July 19, 2025
Your Chicken is 364% Bigger Than in 1957
The Chicken on Your Plate Has Grown 364% in Just 50 Years—Here’s How and Why It Matters It took me a minute to grasp what I was seeing when I first stumbled on that side‑by‑side picture of chickens from different decades. A scrawny bird from 1957, a slightly more developed one from 1978, and then a mammoth-looking 2005 bird. The numbers underneath were even more jaw-dropping: 905 grams in 1957, 1,808 grams in 1978, and over 4,200 grams by 2005. That’s a whopping 364% size increase. I couldn’t help but wonder—what happened to our chickens? How did we turn a



