Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?

by Andrew Lawler

  Long after World War II, the slaughtered and plucked bird typically came into American kitchens with head, feet, and guts intact—what is still called a New York dressed chicken. That changed in the late 1960s, when Holly Farms introduced packaged pieces. Even those recognizable parts—breast, wings, and thighs—have since proliferated into hundreds of products that bear no obvious resemblance to chicken anatomy, like the Chicken McNugget.

  While we eat far more chicken than we did in Steele’s time, we know it far less. Traits long admired by humans, such as courage and devotion to family, no longer are modeled by the bird. When we get our hackles up or feel henpecked, there is no visceral connection to the cockpit or barnyard. While pigs and cows are turned into pork and beef, chicken today is more likely to refer to meat than an animal. The bird has vanished from our sight even as it proliferated. When it lands in our shopping basket or on our plate, we can only trust that it was humanely handled, safely processed, and carefully inspected.

  Driving south from Dover into Sussex County, I rendezvous with Bill Brown, an extension agent for the University of Delaware, at the site of the first Chicken of Tomorrow contest, in 1948, near the little town of Georgetown. He’s agreed with only a couple of hours’ notice to give me a brief tour of a miniature broiler house at this rural research station set amid flat fields. Brown, a stocky man with a goatee, rummages through his trunk and hands me a white hazmat-style suit. Disease rather than predators is the primary threat to today’s meat birds, since they are concentrated in large numbers and harvested before their immune systems can fully develop. What I carry on my shoes could kill them all. Once we are dressed, he leads me through a metal door and into an open warehouse. “It’s a small flock,” he says apologetically. “Maybe twenty-four hundred birds.” He’s not being facetious. At home, Brown and his wife raise two hundred thousand chickens in a half-dozen houses under contract with Perdue. Even that is considered a modest number today.

  A warm and humid wave of air swiftly replaces the October chill amid the high-pitched peeping of day-old chicks. Bright overhead lights reveal long pipes punctuated by bright red feed and water stations crowded with the fuzzy yellow chicks. The space seems roomy now, Brown says, but it will quickly fill up as the chicks quadruple their weight in the first week. In less than two months, they will head to a processing plant, still three months shy of sexual maturity. As Brown steps gently forward, the animals seem unafraid. He scoops one up and holds it in his palm as he explains that these birds are part of an experiment to gather data on the ammonia fumes that already make my eyes smart. The noxious gas is a byproduct of chick urine, and poultry scientists want to find better ways to neutralize its effects by altering the feed or by precipitating it out of the air. “You get used to it,” he says as I blink furiously.

  We step outside and I take a grateful lungful of clean air in the sudden quiet. Brown tells me that the toughest problem is coping with the chicks’ waste after they are sent to slaughter and the sheds are cleaned. The 600 million chickens raised on Delmarva produce more waste than Los Angeles. The manure is rich in phosphorus and potassium and more than twice as effective as commercial fertilizer, well suited for nutrient-poor fields. The manure’s high level of phosphorus was thought by some researchers to bind soundly with alum, lime, and other substances, preventing damaging runoff into streams and rivers. But now soil scientists say that the water table can absorb and move phosphorus in ways that are still poorly understood. And with plant expansions, there is too much manure and too few fields on the peninsula to cope with the mounting waste. Watermen fear it is killing their crabs and fish. Moving it is expensive; Perdue experimented with turning manure into pellets that could then be shipped to the Midwest but abandoned the effort as it was too costly, while ­attempts to turn the waste into gas have yet to bear fruit. The confusing county and state laws make a solution to the growing problem both politically unlikely and technically elusive.

  Continuing south, I pass through Maryland and into the narrowing strip that is Virginia’s Eastern Shore, stopping for a lunch of soft-shell crab just outside Temperanceville, a village of less than four hundred people where no whiskey has been openly sold since 1824. A few miles on, on the right side of the highway, a low-slung building as long as a football field fronts a wide manicured lawn. This is part of a Tyson plant employing more than a thousand workers to slaughter and package a million chickens each week. Environmentalists singled out this plant as the most polluting poultry facility during the 1990s amid a series of devastating fish kills in Chesapeake Bay. Without permission to visit, I drive on for another forty miles, almost to the tip of Delmarva, pass a massive Perdue facility, exit the highway, pass rusting trailers with yards full of children’s toys, and rumble down the grassy lane of a 1920s colonial-­revival house that is the headquarters of United Poultry Concerns.

  Though invited, I am apprehensive. When I first contacted Karen Davis, the founder and sole full-time employee of the animal-rights organization, she shot back a curt email response, calling a magazine article I did on the bird “despicable.” What I needed, she wrote, was “a whole different perspective, spirit, and attitude toward chickens.” But she would make time to meet me. I swallow my irritation and knock on her door. Instead of encountering an angry crusader, however, I meet a thin, smiling woman with a thick mop of black hair. On her matching black Windbreaker is a button that says, “Stick up for Chickens.”

  The lecture I expect doesn’t come. Instead she suggests that I meet her birds, as a parent might proudly offer to show off her young children. I follow her through the living room and kitchen—every horizontal and vertical space taken up with chicken knickknacks, prints, and posters—onto a porch, and into the backyard. There are tall cages amid a large fenced yard bordered by shade trees. She introduces me to Ms. Hendy, Pace, Petunia, Taffy, Buffy, and Biscuit, and proffers the story of each—this one rescued from the Perdue plant, another from a lab in Norfolk, yet another from a raid on a Mississippi cockfighting ring—then brandishes a rake to protect me from the hot-tempered rooster Bisquick. Some are left anonymously on her doorstep. Since 1998, when she moved here from the Washington suburbs, her modest two-acre sanctuary has been an island for misfit poultry.

  After the numbing uniformity inside the Delaware broiler shed, the individuality of each of Davis’s birds is startling and unnerving. Beside the spry and lean gamecock, the rescued factory chicken with its pumped-up breast and spindly legs looks grotesque. ­Commercial laying hens typically have the tips of their beaks seared off to prevent them from injuring their neighbors, and I spot one pecking pathetically in the grass, apparently unable to spear a worm with its defective bill. An aging broiler saved from the slaughterhouse sits in the corner of a cage, too heavy and lame to walk. “The industry has created chickens that have chronic pain in order to get birds that grow at the far outer limits of what is biologically possible,” writes Temple ­Grandin, a Colorado animal scientist who has pioneered animal-­welfare systems. Davis’s backyard is a stark lesson in the grim realities of the modern chicken.

  Davis knows from long experience as an activist that her folksy tour is far more effective than any lecture. The litany of horrors and illusions is well documented in peer-reviewed scientific journals, animal-rights periodicals, and books. Debeaking, even if it is not botched, is a painful procedure typically accomplished with a heated blade that deprives a bird of its primary sense organ. A significant percentage of birds that are not killed by the knife end up scalded to death in hot vats. Most U.S. free-range and organic chickens, like their industrial cousins, never see the sun, eat a worm, choose a mate, or raise a chick. And, I’m surprised to find, poultry grown for food is exempted from any and all U.S. government rules regulating animal welfare. “Is it any wonder that many people regard chickens as some sort of weird chimerical concoction comprising a vegetable and a machine?” asks Davis. Seeing the damaged survivors of the system brings home the extent
of the problem.

  We mount the porch steps, and Davis points out an area reserved for aging birds, a sort of poultry rest home. In her living room full of chicken tchotchkes, she tells me that she didn’t grow up around the birds, though she still broods over a dark memory of a neighbor killing a fowl during her childhood in Altoona, Pennsylvania, just east of the farm where Roenigk grew up. Drawn to the animal-rights movement in the 1980s, Davis quickly became enchanted with chickens. “Guinea fowl aren’t going to sit with you or perch on your shoulder, but chickens can be very affectionate,” she tells me. “They are cheerful, friendly, and like to be with you. They look you in the eye, and one of their charms is that they also live an autonomous social life—they aren’t waiting for you to release them from boredom. And,” she adds with a laugh, “they have the most balletic way of tripping through the grass.”

  Though her poetic description is sentimental—Bisquick clearly would like a piece of me—it is as succinct an explanation for the chicken’s close relationship with humans as any I’ve heard. She owns a sweatshirt that says, “I dream of a society where a chicken can cross the road without its motives being questioned.”

  Davis is an unapologetic take-no-prisoners vegan, who believes that no human needs to eat an animal or even an egg. “We can get all the protein we need from plants. We can turn them into chickenlike flavors and textures. We have all this ingenuity, and we pride ourselves on what we can do. There is no need to kill chickens.” Nearing seventy, though looking much younger, she pushes legislation, keeps up on the scientific literature, posts outraged blogs, and protests every year at the Delmarva Chicken Festival and at the Brooklyn kapparot rituals on Yom Kippur eve.

  She is realistic enough to acknowledge that her efforts will fail. “Chickens are doomed,” she says without hesitation. “It’s the doom of proliferation, not extinction. I think it’s a worse doom than extinction. I think chickens are in hell and they are not going to get out. They already are in hell and there are just going to be more of them. As long as people want billions of eggs and millions of pounds of flesh, how can all these animal products be delivered to the millions? There will be crowding and cruelty—it is just built into the situation. You can’t get away from it.” She pauses again. “And we are ingesting their misery.”

  It is a haunting refrain that predates the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s 1975 Animal Liberation, which helped set the modern animal-rights movement in motion. Her words echo back to the ancient mathematician and mystic Pythagoras, who is said to have been an ethical vegetarian as the first chickens arrived on Greek shores. Devout Jains, Hindus, and Buddhists for millennia have avoided meat, given their belief that animals share soul material with humans. “No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being,” the first-century AD Greek essayist Plutarch wrote about farm animals. “The eating of flesh is not only physically against nature, but it also makes us spiritually coarse . . . it is perfectly evident that it is not for nourishment or need or necessity.”

  More recently, the writer J. M. Coetzee warned that “we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.” Miserable and tortured animals will not in the long run make for a happier humanity and a better world. Most of us would be appalled, as Plutarch was, at the ancient practice of thrusting red-hot iron pikes into the throats of live pigs in the belief that it would make the flesh tenderer. What goes on in the chicken cities of our own century, though still largely shielded from public scrutiny, may someday be seen by a majority of humanity in a similar light.

  Davis’s stance is by her own admission impractical, her actions ineffectual, and her views wildly anthropomorphic. Her tenacity as a Don Quixote of poultry, tilting at Tyson and Perdue in their very backyard while caring for the fowl flotsam that comes her way, is undeniable, and strikes me as worthy of attention and respect. As I drive away in the autumn dusk, uncomfortably pondering my own cowardly reckoning as a chicken eater, she’s heading for the backyard to shoo her flock into their cages for the night.

  American-style factory farms are spreading inexorably around the globe, but there are a few pockets of stubborn resistance. Shoppers in some countries are still willing to pass up less expensive imported birds in favor of the traditional varieties that they find much tastier. And the chicken still performs functions that don’t require high-tech animal engineering. When a Western aid organization introduced the Rhode Island Red to rural Mali in sub-Saharan Africa, it was literally a flop. Villagers seeking a prophetic sign watch to see if a dying chicken falls to the right or left. The new birds proved useless for divination, since they fell forward on their massive breasts.

  In the bastion of Bresse, in eastern France, chickens exert a nearly mythic hold that the industrial chicken has yet to break. The Latin word for rooster and France is the same—gallus. Though linguists say this is a coincidence, ancient Celtic tribes in the area held the cock sacred. A rooster often accompanied their god Cissonius. The bird’s high status among medieval Christians in this Catholic country and its fierce fighting abilities eventually made it the national symbol. With the exception of a brief period in Napoleonic times—the emperor was not a rooster fan—eagles were left for Hapsburgs and Germans. ­According to one account, there was “a fierce zoological debate” within Napoleon’s Council of State that ended with the choice of the rooster as the government’s emblem. “It’s a barnyard creature!” scoffed the emperor, who nullified their decision in favor of the Roman eagle.

  During the 1789 revolution, citizens carried flags emblazoned with the cock, and in 1830 it replaced the fleur-de-lis as the national emblem. France’s official seal is Liberty sitting by a ship’s tiller decorated with a proud rooster. The bird appears on coins and on war memorials, surmounts the gate of the presidential Élysée Palace in Paris, and even sits atop the golden pen set on the president’s desk.

  One of the perks of that high office is a gift of four of the country’s finest poultry for the ritual Christmas meal. The chickens come from Bresse, an old French province lodged between the city of Lyon to the southwest and the Swiss border to the east. The region has long been famed for its food. “We wired to the Picassos that we were delayed,” writes Gertrude Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. The couple was traveling south from Paris to the Mediterranean for a summer holiday with the painter and his wife in the 1920s when they encountered the countryside and food in the foothills that led up to the Swiss Alps and stopped in the bustling market town of Bourg-en-Bresse, “renowned for its chickens of the large and thick breasts and short legs.”

  That chicken is mentioned in Bourg-en-Bresse archives as early as 1591, when citizens bestowed two dozen on the local feudal lord for saving the city from invaders. When Henry IV—famous for his pledge to put a chicken in the Sunday pot of every peasant—showed up a decade later, he was delighted by the quality of the poultry. The celebrated gastronomical author Anthem Brillat-Savarin praised the Bresse chicken in 1825 as “the queen of poultry and the poultry of kings.” In 1862, a local count organized a contest to select the best-tasting chicken from among black, gray, and white varieties. The winner was a well-proportioned white bird with a bright-red comb and dark-blue legs, its colors the colors of France. Thanks to railroads, the Bresse chicken soon was a favorite dish among the elite from Paris to St. Petersburg. Along with regular birds, the ­farmers specialized in the ancient and difficult art of castrating young roosters to make tender capons and sterilizing young hens called poulardes.

  The fowl drew the attention of Darwin’s collaborator William Tegetmeier, who at first wasn’t impressed by what looked like an ordinary European b
ird, inferior in size to the big new Asian varieties. But a French colleague explained to him in 1867 that the secret to their superb taste was “the skill and the habits handed down from one generation to another among the farmers of La Bresse.” The special property of the Bresse soil; a careful regimen of local corn, wheat, and whey; and an unusual method of slaughter were the key. Flocks were kept small to avoid disease, the birds were placed in cages for the last couple of weeks of their lives to fatten them up, and a knife driven quickly into their palate bled them efficiently.

  In the era of hen fever, Bresse farmers crossed Asian chickens like the Cochin with their smaller birds, and the result was a larger but coarser-tasting chicken. Rather than sacrifice taste for quantity—a choice capon in Tegetmeier’s day might sell for the equivalent of a hundred dollars today—they passed the next century and a half ­quietly sticking to their old ways and traditional breed. Every December, four contests, grandly called the Les Glorieuses de Bresse, are held across the region to choose the finest chickens, which arrive at the Élysée ­Palace by Christmas Eve with the kind of pomp that Americans ­reserve for the lighting of the tree at New York’s Rockefeller Center.

  Today, the Bresse chicken is in the august company of the sparkling wine called Champagne and the rich cheese called Roquefort. Granted an appellation d’origine contrôlée, the bird is now licensed to ensure that it was made in the region under exacting and traditional standards. This required an act by the French National Assembly in 1957. It is the first and only animal to receive such a designation, apart from the salt-marsh lamb of the Somme that in 2006 was also granted a comparable license. When I sit down at the kitchen table of Pascal Chanel, a poultry farmer who lives just outside Bourg-en-Bresse, I’m astonished to hear him describe methods virtually identical to those laid out by Tegetmeier’s French informant at a time when Americans were still recovering from the trauma of the Civil War.