confinement in a battery cage. A chicken's beak is filled with nerves, and debeaking can result in severe and possibly chronic pain.

95% of egg-laying hens spend their lives in battery cages. Battery cages commonly hold 5-10 birds, and each chicken may be given an amount of floor space equivalent to less than a sheet of letter-size paper. Constantly rubbing against and standing on wire cages, hens suffer severe feather loss, and their bodies become covered with bruises and abrasions.

Today's hen, selectively bred and artificially induced to yield high egg production, will produce more than 250 eggs annually, compared to 100 eggs annually a century ago.

In order to shock their bodies into another egg-laying cycle when production declines, hens are sometimes starved and denied any food for up to two weeks - a process known as "force molting."

The lifespan of an industry chicken would be 5-8 years. However, when egg production declines after 1-2 years, hens are considered "spent" and sent to slaughter. Chickens and turkeys are exempt from the Humane Slaughter Act, a federal law that requires some animals to be rendered insensible to pain before slaughter.

Due to a declining market for "spent" hens, producers often elect to kill them by gassing them with high concentrations of carbon dioxide. In some cases, the gas does not kill the birds, and there have been reports of live hens found at landfills crawling out from piles of decomposing chickens.

Chickens Used for Meat

Every year, 9 billion chickens are slaughtered for meat in the United States. Called "broilers" by the industry, these curious, social birds are treated simply as production units, selectively bred and fed for abnormally fast growth without consideration for their well-being. The resulting large size contributes significantly to suffering, disease, and early death.

Chickens raised for meat are selectively bred to grow to "market weight" at an alarming pace. In the past 50 years, the amount a chicken used for meat grows each day has increased by more than 300%.

Chickens in the meat industry typically spend their lives confined to warehouse-like buildings, each packed with as many as 20,000 chickens. On average, the space per chicken is only slightly larger than a sheet of letter-size paper. This crowding can result in scratches and sores from the birds being forced to walk all over each other.

A 2006 study found that 55% of uncooked chicken purchased from supermarkets contained arsenic, which is known to cause cancer in humans. Arsenic is added to the feed of approximately 70% of the broilers raised each year because it is believed to promote growth.

Since more than one flock is sometimes kept on the same litter before the floor is cleaned, floors can be covered in the waste of tens of thousands of chickens. Excessive ammonia levels that can result from the waste breaking down can lead to health problems for chickens, including difficulty breathing.

The lights are kept on nearly constantly in the buildings where chickens raised for meat are confined. This can stimulate eating and unnaturally rapid growth and limits the opportunity for chickens to sleep and rest, all of which leads to serious health problems.

Studies have consistently shown that approximately 26-30% of broiler chickens suffer from difficulty walking because their skeletons have trouble supporting their rapidly growing bodies. This can also lead to deformities and lameness.

The rapid growth of broiler chickens is often associated with acute heart failure. The hearts and lungs of the rapidly growing birds are not able to effectively get oxygen circulated throughout the body. This problem is the leading cause of death in chickens as they reach "market weight."

With bodies taxed beyond belief, chickens who survive their time in production are often slaughtered at just 42 days old. They are still "peeping" the sound of baby chicks when they are killed - even though their bodies have ballooned to the size of giant adult chickens in this short time due to industry practices.

At the slaughterhouse, there is no law in place requiring chickens to be rendered unconscious before slaughter, and the electrified water bath stunning used has been shown to cause painful shocks before it stuns the birds.

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Chickens used for egg production are among the most abused of all farm animals. In order to meet the consumer demand for eggs, 280 million hens laid 77.3 billion eggs in 2007. From hatching to slaughter, egg-laying hens are subjected to mutilation, confinement, and deprivation of the ability to live their lives as the active, social beings they are.

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Chickens raised for their flesh-called "broiler" chickens by the meat industry-are typically confined to massive, windowless sheds that hold tens of thousands of birds each. While chickens can function well in small groups, where each bird is able to find his or her spot in the pecking order, it's virtually impossible for them to establish a social structure in such large numbers. Because of this, the frustrated birds often peck at one another relentlessly, causing injury and even death.

Such intensive confinement also breeds filth and disease. A Washington Post writer who visited a chicken shed said that "[d]ust, feathers and ammonia choke the air in the chicken house and fans turn it into airborne sandpaper, rubbing skin raw."

Michael Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker, also visited a chicken farm and wrote, "I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe. ... There must have been thirty thousand chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn't move, didn't cluck. They were almost like statues of chickens, living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way."

Because the birds are forced to breathe ammonia and particulate matter from feces and feathers all day long, many suffer from serious health problems, including chronic respiratory illnesses and bacterial infections.

Consumer Reports found that two-thirds of chicken meat analyzed was infected with salmonella or campylobacter-or both. The extremely high prevalence of dangerous contaminants in chicken flesh is largely from the filthy conditions in the sheds where the birds are raised. Factory-farmed animals are fed sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics as "growth promoters." Feeding animals low doses of antibiotics encourages the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria-which people come into contact with when they handle or consume infected meat.

In addition to drugs, genetic selection is also used to make chickens grow faster and larger. The average chicken today is four times bigger than one in the 1950s, and chicken breasts are 80 percent larger than they were back then. Many chickens become crippled because their legs cannot support the weight of their bodies. It's common for chickens to die from ascites, a disease thought to be caused by the inability of birds' hearts and lungs to keep up with their rapid skeletal growth.
'Breeder' Chickens
The welfare of the "breeding" animals who give birth to the more than 8 billion "broiler" chickens killed in the U.S. each year is largely ignored. Like the chickens to whom they give birth, "breeder" chickens are confined to filthy sheds without access to sunlight, fresh air, or anything else that they would enjoy in nature.

When these birds are very young-usually just 1 to 10 days old-hot blades are used to cut off a portion of their sensitive beaks so that they won't peck each other out of the frustration caused by intense confinement. Sometimes their toes, spurs, and combs are also cut off. The birds are not given any painkillers to ease the agony of this mutilation, and many debeaked chickens starve to death because eating is too painful.

"Breeder" chickens are forced to live on factory farms for more than a year. Because they're kept alive so much longer than "broiler" chickens, they face an even higher risk of organ failure and death as they grow larger and larger as a result of their genetically manipulated bodies. In an attempt to stunt "breeder" chickens' growth, farmers drastically limit the birds' feed, keeping them in a constant state of hunger and frustration.

After more than a year of deprivation and confinement, the bodies of these breeding birds are too worn out to produce as many chicks. Frail and exhausted, they are loaded onto trucks and sent to slaughter.

If you don't want to support such cruelty, take PETA's pledge to try vegan for 30 days. You'll likely feel healthier and more energetic. If you stick with it, you'll even reduce your risk of developing cancer. According to a 2006 Harvard study of 135,000 people, those who frequently ate grilled, skinless chicken had a 52 percent higher chance of developing bladder cancer than those who didn't. To learn more about the health benefits of a plant-based diet, see PETA's "Eating for Your Health" section.

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Chickens raised for their flesh-called "broiler" chickens by the meat industry-are typically confined to massive, windowless sheds that hold tens of thousands of birds each. While chickens can function well in small groups, where each bird is able to find his or her spot in the pecking order, it's virtually impossible for them to establish a social structure in such large numbers.

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The most telling symbol of the modern era isn't the automobile or the smartphone. It's the chicken nugget. Chicken is already the most popular meat in the US, and is projected to be the planet's favourite flesh by 2020. Future civilisations will find traces of humankind's 50 billion bird-a-year habit in the fossil record, a marker for what we now call the Anthropocene. And yet responsibility for the dramatic change in our consumption lies not so much in general human activity, but capitalism. Although we're taught to understand it as an economic system, capitalism doesn't just organise hierarchies of human work. Capitalism is what happens when power and money combine to turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. Indeed, the way we understand nature owes a great deal to capitalism.

Every civilisation has had some rendering of the difference between "us" and "them", but only under capitalism is there a boundary between "society" and "nature" - a violent and tightly policed border with deep roots in colonialism.

First taking shape in the era of Chistopher Columbus, capitalism created a peculiar binary order. "Nature" became the antonym of "society" in the minds of philosophers, in the policies of European empires, and the calculations of global financial centres. "Nature" was a place of profit, a vast frontier of free gifts waiting to be accepted by conquerors and capitalists.

This was a dangerous view of nature for all sorts of reasons, not least because it simultaneously degraded human and animal life of every kind. What we call "cheap nature" included not only forests and fields and streams, but also the vast majority of humankind. In the centuries between Columbus and the industrial revolution, enslaved and indentured Africans, Asians, indigenous peoples and virtually all women became part of "nature" - and treated cheaply as a result. When humans can be treated with such little care, it's not surprising that other animals fare even worse under capitalism, especially the ones we end up paying to eat.

Animals have been at the epicentre of five centuries of dietary transformation, which sharply accelerated after the second world war. The creation of the modern world depended on the movement of cattle, sheep, horses, pigs and chickens into the new world, reinforcing the murderous advance of microbes, soldiers and bankers after 1492. Capitalism's " ecological hoofprint ", to use food scholar Tony Weis's well-turned phrase, has become radically globalised ever since. In the half-century after 1961, Weis tells us, per capita meat and egg consumption has doubled, and the number of slaughtered animals leapt eightfold, from eight to 64 billion.

To those with a romantic view of where their food comes from, uncooked meat appears to be a raw ingredient rather than a processed one. Quite the opposite. Feed and oilseed crops form part of what Weis terms "the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex". Markets for grain made it possible for meat not just to become cheap food, but also to back financial instruments. Futures contracts in pork bellies, for instance, in turn require the uniformity, homogenisation and industrialisation of the crops they transform. Raw meat in the supermarket is, in other words, cooked up by a sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism's ecology.

Where there's profit, there's every incentive to realise it efficiently. Modern meat-production systems can turn a fertile egg and a 4kg bag of feed into a 2kg chicken in five weeks. Turkey production times almost halved between 1970 and 2000, down to 20 weeks from egg to 16kg bird. Other animals have seen similar advances through a combination of breeding, concentrated feeding operations and global supply chains. The consequences of the sustained rise in meat consumption are a planetary affair too: 14.5% of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are from livestock production.

The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to industrial agriculture's bottom line. Nature is merely the pool from which animals are drawn and factory farmed, and the dump into which their, and our, waste disappears. The danger lies in believing the division between nature and society is real, in seeing "factory farming" as an environmental question and "factory production" as a social question. Social questions are environmental questions, and vice versa.

hickens don't turn into nuggets by themselves. Capitalists need cheap work. With the European invasion of the new world in 1492, that labour presented itself in the bodies of indigenous people. By the late 16th century, when Spaniards were desperately trying to revive silver production at the great silver mountain of Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, they began using the word naturales to refer to indigenous people. Through hard work and prayer, those indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, might find divine redemption through work and perhaps even, one day long in the future, entry into society as equals.

Work was never meant to be fun. Consider the etymology of the French travail and the Spanish trabajo, each a translation of the English noun "work": their Latin root is trepaliare, "to torture, to inflict suffering or agony." But the way work works has changed.

For millennia, most humans survived through more or less intimate relations with land and sea. Even those who didn't were closely connected to the tasks and objects of labour. Human survival depended on holistic, not fragmented, knowledge: fishers, nomads, farmers, healers, cooks and many others experienced and practised their work in a way directly connected to the web of life. Farmers, for instance, had to know soils, weather patterns, seeds - in short, everything from planting to harvest. That didn't mean work was pleasant - slaves were often treated brutally. Nor did it mean that the relations of work were equitable: guild masters exploited journeymen, lords exploited serfs, men exploited women, the old exploited the young. But work was premised on a holistic sense of production and a connection to wider worlds of life and community.

In the 16th century, that began to shift. The enterprising Dutch or English farmer - and the Madeiran, then Brazilian, sugar planter - was increasingly connected to growing international markets for processed goods, and correspondingly more interested in the relationship between work time and the harvest. International markets pushed local transformations. Land in England was consolidated though enclosure, which concurrently "freed" a growing share of the rural population from the commons that they had tended, supported and survived on. These newly displaced peasants were free to find other work, and free to starve or face imprisonment if they failed.

This history is alive and well in the modern chicken nugget. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the US, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to poultry workers. It's hard to find staff when, according to one study in Alabama, 86% of employees who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. To fill the gaps in the labour force, some chicken operators use prison labour, paid at 25 cents an hour. In Oklahoma, chicken company executives returned to a colonial fusion of work and faith, setting up an addiction treatment centre in 2007, Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery. With judges steering addicts to treatment instead of jail, the recovery programme had a ready supply of workers. At CAAIR, prayer was supplemented with unpaid work on chicken production lines as part of a recovery therapy. If you worked and prayed hard enough for the duration of your treatment, you'd be allowed to re-enter society.

CAAIR's recruits were predominantly young and white, but the majority of poultry workers are people of colour. Latinx immigrants are a vital force in US agriculture, and the delivery of their cheap work was made possible by class restructuring on two fronts. One, in the US, was a strong movement in the 1980s by newly aggressive meat-packing firms to destroy union power and replace unionised workers with low-wage immigrant labour. The other was the destabilisation of Mexico's agrarian order after 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which resulted in flows of cheap immigrant labour - unemployed workers displaced by capitalism's ecology from one side of the US border to the other.

A line on a map between two states is a powerful abstraction, one that has been used recently by the far right to recruit and spread fear, and for much longer by capitalists in search of ever cheaper and more profitable workers. Under capitalism, national territories, locally owned land and new migrating workers are produced simultaneously.

ith migrant workers came elite fears of the itinerant poor. In 17th- and 18th-century England, this panic resulted in harsh laws against vagabondage, and the development of charities to ameliorate the worst effects of enforced destitution. Threats of imprisonment moved the poor into waged work, an activity that took the intelligence, strength and dexterity of humans and disciplined them to productive labour using another modern invention: a new way of measuring time.

If the practice of labour shapes capitalism's ecology, its indispensable machine is the mechanical clock. The clock - not money - emerged as the key technology for measuring the value of work. This distinction is crucial because it's easy to think that working for wages is capitalism's signature. It's not: in 13th-century England only a third of the economically active population depended on wages for survival. That wages have become a decisive way of structuring life, space and nature owes everything to a new model of time.

By the early 14th century, the new temporal model was shaping industrial activity. In textile-manufacturing towns like Ypres, in what is now Belgium, workers found themselves regulated not by the flow of activity or the seasons but by a new kind of time - abstract, linear, repetitive. In Ypres, that work time was measured by the town's bells, which rang at the beginning and end of each work shift. By the 16th century, time was measured in steady ticks of minutes and seconds. This abstract time came to shape everything - work and play, sleep and waking, credit and money, agriculture and industry, even prayer. By the end of the 16th century, most of England's parishes had mechanical clocks.

Spain's conquest of the Americas involved inculcating in their residents a new notion of time as well as of space. Wherever European empires penetrated, there appeared the image of the "lazy" native, ignorant of the imperatives of Christ and the clock. Policing time was central to capitalism's ecology. As early as 1553, the Spanish crown began installing "at least one public clock" in its major colonial cities. Other civilisations had their own sophisticated temporal rules, but the new regimes of work displaced indigenous tempos and relationships with the natural world. The Mayan calendar is a complex hierarchy of times and readings from the heavens, offering a rich set of arrangements of humans within the universe. Spanish invaders respected it only to this extent: they synchronised their colonial assaults to sacred moments in the calendar.

As social historian EP Thompson observes in his seminal study Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, the governance of time follows a particular logic: "In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to 'pass the time'." The connection of specific activities to larger productive goals didn't allow for time theft, and the discipline of the clock was enforced by violence across the planet.

Teaching the value and structure of capitalist time to new subjects was a key part of the colonial enterprise. One settler noted in 1859 that Indigenous Australians "now ... have the advantage of dating from the 'Nip Nip,' or Settlers' yearly regular shearing time. This seems to supply them with a mode of stating years, which before they had not. Months or moons then satisfied them." But the regulation of time was also a focus of resistance. Another settler wrote in a diary: "This evening there was a grand Korroberry [sic, for corroboree, an exuberant, possibly spiritual, gathering] - I endeavoured to dissuade them, telling them that it was Sunday - but they said, 'black fellow no Sunday.'" Why the resistance? Because they knew full well that their labour was the object of theft, that colonists were appropriating their work.

Fights over the regulation of time continue even now. On US poultry lines, there is a federal law limiting the speed at which birds are processed: 140 birds per minute. The industry is lobbying to eliminate the limit, so that it can compete with factories in Brazil and Germany, where the rate is nearer 200 bpm. Worries about higher rates of food contamination and worker injury are being outweighed by the certain profit from more dead chickens.

apitalism has always experimented with every available kind of labour system simultaneously. A sugar plantation in 1630s Brazil, for example, would be easily recognisable as a modern industrial operation in, say, the Bangladeshi textile industry. Just as autoworkers on the line assemble simplified, interchangeable parts and fast-food workers manufacture standardised burgers, so did African slaves work specialised jobs in a simplified landscape of sugar monoculture.

Behind the modern factory, there has always been a layer-cake of exploitation. Managers of factories were salaried more than the workers, who worked with raw materials acquired through various kinds of peonage and natural resource exploitation, and all of them depended on free domestic labour, usually from women. The global factory depends on a global mine, a global farm, and a global family.

Hence the persistence today of slavery. One UN agency, the International Labour Organization, estimates there are 40 million people in slavery today, the majority of whom are women, many in forced marriages. Wartime work camps in, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo supply the rare-earth metals such as tantalum that power the physical infrastructure behind the virtual economy.

But just as management looks to find new ways to generate profit, so workers find ways to resist. Early capitalism's great commodity frontiers - of sugar, silver, copper, iron, forest products, fishing and even cereal agriculture - were zones of experimentation in strategies of labour control in Europe and its colonies, and always spaces of conflict. Strikes, rebellions, negotiations and resistance characterised the application of capitalist work disciplines. Every resistance by labour was a new reason to bring in machines. Modern work regimes and technologies emerged from the crucible of experiments, strategies and resistances of early modern workers.

Worker unrest in factories and slave rebellions, past and present, are linked not just because they are expressions of resistance, but because they are protests against the ecology of capitalism. Every global factory needs a global farm: industrial, technological and service enterprises rely on the extraction of work and cheap nature to thrive. The apps on your iPhone, designed in Cupertino, California, might have been coded by self-exploiting independent software engineers, and the phone itself assembled in draconian workplaces in China, and run on minerals extracted in inhumane conditions in the Congo. Modern manufacturing relies on layered, simultaneous and different regimes of work. And in response to every act of resistance against it, capitalism has moved the frontiers of work yet again.

egemony over workers has been aided by cheap food, and the promise of a chicken in every pot. Cheap food has been central to the maintenance of order for millennia. But in the ecology of capitalism, that order has been maintained through planetary transformation.

Since the 15th century, some land has become the exclusive domain of specific kinds of crops and crop systems: fields of monocultures designed to bring in flows of cash. Other areas were reserved to house those humans who had been excommunicated from those lands, to be better placed at the service of capitalists in cities. It was always a socially unstable geography, with low industrial wages supported by lower peasant wages supported by free gifts from nature, women and the colonies. After the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries offered workers the promise of alternatives to exploitation, capitalist fears of urban uprising and communism reached fever pitch. To allay this existential dread, governments and foundations did not address inequality or exploitation. Instead, they funded the development of crops that would grow abundantly enough to provide cheap food and curb urban hunger.

That it was urban, and not rural, hunger that troubled policy makers is vitally important. Food and employment for people in rural areas - where most of the world's hunger was concentrated - were of little concern. Hunger began to matter politically only when the poor came to the cities and translated it into anger, and thence potentially into insurrection and a challenge to the rule of cheap nature. It's here - in the bourgeois concern about that rule and its need for worker quiescence - that we find the origin of what came to be known as the Green Revolution.

The aim was to breed varieties of cereals that might flow freely through urban areas. But the revolution wasn't simply an agronomic transformation. It required more than magic seeds. In order for farmers to grow the crops, national governments had to subsidise the purchase of crops through agricultural marketing boards, to lay the infrastructure for irrigation, and to suppress political dissent around alternative food systems. The Green Revolution of the early- to mid-20th century was a package of reforms designed to prevent the revolutionary political goal of many peasants' and landless workers' movements: comprehensive land and agrarian reform.

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'Cheap food has been central to the maintenance of order for millennia' ... a 99 cent store in New York City. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

If you squint, it's possible to see the Green Revolution as a success. Globally, grain output and yields (the amount of output per unit area) more than doubled - between 1950 and 1980. India's wheat yields shot up by 87% between 1960 and 1980, similar to what American corn farmers experienced in the two decades after 1935. A rising share of all this food was traded on the world market, with global grain exports increasing by 295% during the 1960s and 70s. If these are the metrics of success, then the political commitment to making food cheap through state subsidy and violence worked.

But the prodigious output did not reduce hunger. Wheat production in India soared, but the amount that Indians ate hardly improved. Hunger, particularly in an economy dependent on agriculture, doesn't end if people remain poor: it doesn't matter how much grain there is if you can't afford to buy it. Indeed, it is a global phenomenon that from 1990 to 2015, prices of processed food rose far less than those of fresh fruits and vegetables, and that in almost every country today, the poorest part of the population can't afford to eat five fresh fruits or vegetables a day.

Although workers in countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) saw an increase in their share of national income after the second world war, that reversed in the 1980s. This was a direct consequence of anti-labour policies that scholars aptly call "wage repression". Given consistently low wages in the neoliberal era, it mak0es sense to look at cheap food as cheap not merely relative to wage costs but directly in terms of price. When we do, it emerges as no accident that one foodstuff whose price has fallen dramatically is chicken in Mexico - a direct consequence of Nafta, technology and the US soybean industry.

Nafta originally excluded agricultural goods, but they were included at the insistence of the Mexican government, which wanted to "modernise" its peasantry by moving them from agriculture into urban circuits of industry. The strategy worked: Mexico's campesino ("peasant farmer") agricultural economy buckled, as evinced by the El Campo No Aguanta Más ("the countryside can't take it anymore") protests that spread throughout the country in 2003. Circuits of migration and pools of labour for US agriculture were the result. But at least the chicken was cheap.

ere we come to an important point about cheap food regimes: they guarantee neither that people are fed nor that they are fed well - as the global persistence of diet-related ill health and malnutrition can attest. Capitalism's agricultural frontiers continue to press against the world's peasants, who provide 75% of the food in large parts of the global south. But while the present is bleak, with agricultural frontiers pushing through Amazonia and displacing peasants around the world, in the 21st century a new wrinkle has appeared that will fatally undermine capitalism's five century-long food regime: climate change.

The imagery of the frontier lends itself to thinking only about land. But the past two centuries have witnessed a very different kind of frontier movement: the enclosure of the atmospheric commons as a dumping ground for greenhouse gas emissions. In the 21st century, agriculture and forestry (which includes land clearance for cash cropping) contribute between a quarter and a third of greenhouse gas emissions.

This is inevitable, because they're profoundly energy- intensive, and have become more so. That's a big problem, because there are no more atmospheric commons to enclose, and no obvious way to keep the costs of climate change off capitalism's ledgers. Nowhere is this clearer than in the faltering global farm, whose productivity growth has been slowing, just as it did for English farmers in the middle of the 18th century. Agro-biotechnology's promise of a new agricultural revolution has so far been worse than empty - failing to deliver a new yield boom, creating superweeds and superbugs that can withstand glyphosate and other poisons, and sustaining the cheap food model that is driving the ongoing state shift in the world's climate system.

Climate change represents something much more than a closing frontier - it is something akin to an implosion of the cheap-nature model, bringing not the end of easy and cheap natures, but a dramatic reversal. As a growing body of research demonstrates, climate change suppresses agricultural productivity. "Climate" refers to extremely diverse phenomena, including drought, extreme rainfall, heat waves and cold snaps. Soy, the paradigmatic neoliberal crop, has already experienced what agronomists call yield suppression as a result of climate change. How much remains a matter of debate, but many analyses land somewhere in the area of a 3% reduction in growth since the 1980s - a value of $5bn per year from 1981 to 2002.

Worse, climate change promises absolute declines. Each 1C increase in average annual global temperature is accompanied by a greater risk of dramatic effects on global farming. Agricultural yields will decline between 5% and 50% (or more) in the next century, depending on the time frame, crop, location and extent to which carbon continues to be pumped into the air at today's prodigious rates. World agriculture will absorb two-thirds of all climate change costs by 2050. That means that both the climate and capitalism's agricultural model are in the midst of an abrupt and irreversible moment of change.

There is little reason to imagine that climate change won't break the modern food system. Worse, industrial food production is a breeding ground for pandemic disease, and reasoned analysis suggests that the kind of concentrated animal-feeding operations that bring us cheap meat will also bring viruses that could decimate the human population. Again, this is nothing new. Just as early-modern climate change and the plague brought about the end of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism, so we face a future in which climate change and a vulnerability to big systemic shocks augur a dramatic end for capitalism's ecology.

We're astute enough students of history to see that what follows capitalism might not be better. Around the world, fascism has emerged from liberalism's soil. Yet precisely as capitalism's bills come due, communities are both resisting and developing complex and systemic responses at capitalism's frontiers. Around each of the seven cheap things that make capitalism possible - nature, work, care, food, energy, money and lives - there are movements that are developing alternatives. Whether in a globally reviving labour movement, in the Movement for Black Lives' demands around food, reparations and local economic sovereignty, or the feminismo campesino y popular ("popular peasant feminism") developed by the La Via Campesina peasant movement in Latin America to bring together concerns around food, care, nature and work, movements are both fighting and developing intersectional alternatives.

John Jordan, an activist and co-founder of the UK's Reclaim the Streets movement, argues that resistance and alternatives are "the twin strands of the DNA of social change". That change will need resources and space to develop. If we are made by capitalism's ecology, then we can be remade only as we in turn practise new ways of producing and caring for one another together - a process of redoing, rethinking and reliving our most basic relations.
Adapted from A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things by Raj Patel and Jason W Moore, published by Verso on 22 May, and available to buy at guardianbookshop.com
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How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era

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The most telling symbol of the modern era isn't the automobile or the smartphone. It's the chicken nugget. Chicken is already the most popular meat in the US, and is projected to be the planet's favourite flesh by 2020.