Russia “Resurrects the Soviet Super Chicken,” Bloomberg Reports

Russia has created a poultry-breeding program to reduce its dependence on meat imports, Bloomberg reports. The country has used Soviet technology—which created “a bigger and tastier version of Gallus gallus domesticus” that apparently nearly went extinct following the collapse of the government—to establish a program that aims to reduce foreign imports of food products. Bloomberg also notes that a “replacement program for potatoes” has been approved, while a program for sugar beets is in progress. “To our knowledge, no country has a large-scale poultry breeding program that competes with the major corporations,” Bloomberg quotes a scientist with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization as saying.

“They thought we wouldn’t be able to compete with them in a million years,” one of the scientists who worked on the Soviet project reportedly told the news outlet. “Now it’s a completely different situation. Friends are friends, but you know how it goes.”