Which Popular Super Bowl Snacks Come from Factory Farms?

Unfortunately, many of the most popular foods to be served and eaten before millions of glowing TV screens this year are the direct result of an inhumane, unsustainable system of industrialized animal agriculture.

Terms like “wings,” “tenders,” and “hot dogs” are so ubiquitous it’s easy to disconnect them from their animal origins. Science is consistently finding that these animals are much smarter and more aware than we tend to give them credit for.

Nearly all of these animals lived brief lives on huge facilities known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOS) or “factory farms.” As the term suggests—these massive windowless “farms” treat animals as commodities in the most highly mechanized, efficient environment possible. So while they might not cost much at the store, these snack foods represent a far deeper cost to animal welfare, as well as the health of humans and the planet they live on.

Let’s take a closer look at the origins of Super Bowl Sunday’s most popular snacks.

Where do those wings, tenders, and nuggets come from?

There’s no question that chicken wings—not to mention the many other incarnations of chicken meat—are one of the most well-loved foods associated with sports fandoms in general. In 2024, Americans ate an estimated 1.45 billion chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday. That staggering number equates to the weight of 11,000 school buses.

Chickens raised for meat—known in the industry as broilers—have cruelty literally bred into them. In order to yield more meat per bird, Big Ag employs a process called “selective breeding,” producing chickens who are four times larger today than just 60 years ago. This unnatural growth means that modern farmed chickens are plagued with lifelong acute pain. Some can’t even stand to support their own body weight.

The suffering persists to the bitter end. Despite scientific evidence of their ability to feel pain and emotions, chickens have been arbitrarily excluded from “humane slaughter” protections in the US.

The killing of chickens via “live-shackle slaughter” is horrifying as it sounds. First, conscious birds are shackled, sometimes so tightly it breaks their bones, upside down onto a machine. The machine dips their heads into a vat of electrified water. This is meant to stun birds unconscious before they’re carried to the next steps—slitting their throats and dipping them into a vat of boiling water. But far too often, the stunning method fails, and every year, hundreds of thousands of birds are boiled alive, fully conscious, and full of unimaginable pain in their final moments.

Pigs in a blanket were once pigs on a CAFO

Whether it’s pigs in a blanket during the Super Bowl party at home, or a hotdog at the stadium, pork products and football seemingly go hand-in-hand.

Maybe you’ve heard the comparison that pigs are similarly intelligent, gentle, and playful as dogs. Considering this, I shudder to imagine my beloved dog facing the horrors found on pigs CAFOs. Factory farms subject innocent pigs to painful, unnecessary mutilation. Young male pigs are traumatically castrated, generally without anesthetic, because it prevents the development of a natural yet unpleasant odor in the meat. Many more pigs have their sensitive tails docked—again, without pain relief—to stop them from the (understandably) stress-induced behavior of biting at each other’s tails.

Perhaps most traumatic of all, mother pigs on factory farms are typically artificially inseminated and then forced into an inhumanely tight spaces called “gestation crates.” These crates are so tight that sows don’t have enough room to turn their bodies around. They’re kept here for months at a time. These poor mothers are further traumatized when their piglets—who they naturally yearn to nurture and care for—get taken away from them at just a few weeks old.

Big Dairy for the Big Game

Cheesy dips, hot slices of pizza, fully loaded nachos, the list goes on. Dairy is a big part of the snack table for the Big Game. While no animals had to be slaughtered in order for us to indulge in macaroni and cheese, or a jalapeno popper, countless cows have had to spend their lives on enormous, problematic factory farms.

Naturally, dairy cows want to graze in the sunshine, socialize with other cows, nurture their young. That’s not permitted on factory farms, where they’re kept inside and locked into an never-ending cycle of forced impregnation, separation from their babies, and milk production.

The cruel and unnatural rate that cows are expected to keep up with to meet demand is also incredibly taxing. While a cow in normal conditions lives up to 20 years, factory-farmed cows’ bodies begin failing them after just four to six years of life. They’re slaughtered soon after.

Egg-laying hens don’t fare much better than broiler chickens

Whether they’ve been “deviled” or baked into some post-game desserts, eggs show up in some form or another in many Super Bowl party spreads. But how were the hens who laid those eggs treated? The beginning of life for a layer hen is cold and unfeeling. Newly hatched chicks are sorted through and discarded if they’re male. Without the ability to lay eggs, the industry considers male chickens useless and kills billions of them every year.

The females end up on CAFOs, which can house hundreds of thousands of birds simultaneously. In the US, many birds are confined in tiny “battery cages,” so small and obviously cruel that they’ve been banned in certain countries. Without even enough room to spread their wings, many chickens become agitated and aggressively peck at themselves or nearby birds. Factory farms don’t solve this by providing more humane conditions. No, instead they take a hot blade to slice off portions of their beaks—which are lined with nerve endings.

Egg CAFOs demand a very high output from their birds. Thanks to years of selective breeding, modern commercial layers produce up to 300 eggs per year. This is far from natural, as the chicken’s wild ancestor, the red jungle fowl, generally produces 12 eggs per year.

The bottom line

By design, animal-based snack foods like the ones we just discussed are tantalizing, even addictive. What’s more, they have become integral parts of our culture and traditions. Not just on Super Bowl Sunday, but on holidays and special occasions all-year long. That can make it difficult to think about the animals that went into every chicken wing, hot dog, and cheesy slice of pizza we eat this Sunday. Sadly, the vast majority of these animals did not enjoy comfortable, healthy lives.

We owe it to these animals to at least be conscious about this food system, and to demand better conditions on factory farms. When we fight for a more humane and sustainable food system, we’re doing it for animals, the planet, and ourselves.

If you’d like to get involved in that effort, click here.