Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?

by Andrew Lawler

  The figure now is close to one hundred pounds. In 2012, Tyson recorded a third of a trillion dollars in sales, and its weekly production topped 41 million chickens in sixty plants. The broiler business is booming in the United States and abroad. The vertical integration model pioneered by Tyson has spread to rapidly urbanizing South America, India, and China, and now the cattle and pork industries are rushing to copy the approach. Once ignored and despised by many in the farm sector, poultry is now an international multibillion-dollar complex that is setting the pace for the world’s agribusiness.

  In Fayetteville, just off the Fulbright Expressway, a historical marker stands on the campus of the University of Arkansas near the site of the Chicken of Tomorrow’s final contest. The sign commemorates the “entrepreneurs who built Arkansas’ poultry industry into a major force in the world economy.” The marker near Razorback Stadium stands on Maple Street at the entrance of the John W. Tyson Building, an impressive modern complex of a hundred laboratories, a ten-thousand-square-foot pilot processing plant, a host of classrooms, and, as its brochure notes, “tasting booths for sensory evaluation.” Funded by the federal government, poultry companies, and a state bond approved by public referendum, it is modern and clean, a $20 million concrete-and-steel monument to the success of science and industry. There’s not a live chicken in sight.

  11.

  Gallus Archipelago

  Wilhelm had a queer feeling about the chicken industry, that it was sinister. On the road, he frequently passed chicken farms. Those big, rambling, wooden buildings out in the neglected fields; they were like prisons. The lights burned all night in them to cheat the poor hens into laying. Then the slaughter. Pile all the coops of the slaughtered on end, and in one week they’d go higher than Mount Everest or Mount Serenity. The blood filling the Gulf of Mexico. The chicken shit, acid, burning the earth.

  —Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

  The modern chicken has a model number rather than a name. There is the Ross 308, the Hubbard Flex, and the Cobb 500. This last is touted by its maker as “the world’s most efficient broiler” with “the lowest feed conversion, best growth rate and an ability to thrive on low density, less costly nutrition.” As a result, this bird offers “the competitive advantage of the lowest cost per kilogram or pound of live-weight produced for the growing customer base worldwide.”

  Like cars, new models are periodically introduced. The Cobb 700 made its debut in 2007 as a slightly souped-up version of the 500. It is designed for a fast-growing South American market that craves the highest yield for the lowest possible price. In 2010, as the backyard chicken craze took hold, there was the CobbSasso 150, “ideally suited to traditional, free-range, and organic farming.” All new models are carefully engineered to suit their particular market.

  The world looks to the United States for the latest chicken as it used to await the arrival of next year’s Chevy or Oldsmobile. Three major breeding companies control the stock of more than 80 percent of broiler chickens, and two are American. The Cobb 700, for example, is the product of the Tyson-owned Cobb-Vantress. Based in Arkansas like its parent company, it has subsidiaries around the world but began in 1916 as a small New England operation that later absorbed the line of birds created by Vantress for the Chicken of Tomorrow contest.

  More than three hundred U.S. breeder hatcheries produced more than 9 billion broiler chicks in 2010. The market weight of broilers has been edging up for decades, while death rates and the amount of feed required have dropped. In 1950, before the Chicken of Tomorrow took hold, a broiler required an average of seventy days to reach the average weight of 3.1 pounds, with three pounds of feed needed per pound of bird. In 2010, only forty-seven days were needed to make a 5.7-pound bird that needed less than two pounds of feed. This revolution was not solely due to breeding. Chickens, particularly those crowded together, are subject to a legion of diseases. New vaccines based on intensive research into chicken illness were the key to reducing mortality rates in this same sixty-year period by half, to 4 percent. Improved nutrition, particularly the addition of key vitamins to feed, was the third factor in this transformation of yesterday’s bird into the chicken of today.

  No other livestock program in history has come close to matching that steady increase in productivity and decrease in feed costs. The result is a testament to the bird’s living organic clay that so impressed William Beebe a century ago. Yet the overriding goal of producing maximum meat with minimum feed has come at costs that are not apparent to consumers. During the 1990s, for example, strains of rapist roosters spread through the facilities that breed broilers. Aggressive males, either unable to understand the usual courtship dance or incapable of mating because of their huge breasts, took out their fury on hens, sometimes killing them in the process.

  Leg and hip ailments brought on by inadequate bone structure hinder health in an animal designed to put on meat so fast the developing skeleton can’t keep up. Some broilers can’t walk to their water and feed stations, and there are signs that large numbers are in chronic pain. One study showed that broilers learned to self-­administer a pain reliever by choosing food containing the drug over food that lacked it. And there is always room for a new idea. An Israeli team recently developed a featherless chicken to reduce processing costs, using a mutant strain bred in California. Images of the bald bird sparked outrage around the world. Other scientists pointed out that a chicken without feathers is an impractical option, since it could injure its partner during mating, be more vulnerable to skin diseases, and have increased sensitivity to temperature fluctuations.

  Academic researchers such as Ian Duncan at Canada’s University of Guelph blame broiler genetic problems on the industry’s fixation with developing birds with ever-bigger breasts. The results of modern selection have maximized profit and kept consumer costs low, but at the expense of individual birds. Even industry representatives say that they may be reaching the limits to reducing feed while increasing weight productivity in chickens.

  What the French call with Gallic candor the industrial chicken is the end point of the breeding frenzy that began with The Fancy. The bird that once delighted or awed or healed today raises uncomfortable questions about who we are, what we eat, and how we should care for and relate to animals. You don’t have to be a vegan to wonder if it is right to put another entire species in perpetual pain in order to satisfy a craving for chicken salad and deviled eggs. As a longtime meat eater, I found myself wishing to avoid books on my shelf with disturbing and depressing titles like Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs; Their Fate Is Our Fate; or Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food.

  Finally I took a road trip that began in Washington, D.C., to visit the National Chicken Council and explore the territory of the modern industrial bird. The council has a name with a serious giggle factor, suggesting a New Yorker cartoon with cigar-chomping fowl gathered around a boardroom table. The hushed offices high in a glass-and-steel building a few blocks from the White House are staid and resolutely chickenless. The conference room has little stuffed cows sporting slogans urging visitors to eat more chicken, part of a successful campaign by the fast-food company Chick-fil-A to convert beef lovers.

  Founded in 1954 by broiler industry magnates—all white, male, and mostly Southern—the council represents 95 percent of the U.S. companies involved in chicken meat production. This sprawling industry employs three hundred thousand workers who annually turn 9 billion birds into 37 billion pounds of chicken that consumers around the world will spend $70 billion to consume. Another two hundred thousand people on thirty thousand farms and in thousands of trucks raise and transport the product. The American broiler industry is the largest in the world and only recently took second place to Brazil as the biggest exporter. These are meat makers with economic and political muscle that surpass that of twentieth-century cattle ranchers.

  With heavyweight members like Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride,
and Perdue Farms, which are among the biggest food producers on the planet, the council has the ear of the capital’s power brokers. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware and Johnny Isakson of Georgia—­respectively a Democrat and a Republican in major chicken-­producing states—recently formed a Senate Chicken Caucus to match one launched in the House of Representatives two years earlier that now boasts fifty members. The goal, Coons told council members who met in a luxury hotel ballroom near the National Mall, is to educate other senators about the contributions and concerns of U.S. chicken producers, Washington-speak for lobbying on behalf of business. “As it does in the House,” council president Mike Brown helpfully explained, “the Senate caucus will give a united voice to chicken producers as we navigate the many issues of importance to our industry in the months ahead.” Those issues are legion, from labor disputes to changes in federal inspection procedures to ethanol production that affects the price of chicken feed.

  The go-to guy on many of the thorny issues confronting the chicken business is Bill Roenigk. He arrived in 1974 at the council during the pre–Chicken McNugget era when no chicken wings were served in bars and Americans still preferred beef to the bird. He is now a consultant but still very involved in the business. Despite his neat suit, bright tie, and shiny black shoes, Roenigk can’t hide a grizzled look under bushy eyebrows when he joins me in the council’s conference room. He grew up on a farm outside Pittsburgh. “Get up and help,” his father told him one morning when he was ten. Along with corn and squash, they raised pigs and cows, and he did chores every morning before leaving for school, a whiff of manure trailing him in the halls. “I was snobbish about the big animals,” he tells me. “I didn’t want to piddle with little chickens.”

  Roenigk wanted to see the world, and he landed a job at the Foreign Agricultural Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture with the hope of doing so. But his wife balked at a posting in Africa, and he found his way, in classic Washington fashion, from regulator to regulated. He helped expedite the sale of chicken legs to Russia in the early 1990s, when starvation stalked that country, and now backs the controversial idea of shipping American chicken carcasses to China, where they would be cooked, repackaged, and sent back for sale to U.S. consumers (“It’s a good way to get the door open to the China market”).

  Like any experienced lobbyist, Roenigk is too self-assured and savvy to find himself on the defensive while discussing controversial issues. This is a top-down and tight-knit industry that has repeatedly and successfully halted efforts by the government to tighten its labor and inspection practices. It has little to fear from the carping of critics. Leaning back in his chair at the conference table, he explains affably that antibiotic use in poultry poses no threat to human health, that ventilation systems ensure quality air for broilers, and that American methods of slaughter are more humane than those used in Europe.

  Yet even he acknowledges that public worries about food contamination and chicken welfare are inexorably on the rise in the United States and around the world. A delegation of worried ­Japanese ­poultry-industry officials recently visited to discuss how to cope with an increasingly outspoken animal-rights community there. Just a week earlier, a salmonella outbreak at a California plant made national headlines and sent jitters through the industry. Not long after my visit, the Federal Drug Administration banned two of three arsenic compounds used in chicken feed to improve feed digestion and then limited antibiotic use in livestock that is designed to boost productivity rather than just maintain health.

  Despite political influence, the chicken business now finds itself under an increasingly relentless spotlight. It’s not the quiet and behind-the-scenes position of the past, and the industry is not as adaptable as the chicken. “We must become much more transparent and show people what is going on,” Roenigk says, and I believe that he is sincere. The National Chicken Council, however, cannot find a company willing to let me visit any of their dozens of plants on the Eastern Shore, which lies just across the Chesapeake Bay from Washington, though I made my request weeks in advance.

  The next morning, a bright fall day, I cross the Bay Bridge, which begins at Annapolis and leads to Delmarva. One out of every fifteen American chickens lives and dies on this 170-mile-long strip of land that bulges in Delaware, tapers into Maryland, and then tails off in Virginia, coming to a point at Cape Charles, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the bay.

  Though surrounded by major urban centers—to the north are Wilmington and Philadelphia, to the west are Washington and Baltimore, and to the south are Norfolk and Virginia Beach—the region of watermen and farmers remains stubbornly rural, poor, and conservative. For three-quarters of a century, the backbone of its struggling economy has been poultry. Hundreds of long broiler sheds and a dozen massive slaughterhouses owned by five companies dot the flat and swampy countryside. Every week, they process 12 million birds in a region that has barely half a million residents.

  My first stop is on the drab outskirts of Dover. There, inside the Delaware Agricultural Museum and Village, a cutout of Celia Steele stands behind chicken wire in front of a rough wooden building no bigger than a one-car garage. She is not quite middle-aged, and has full lips, a fleshy nose, and a Victorian-era blouse cinched at the sleeves. Steele’s right hand reaches for something, her eyes dark and intelligent. In front of the life-sized cardboard black-and-white cutout is a little plastic sign declaring her a Sussex County poultry pioneer. It is the most modest of memorials.

  Yet what began in the housewife’s backyard in the little coastal town of Ocean View, fifty miles to the southeast, in fact dramatically altered the fate of two species. Steele’s broiler business laid the foundation for a global industry, augured a radical change in humanity’s diet, and opened a Pandora’s box of vexing ethical, labor, environmental, and health issues. Chickens now produce 100 million tons of meat each year, twice what was produced only two decades ago. Egg production in the same period also has doubled. Seven billion hens lay more than a trillion eggs a year. The bird now is a critical staple of our modern industrial society. This sudden and dramatic proliferation coincides with the global migration to cities, which now hold more people than rural areas for the first time in our species’ history. Steele’s success, after all, hinged on the nearby market of New York City, which just two years after she began her broiler business surpassed London as the world’s largest city.

  The fowl is now so central to our urban lives that price hikes and supply problems can quickly transform into ominous political threats. Just as members of the British Parliament worried in the 1840s that the potato blight could spark revolution, so do politicians in developing nations today fear the wrath of a populace denied a chicken in every pot. Saudi Arabian leaders now grant generous government subsidies for imported grain to feed Saudi chickens in a move designed to keep prices low and a potentially restless population happy.

  Like Londoners in the nineteenth century and New Yorkers in the twentieth, Africans, Asians, and South Americans crowding into twenty-first-century megacities like Lagos, Manila, and São Paolo are quickly developing an insatiable appetite for the bird, on a scale unimaginable in Steele’s day. To feed this demand, companies are copying the Tyson approach of controlling every aspect of the supply chain. This interlocking system of large companies that breed, hatch, raise, slaughter, and market chicken involves far more than just shipments of processed meat. Chicken feed is now a misnomer, since it is a multibillion-dollar international business, as is chicken medicine and the equipment needed to house, water, feed, and process the bird.

  Driving down Delmarva’s highways and back roads, I don’t see a single chicken. The situation would have been unthinkable in Steele’s time, despite the fact that only a fraction of the fowl existed then compared with today. As chickens have become more numerous, they paradoxically have become less visible. Vast new metropolises of fowl now mirror our growing megacities. These shadow cities across Asia, Africa, Austr
alia, the Americas, and Europe are typically set outside our urban world in the increasingly empty countryside like that of Delmarva.

  Just like human municipalities, the complexes require electricity, water, food, and sewage systems, as well as road, rail, ship, and air connections to maintain and move millions of inhabitants. Many American plants, such as those in Delmarva, slaughter and process a million broilers a week. The expanded Fakieh Poultry Farms in Saudi Arabia will soon be producing 1 million broiler chickens and 3 million eggs a day. Privately owned, these poultry polities are largely off-limits to outsiders, and regulations vary widely from country to country. It is now possible to live an urban life eating chicken meat and eggs daily and never see an egg laid, witness a single slaughter, or even glimpse a live bird.

  The abrupt segregation of the two species is almost as remarkable as the chicken’s population explosion. “The attitude of a gentleman towards animals is this,” said the Chinese sage Mencius some twenty-­five hundred years ago. “Once having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die, and once having heard their cry, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. This is why the gentleman keeps his distance from the kitchen.” Such distance was long a luxury available only to the rich. In his Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust recalls the cook’s ability to make the flesh of a roast chicken “so unctuous and so tender” with a skin “gold-embroidered like a chasuble.” Yet one day he spies her savagely killing a bird in the courtyard while crying, “Filthy creature! Filthy creature!” He would have insisted on her immediate dismissal, except that he could not bear to lose the sumptuous meal she made with the slaughtered animal. “And, as it happened, everyone else had to make the same cowardly reckoning.”