WIDESPREAD DISEASE IN SUPERMARKET CHICKEN

White striping is a disease—like spaghetti meat, woody breast, and green muscle disease. It shows up in the muscles of chickens who have been selectively bred to grow unnaturally fast—just so they can be sold on supermarket shelves.

90% of chickens eaten in the US come from just two extremely fast-growing breeds: the Cobb 500 and the Ross 308. Corporate greed means billions of chickens balloon to more than double their natural size and, as a result, face premature death, excruciating deformities, and diseases like white striping.

The symptom: white striping on chicken breasts. The cause: selective breeding for rapid growth. The motive: profit.

Scientists have studied white striping for the last 20 years. We wanted to know what white striping means for the average consumer. So we headed to the top 16 highest-grossing supermarkets and their subsidiaries in the US to find out.

In our new investigative report, 56 shoppers visited 85 supermarkets in 29 states and took 1630 photos of chicken meat.

This investigation spanned the entire country. From California to Washington. From Florida to Maine. At each supermarket we visited, two independent investigators assessed the store’s own brand of chicken and scored the meat on a scale from zero to three based on the amount of white striping they found.

• Score 0: No white stripes are visible on the breast muscle
• Score 1: White striping is present, but the stripes are very fine and may not cover the entire breast muscle
• Score 2: White striping is obviously present and covers the breast muscle more thickly
• Score 3: Easily detectable white stripes with many thick bands

Next time you visit your local grocery store, take a close look at the boneless, skinless chicken breasts. These large pectoral muscles suffer the most from diseases like white striping.

In 2012, multiple studies found white striping in only 5% of chicken, and 50% of shoppers said they wouldn’t buy chicken with white striping. Now, shoppers have no other options.

The chicken industry knows consumers avoid meat with white stripes, so it conceals the most obviously diseased cuts in heavily processed products. Keep in mind that other cuts—like thighs, drumsticks, and strips—might not have visible white stripes, but chances are extremely high they came from a diseased bird.

Scientists are still studying the causes of these diseases, but one thing is clear: white stripes appear in chicken meat because these birds have been selectively bred—over multiple generations—to grow extremely quickly.

White stripes show up whenever a chicken’s body can’t keep up with her explosive muscle growth—which means white striping in fast-growing breeds is incredibly common.

These chickens put on so much muscle that it’s almost impossible for them to keep up with the growth. They can’t even pump enough blood to every part of their engorged bodies. Without enough oxygen and nutrients, their muscles become inflamed. Although their bodies desperately try to heal these dying muscles, the damage is unavoidable. As a result, their diseased muscles develop distinctive white stripes of collagen and fat, forming something like scars.

Because they’re bred to put on weight as fast as possible, chickens raised for meat—also known as “broilers”—begin to suffer from white striping soon after hatching.

In the 1920s, no one had ever heard of "white striping." In the 1950s, chicken breeders began to selectively breed birds to grow bigger and faster. In the 1980s, scientists first identified new diseases—such as green muscle disease—in chickens raised for meat. In the 1990s, scientists began to connect these muscle diseases to selective breeding for fast growth. In the 2000s, scientists first described "white striping" in academic literature, and by the end of the decade, 5% of chickens were suffering from white striping. Today, chickens are almost triple the size they were 100 years ago. They grow four times faster. And now 96% of chickens suffer from white striping within six weeks of hatching.

We can save chickens from white striping by telling corporations to stop selling these “fast growth” birds just to turn a profit. Let these supermarkets know you’re against their indifference to animal cruelty, which leaves billions of chickens suffering from this disease every year.