--- description: On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver spoke about America's favorite food — chicken. title: John Oliver Has Beef with the Treatment of Chicken Farmers image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) ## Entertainment Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # John Oliver Has Beef With the Treatment of Chicken Farmers by [Melissa Locker](/author/melissa-locker/) ## Melissa Locker Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close May 18, 2015 7:49 AM CUT by [Melissa Locker](/author/melissa-locker/) ## Melissa Locker Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close May 18, 2015 7:49 AM CUT On _Last Week Tonight_, John Oliver spoke about America’s favorite food — chicken. He didn’t focus his diatribe on the treatment of chickens (although video clips of Paul McCartney and Pamela Anderson assured viewers poultry is treated abysmally), but rather on the treatment of America’s chicken farmers. According to Oliver, to sate the American appetite for chicken, the big four poultry companies use a system of contract farmers to raise their product — which currently requires 169 million chicks a week, which is as Oliver put it, “Warren Beatty numbers.” Despite those impressive stats, according to Oliver, a surprisingly large percentage of those contract chicken farmers live at or below the poverty line. But when asked to comment about their impoverished contract farmers, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council asked, “Which poverty line are you referring to?” As Oliver pointed out that, it doesn’t matter, because “the poverty line is like the age of consent, if you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, it you’ve probably already done something very, very wrong.” Oliver then asked members of Congress to enact meaningful legislation to protect chicken farmers — and a call to arms to change their Wikipedia pages if they didn’t. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3882115/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-chicken-farmers/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3882115/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-chicken-farmers/"},"headline":"John Oliver Has Beef With the Treatment of Chicken Farmers","datePublished":"2015-05-18T07:49:06.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-31T08:26:37.259Z","description":"Many poultry farmers live below the poverty line","url":"https://time.com/3882115/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-chicken-farmers/","keywords":["Television","Agriculture","HBO","Farming","John Oliver","Last Week Tonight","Chickens","poultry"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Melissa Locker","jobTitle":"","url":"https://time.com/author/melissa-locker/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3882115/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-chicken-farmers/","name":"John Oliver Has Beef With the Treatment of Chicken Farmers"}}]}] ```