Publications about the meat industry have exploded in recent years. Studies of chicken are no exception. Steve Striffler’s Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (New Haven, 2007), Christopher Leonard’s The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business (New York, 2014), and Maryn McKenna’s Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats (Washington, D.C., 2017) have all emphasized major problems with the modern chicken industry. Given the industry’s significant effects on our health and environment, and the fact that chicken is now the leading meat eaten in the United States as well as in many other countries, the topic deserves careful scrutiny.
Josephson’s book claims to be a “global history of the industrial chicken” (4). Although Josephson covers a great deal of well-trod territory on the subject, he situates the study in a global context, uses interdisciplinary...