OPINION
False humility​: Chicken mania will pique historians' interest
26 Jun 2025
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There’s a new McDonald’s ad that rings as fairly brazen. Two blokes eating chicken wings in a ute tray with some of kind of plant/warehouse/factory in the background. An attempt to enshrine a new McDonald’s menu item as fuel for ‘salt of the earth’ types and a legitimate competitor to the niche market power of KFC. The narration goes:
Will historians one day write books about this era of peak chicken? Probably not. But that says more about historians than it does these wings.
On first exposure – TV in the background – I heard the ad and appreciated its turn of phrase. Heck, there must be a great deal of ‘valuable’ things that nevertheless won’t be preserved! It’s an ad that has burst onto the scene on high rotation, so I didn’t have to wait long for a second viewing. By which time, I received it entirely differently.
In this ad, the world’s biggest fast-food company displays a curious grip on the notion of ‘relevance’. To be fair, McDonald’s Australia probably refers to its own range of products by the term ‘peak chicken’, but this aligns so neatly with what’s popularly considered a ‘golden era’ of chicken consumption it must be taken as an endorsement of the wider situation, too. Is it really the case future historians won’t see fit to report on the manner in which modern chicken meat, one of our epoch’s favourite foods, was arrived at? Shall the fate of 21st century chickens really be overlooked when they comprise almost 90% of land animals currently being slaughtered? And when their consumption has helped to grow and sustain a human population boom in the last half-century, even though the two spikes hardly track parallel? In 1961, a year when the human headcount was just over 3 billion, it’s estimated 6.5 billion chickens were slaughtered for meat worldwide. In 2023, the human population was over 8 billion (something like a 260% increase), but the number of slaughtered chickens was up to 76 billion (something like a 1150% increase). An estimated 140,000 chickens are now slaughtered every minute. No biggie.
A second TV ad in the McDonald’s campaign diverges slightly from the first. In it, a city worker leans at the foot of a staircase, eating a bag of the feted McDonald’s wings. She pauses to brush off debris from her shirt, as the same voice pronounces:
All great eras leave a legacy. In this golden age of peak chicken, that legacy is crumbs.
A line which, knowingly or not, is directly antagonistic to a popular denouncement of our chicken craze. Rather than anything about ‘crumbs’, it’s been said the bones of broiler chickens (the variety raised for meat consumption) will be among the signatures of our era in the archaeological record – traditionally the best indicator of the historical hitting zone. Via selective breeding, present-day broilers reach their slaughter weight almost twice as fast as breeds from the 1960s, and yet they also manage to grow four times the actual size of those forebears. Broilers are usually deemed ready for slaughter within 5-7 weeks of life, and the rapid growth of their flesh is completely at odds with their skeletons and organs, often leading to lameness or immobility.
What does ‘peak chicken’ look like in Australia? Here, 700 million chickens are raised and killed for meat each year. Chicken dominates the market, largely due to its ‘healthy’ perception, versatility, and attractive price. During World War II, the cost of chicken in Australia was four times higher than steak, but they’ve since traded places. In saying this, McDonald’s own chicken nuggets have experienced significant price hikes in recent years, even if these didn’t prevent the chain trading 20 million kilograms of chicken in Australia in 2023.
McDonald’s trumpets that the chicken meat they’re serving up in Australia – via key providers Ingham’s, Baiada and Turosi – carries RSPCA-approval. Chiefly, the RSPCA concerns itself with ensuring broilers have opportunities in their short lifespan to express ordinary behaviours – such as pecking, scratching, roaming. As far as ‘end of life’ for broilers goes, the RSPCA advocates that chickens being rounded-up aren’t carried more than four at a time, and that, at the slaughterhouse, they’re not clamped for too long before they’re stunned with electrified water. But there is little that can be done for the suffering that arises from these animals’ ruthlessly engineered physiologies.
Carnivore and herbivore humans alike await the arrival of lab-grown meat in their lifetimes, and by some rosy estimates it may be achievable at a replacement scale by the middle of this century. At the other end of the timeline, the industrialised farming of meat didn’t kick off in earnest until a post-WWII boom. So, if such boundaries are to be believed, our chicken mania will be a neat 100-year period that descendants entrusted with telling our story will struggle to miss. No doubt the economic, ecological, and ethical conundrum of chicken farming is far bigger than even heavy-hitter McDonald’s, but the wording of this latest ad is tactless and it hints at something deeper. Somebody at a recent McDonald’s advertising roundtable must have raised the ‘factory farming’ rejoinder, yet consensus resolved to go ahead with the script as it was, due to a belief the titanic scale of meat farming is such a niche concern that a few aggrieved animal advocates wouldn’t have cohered as much of an obstacle. This phenomenon – the impotence of the opposition – will surely take up chapters in the inevitable books, as well.
