More Poultry, More Problems

Christopher Leonard Says Your Chicken McNuggets Are Bankrupting Rural America

Waldron, Arkansas is in the middle of nowhere. But because it’s home to a Tyson Foods poultry plant that processes 1 million birds a week, it’s also ground zero for the American industrial meat system. Former Associated Press agribusiness reporter Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business, traveled to Waldron to investigate a Tyson-owned hatchery where business wasn’t going as planned. As he explained to an audience at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Tyson typically hatches chicks and delivers them to independently owned farms …