The Birds and The Bugs

Chicken is such a mainstay of the contemporary American dinner
table that it seems hard to imagine that, just a century ago, it
was rare and expensive. But over the course of the 20th century,
both chickens and the chicken industry exploded in size. Much of
that growth can be attributed to the miraculous properties of
antibiotics, which were developed to fight human diseases but
quickly began to be fed to farm animals in vast quantities.
Journalist and author Maryn McKenna weaves these two intertwined
tales together in her new book, Big Chicken: The Incredible Story
of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way
the World Eats. In this episode of Gastropod, she describes the
consequences of decades spent feeding chicken antibiotics, in terms
of chicken flavor, poultry well-being, and, most significantly,
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