Why Westerners eat so much chicken

By W.Z.

WALK INTO any upscale supermarket in a big city and you will find a vegan section. This might lead you to believe that the number of herbivores is increasing. Perhaps it is, but surveys show that less than 10% of Europeans have cut meat entirely from their diets. According to Gallup, a polling firm, just 5% of American adults are vegetarians, a proportion that is virtually unaltered since 1999. But even though Westerners remain wary of ingesting tofu sausages, and are eating the same amounts of beef and pork, their diets have still changed significantly in recent decades. Data from the OECD, a Paris-based think-tank, show that since 1990 consumption of chicken per person has risen by 70% in rich countries.