How antibiotics fueled a new agricultural industry And that has produced the most serious unintended consequence: Drug-resistant bacteria that have migrated from food animals to humans and contributed to the emergence of a global health crisis. "And it got us a system of meat production that is incredibly efficient, incredibly consistent, that's very reliable, and that produces a protein that isn't very interesting."īut in addition to creating a blander product, Thomas Juke's experiments and Lederle's quick embrace of chlortetracycline as a growth promoter would also lead to widespread, routine use of antibiotics throughout animal agriculture, chronicles McKenna in the book. "The story of antibiotic use in agriculture at least starts out with good intentions-to restore the damage to the food system caused by World War II, and to feed the world inexpensively," McKenna said in an interview. The discovery that the drug could quickly fuel growth in chicks raised in confinement revolutionized the poultry industry, turning chicken into America's favorite protein. In Big Chicken, McKenna lays out in extensive detail the unintended consequences that resulted from experiments performed at Lederle Laboratories in December 1948 when scientist Thomas Jukes began adding trace amounts of the antibiotic aureomycin (later to be known as chlortetracycline) to chicken feed. She tells that story, she says, not to memorialize the deliciousness of that free-range, antibiotic-free French chicken but to highlight what she considers to be her beat as a journalist: Unintended consequences. The taste of that "sidewalk Paris poulet," McKenna writes, left her both delighted and sad, opening her eyes to how invisible chicken-the most widely consumed animal protein in the United States-had become for her, despite living in one of the leading poultry-producing states in the country (Georgia) and years of covering epidemics and outbreaks that frequently originated in poultry. In the prologue to her new book, Big Chicken, journalist Maryn McKenna paints a mouth-watering portrait of a roasted chicken from a sidewalk market in Paris that tastes like "muscle and blood and exercise and the outdoors" and nothing like the chicken she had been eating for much of her life.
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