Chickens do not receive any hormones. It’s been banned in poultry in the U.S. since the 1950’s when it was tested and shown to be ineffective. Beef commonly gets hormone implants in their ears. No hormones are approved or used in feed.
The rapid growth of the birds is mostly due to selective breeding and nutritional improvements. The growth rate and adult size in animals can be massively changed by breeders. Just look at the Great Dane and mini-yorky in dogs.
They also use antibiotics in the feed to reduce the bacteria load of the birds. This does increase the growth rate and reduces sick birds and deaths. It is not a good idea when it comes to antibiotic resistance buildup in bacteria however.
The whole three sisters thing was an early crop rotation method. Not all together like as advertised.
Beans where grown first as they are shallow rooted and produce about 50% of the nitrogen they need. If they harvest 25% of the crop and till under the rest they have around around a 25% increase in a available N.
The next season is corn and pumpkins together. They are both heavy N feeders. They spaced out the corn a lot more than modern hybrids so the pumpkins had plenty of room to grow and shade out weeds. They unfortunately share the pest of cucumber beetle species (corn rootworm).
The next season they had to go back to beans to break the rootworm cycle.
Eventually other nutrients would become low (P,K, micros etc). Other pests and diseases would buildup. They would rotate onto new plots letting the old plots go fallow for a while.
I personally hate them for most of the same reasons that you like them.
First off they are slow to use. Part of that is because things are buried in menus, and part is from the annoying up-selling screens. Using them take 4-5 times longer in my experience. I don’t go there often enough to justify it.
Second, if you are paying cash, you still have to wait in line and see an actual human. Might as well just order with them.
Third, I am nearsighted but I have good glasses. The small font on the menu boards don’t bother me. I would rather see the entire thing while in line. Make my decision and order to a person.
They have proven many times over that pirating/accessibility have inverse relationship.
My most frustrating example was when I needed one song for a project my wife was working on a long time ago. I looked to try to purchase it online and could only find it on iTunes. In order to purchase from iTunes you had to download the application and install it. However I had an old machine running Linux… By the time I figured this all out I had spent 2 hours trying to pay $0.99 for one song. I could not find an approved way to do it. So I went the alternative route and had the song in under 5 minutes.
They keep pushing accessibility down recently. I am not playing their games again. When they want to be reasonable they will get paid.
My wife teaches Bilingual middle schoolers (spanish/english). Around 40% of the kid’s Moms are from Mexico.
To get the kids to clean up the classroom she has a small list of school appropriate “Cleaning songs”. She never announces it or tells them to clean up. She just turns the music on 5 minutes before class ends.
All the kids with Mexican moms, pop up and start frantically cleaning. The other kids, after a bit of confusion, follow.
She says “I might as well take advantage of all the Pavlovian training their mothers have done.”
There is also less memorable significant changes/events in your life. Think about all the memorable firsts or unique events and schedule changes that you had in your teens/early 20’s.
A new grade every year in education, new teachers, new students, learning to drive, first drinks, first relationship, first apartment, how many shitty jobs you left for a “better one?”.
Then compare it to the lfe as you get older. Same job or similar job. Same people for decades. Same house, same favorite restaurants, etc…
Your brain isn’t going to remember the month you spent staring at an excel spreadsheets the same way. It’s going to lump that month together as “boring shit to mostly forget”.
In the old world, agriculture started in the Mediterranean and temperate regions. The domesticated species are mostly winter annuals or adapted to a Mediterranean climate (dry summers, wet winters).
New world species are mostly subtropical or tropical species. Corn, potatoes, pumpkins, beans, tomatoes, peppers, etc are all warm weather crops. This is a major reason the large population centers developed in the tropical and subtropical areas.
Populations in the North America domesticated other species like lambsquarters and erect knotweed. However these species were not as productive and they gave them up when corn and beans were traded for from present day Mexico.
So the least experienced farmers with the species, were the first ones the Europeans ran into in North America. :-)
The Europeans reported the three sisters methodwith some tribes in the northeast. The accounts are all very jumbled and contradictory. The tribes in New England also appear to have have been relatively new to growing. All three species were not found together in New England before the 1300’s. If they did grow them this way they could only do it one season in a location. They would have to change locations then next year.
Fundementally you can’t plant corn/pumpkins repeatedly without a break. It’s a mega attractant to the rootworm beetles which are endemic to North America. If they did not rotate they would have crop failures after only one season. Beans also have all sorts fungal and bacterial diseases. The only way they could control them is via rotation/fallowing.
What was done in mesoamerica for thousands of years was rotation. They were the ones that domesticated the three species and built large civilizations from the extra food availability. They grew bush and vine beans, corn, and pumpkins. They also grew casava, tomatoes, peppers and other species. When yields started to decline, they would fallow the ground and move their plots.
There is evidence that the Mayans for over 500 years mostly figured out how to avoid fallowing their fields. They would grow 3 cycles per year in rotation for a large surplus of food.
A better estimation is waist to height ratio. If your waist is more than 50% of your height, you have an issue. It tracks a lot better with cardiovascular disease and diabetes risks than BMI.