Click to enlarge
The chart shows the per capita retail availability of beef (blue), pork (yellow), and chicken (red) since 1909. The data come from the USDA/Economic Research Service and are available via data.gov with similar statistics for just about any food you can think of.
The explosion in chicken availability surprised me, so I checked Wikipedia and found this telling bit of information:
Soon after poultry keeping gained the attention of agricultural researchers (around 1896), improvements in nutrition and management made poultry keeping more profitable and businesslike.
Prior to about 1910, chicken was served primarily on special occasions or Sunday dinner. Poultry was shipped live or killed, plucked, and packed on ice (but not eviscerated). The "whole, ready-to-cook broiler" wasn't popular until the Fifties, when end-to-end refrigeration and sanitary practices gave consumers more confidence. Before this, poultry were often cleaned by the neighborhood butcher, though cleaning poultry at home was a commonplace kitchen skill.
The major milestone in 20th century poultry production was the discovery of Vitamin-D (named in 1922), which made it possible to keep chickens in confinement year-round. Before this, chickens did not thrive during the winter (due to lack of sunlight), and egg production, incubation, and meat production in the off-season were all very difficult, making poultry a seasonal and expensive proposition. Year-round production lowered costs, especially for broilers.
On a side note, here is a look at the global distribution of chickens. The map shows headcount as a percentage of the top market (China) -- a strange way of presenting this information, but interesting nonetheless.
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Related:
Eating like our ancenstors
