Fast-growing Broilers Lead to Quality Issues

Wall Street Journal:

In its quest to grow ever-bigger chickens to meet growing demand for white meat, the food industry has hit an unexpected problem.
The trouble isn't raising large-enough birds. A growing share of broiler chickens—bred for meat, not to lay eggs—now can yield a pair of breast fillets that are heavier than an entire bird was a few decades ago. A rising number of those fillets are laced with hard fibers in a condition the industry calls woody breast. It poses no threat to human health, but it degrades the texture of the meat....
The effects of woody breast can be so subtle as to go unnoticed by home cooks. Its cause isn’t known, but Dr. Petracci and other researchers say several decades of breeding in favor of heavier, faster-growing birds could be a factor....
If found, affected meat is pulled from the line, sold at a discount and then further processed or ground for products like chicken sausage, Mr. Cockrell said. Woody breast now is found in less than 5% of the supply of boneless breast meat at its plants, he added...
Woody breast is similar to other disorders the industry has struggled to contain, including “white striping,” which appears in pale parallel lines of fat across fillets. Green muscle disease, which causes discoloration due to hemorrhages in the muscle, is also showing up in turkey and chicken breasts more often...
Poultry processors world-wide primarily use lines of birds from just three breeding firms—Aviagen Inc., Cobb-Vantress Inc. and Hubbard, a unit of France’s Groupe Grimaud—that emphasize similar traits, like high breast-meat yield.

I didn't know that three companies produced most chickens for meat production.  I would think we may be reaching a point where selective breeding and lack of genetic diversity produce more defects which weigh on the massive gains in productivity that have been achieved in the last 50 or 60 years.  Kind of like the way Moore's Law has tapered off from previous increases in computing power due to massive amounts of heat being generated by ever smaller transistors.