Chicken tonight

Is dinner tonight fowl? Check out how that chicken gets to your plate in Lisa McManus’ “The Whole Chicken Story” in the September/October issue of Cook’s Illustrated. She reports that 8 billion chickens are killed in the United States annually: That’s about 84 pounds of bird per person. McManus writes that these animals have been “engineered” to grow to full weight—6 pounds—in six weeks, compared to 4 pounds in seven weeks in 1980 and 3 pounds in 10 weeks in 1950. The birds are “often bulked up with … (ground-up chicken feathers),” and within the chickens “Johns Hopkins researchers found residue of arsenic; they also found traces of caffeine and the active ingredients in Benadryl, Tylenol, and Prozac, which has been fed to chickens to alter their moods.”