Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?

by Andrew Lawler

  Americans’ appetite for chicken, which tops that of all other major nationalities, continues to grow. U.S. consumers eat four times the world average. Mexicans are the leading egg eaters, consuming more than four hundred annually, almost three times the global average. In China, people eat twenty-two pounds of chicken a year—only about one-fourth of the American appetite—but that figure is climbing annually and the country is the world’s largest market for bird imports. In 2012, for the first time, more chicken was consumed in China than in the United States. It is a stunning change from the days of Han’s youth, when poultry production was almost nil. Fujian Sunner Development Co. employs ten thousand people in its vertically integrated poultry operation in China, and its chairman Fu Guangming is a billionaire. Tyson Foods intends to build ninety farms in China in coming years, each with more than three hundred thousand birds at a time, as part of an effort to capture a share in what is now the largest single market for chicken, and other U.S. companies like Cargill are also rushing to build their own farms and processing plants. Little wonder that Han’s village now lacks chickens. In 2014, the Chinese government announced it would move 100 million more people to cities from the country by the end of the decade, so that 60 percent of the population would be urban.

  Malthus also could not have foreseen the daunting environmental, labor, health, and animal-welfare issues that bedevil our radical new relationship with the bird. Today’s poultry industry, like the proliferation of megacities and human-induced climate change, is an experiment on a scale and of a scope never before attempted. Polluted waterways, dangerous conditions for workers, food safety concerns, and appalling animal-welfare issues remain largely in the shadows of this vibrant international trade. The companies that dominate the industry tend to be large and politically powerful and capable of blocking or watering down government regulations that could increase their costs.

  Someday we may lose our appetite for chicken. Alternatives are appearing in European and American markets, such as chickenlike tofu or mushrooms that mimic the bland taste of industrial chicken. By heating, cooling, and pressurizing vegetable protein, the owner of the California company Beyond Meat promises to create an inexpensive chickenlike enchilada free of antibiotics, arsenic, and avian flu. Its “chicken-free strips” are now sold at the Whole Foods supermarket chain. Another California startup, Hampton Creek, wants to replace the egg with a vegan option, thanks to funding from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel as well as Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Its first product, Just Mayo, is now on shelves. While many of these alternatives taste as bland as the food they aim to replace, they are poised to capture a growing share of the American and European market.

  Yet with the growth of megacities like Hanoi and Nairobi, the advancing middle class of India and South America and the retreat of village varieties, the chicken seems locked in as our fast-food staple and urban necessity for decades to come. The royal pet, the sacred symbol of the sun and herald of resurrection, the bird that cleansed us from sin and provided us with our models for courage and self-sacrifice is quickly turning into a vital foodstuff. The chicken in China, for example, has long represented the five virtues of politeness, martial arts, bravery, benevolence, and faith, but its primary role today is feeding the country’s 150 cities with populations in excess of 1 million—a number likely to double by 2030.

  More humane genetics, treatment, and living conditions could roll back the worst abuses against our companion species without unduly interfering with the flow of cheap animal protein to our cities. Egg cartons, for example, could specify in simple images the conditions of the hens. The cartons that I saw in Bourg-en-Bresse were clearly marked according to the condition of the hens that laid the eggs, as mandated by French law. Chicken fertilizer could be used intelligently to replenish depleted soils, as Easter Islanders did centuries ago. Labor advocates could follow the approach taken in the textile and electronic industries in countries like Bangladesh and China to expose and then demand improvements to the harsh conditions endured by many poultry workers. Chefs could insist tastier alternatives to the industrial chicken, even if that entails a slightly higher cost. And international guidelines on antibiotic use, feed safety, and salmonella and other bacterial threats could ensure consumers that buying cheap industrial chicken, whatever its origin, is not a health gamble.

  Industrial chicken may be an inevitable part of our human future, but we can reshape the way we breed, treat, and slaughter the birds while expanding our choices in restaurants and supermarkets.

  The backyard chicken movement in Europe and the United States is one hopeful sign that the word chicken can mean more than just a meal choice. “Don’t try to convey your enthusiasm for chickens to anyone else,” warned E. B. White in the 1940s. That interest is now something to crow about. Though the numbers are small and the trend may prove fleeting, communities have banded together to roll back provisions banning chickens within city limits in dozens of American cities, exposing many people unfamiliar with the bird to its charms and advantages. The growing popularity of chickens—there are now whole sections in magazine stands devoted to poultry—has played a pivotal role in the resurgence of small-scale agriculture across the country. The spike in raising homegrown vegetables followed in the wake of early-twenty-first-century hen fever.

  Upscale Neiman Marcus recently offered a hundred-thousand-­dollar chicken coop, complete with chandelier and heritage birds, as its ultimate extravagant gift. “We’ll hold the future farmer’s hand as we teach how to raise a healthy flock, to compost from hen house to garden bed, grow veggies and herbs for their table and flock, sprout legumes, fodder and rotate pasture trays, and experience the reward of permaculture,” says the designer.

  Just as the Victorian Fancy cooled, so will today’s backyard birds fall out of favor, and the number of chickens abandoned in city parks or at animal shelters is on the rise. The movement, however, may also help reorient and revitalize our relationship with the animal. We may pause to confront the problems we’ve created in relegating the chicken to the role of industrial machine. We may pause, if only for a moment, when deciding what’s for dinner. We may remember that the chicken is a living animal with a fascinating and formidable history as well as affordable meat.

  Marx and Lenin look sternly from their frames as Le, Han, and I—a trio of former enemies, Vietnamese, Chinese, and American—plot a campaign to find the red jungle fowl in its native habitat of Southeast Asian jungle. Dawn and dusk are the best time to spot the notoriously wary wild bird. The local method is to use another captured fowl to lure it out of its hiding places. “The snare is carried in a basket-like case, which is often fitted with a compartment for the decoy rooster,” writes Fay-Cooper Cole, who founded the University of Chicago’s anthropology department and studied the Tinguian people of the Philippines in the 1920s. “This is set up so as to enclose a square or triangular space, and a tame rooster is put inside. The crowing of this bird attracts the attention of the wild fowl who comes in to fight. Soon, in the excitement of the combat, one is caught in a noose, and the harder it pulls, the more securely it is held.”

  The live bait, in this case a red jungle fowl captured in the wild a few weeks before, waits sullenly in a small wire cage in the back of a Russian Jeep parked outside a community hall of a north Vietnamese village.

  After a flurry of cell phone calls, we set off in the Jeep as the day draws to a speedy tropical close. On the curvy highway that snakes through a lush valley squeezed by saw-toothed mountains, Han points out swaths of corn planted on steep hillsides that are washing away, corn that feeds the growing number of industrial chickens in Vietnam even as it destroys the habitat of the bird’s wild sibling. Along the way we stop to pick up our guide, a member of the Black Thay ethnic group named Lo Van Huong, and follow his single-­syllable directions. Turning off the paved road, we bump over a rough path, ford a rocky stream, and pass through a village of wooden houses on stilts. In low
gear, we grind our way up a steep track past lumbering carts of newly harvested rice. Tall and dignified Black Thay women wearing black headdresses with bright needlework swoop along on shiny motorbikes. One clutches a dead chicken that swings ­rhythmically from a handlebar as she glides past.

  As the road becomes impossibly steep, we pull into a saucer-­shaped valley hemmed in by stone cliffs, where a lone farmer in a conical hat is harvesting rice. The cage strapped to his back, Huong quickly heads up a path that winds through the rock, and I hurry after, while Han and Le wait below. Beside a stream near the mountain’s crest, the guide sets the fowl’s cage on the ground and we hide in the surrounding thickets. The feathers of the caged bird glow in the fast-fading light, but there is no sign that the bait is attracting the attention of a wild fowl. Night falls and we give up, but return before dawn the next day.

  As the sky lightens, Huong expertly builds a screen of vegetation before noiselessly vanishing behind a couple of bushes. Through an opening I can see the trapped red jungle fowl standing erect in his cage. A long half hour passes amid the whir of mosquitoes and the blare of truck horns from the distant highway. Then the caged bird abruptly shakes its feathers, raises its head, and lets loose a surprisingly loud and deep crow, a cock-a-doodle-doo with an extra note on the end.

  A wild cock in the vicinity answers, and that call is echoed by another response from a neighboring ridge. Then the bird in the cage lapses into silence for another half hour. With the sun rising fast, the chances for spotting a wild red jungle fowl are rapidly diminishing. Huong reappears without snapping a twig and we pick our way past boulders and cling to vines as we work our way back down to the rice field. When we arrive at the truck, he speaks briefly to Thuy. “There are a lot of jungle fowl here,” she translates. “But you make too much noise.” I murmur that I’m no William Beebe. Then she adds that while chatting on her cell phone, she saw a fowl fly across the little valley.

  After saying good-bye to Huong, we drive deeper into the craggy mountains, and the sun is low and our legs cramped when we arrive at a farm outside of the city of Son La. A bamboo cage containing a red jungle fowl hangs in the courtyard. Nguyen Quir Tuan, a lean farmhand from the Hmong ethnic group, says that this bird came from high in the mountains, beyond the reach of humans and domesticated chickens. He opens the cage and takes the reluctant bird by its feet. Its spurs are razor sharp, longer than my longest finger.

  “There are fewer now because the trees are being cut and they are being hunted,” says Tuan as he puts the nervous bird back into its cage. “Years ago, when tigers were still prevalent, the fowl inhabited even the valleys,” he says, gesturing at the fields around us. Now, he adds, the only wild places are a few isolated mountaintops. Tuan expresses an unmistakable awe of the animal. He says it is smart and secretive and can swiftly die if caged by rushing the bars and breaking its neck. Though small, he says it is tough enough to beat a domesticated rooster in a fight, and can also fly.

  As we tour the countryside in subsequent days, captured red jungle fowl hold a place of honor in village homes. In the small community of Chieng Ngan, a local official takes us to visit a farm family with a small coffee plantation and a pet wild bird. “They can live twenty years,” he says as we climb the stairs of the plank house on stilts with a low-pitched roof. A young father with a toddler on his hip—not an uncommon sight in this matrilineal culture—greets us. By the open window stands a young male jungle fowl with a string tied to its leg, next to two sliced-off plastic bottles of rice and water. The owner says he keeps the animal for its crow.

  In Vietnam, it is illegal to hunt or trap the red jungle fowl, and villagers are either creative or vague in explaining the presence of a wild fowl in their homes. One woman says that her husband came across a jungle fowl egg while searching for mushrooms, and another claims that a wild fowl was caught while fraternizing with her chickens. All say they take particular delight in the bird’s crow, which they found more melodious than that of a domesticated rooster. No one would say whether the captured males were used for cockfighting or for a good meal. But after we waved good-bye to the official, Thuy laughed. He had told her that nothing tasted as good as the fowl, and that he ate about twenty a year.

  The next morning we visit Son La’s outdoor market, where one vendor displayed commercial brown eggs and more expensive local chicken and duck eggs. “Do you have red jungle fowl eggs?” She jumps up from her stool and hovers boldly over my notebook, and I hand her my pen. She scribbles something, saying, “No eggs, but order a jungle fowl.” The cost, she adds, would be about a hundred dollars and in my notebook she’s written a cell phone number. Red jungle fowl may still live by the thousands across South Asia, but their numbers are diminishing as human populations increase and forest cover shrinks. Most if not all have incorporated genes from the domesticated bird. “There are red jungle fowl that look wild but are not,” Han says as we make the long return journey to sprawling Hanoi.

  That night, from my hotel in Hanoi, I send pictures of the red jungle fowl to I. Lehr Brisbin, the South Carolina ecologist. “Way too calm,” he writes back. “Probably not pure stuff.” Then he asks me to pluck some feathers and quills, seal them in a Ziploc bag, and bring them back for DNA testing.

  Brisbin, the man who saved Gardiner Bump’s Indian red jungle fowl from destruction in the 1970s, is enlisting a new generation of researchers to ensure that the remaining Bump birds survive well into the future. At Virginia Tech, biologists recently incubated eggs laid by Leggette Johnson’s flock of wild red jungle fowl, the pure descendants of the Bump birds, in order to maintain a flock that will be sustainable for years to come. Brisbin’s patient campaign to save the red jungle fowl is finally bearing fruit.

  Returning from our excursion to Johnson’s Georgia farm, he lays out his dream of repopulating South Asia with what he believes are the last of the truly wild chickens. Restocking forests from India to Vietnam with the Bump birds could halt or even reverse the genetic extinction of the wild chicken. His goal is not to supply game for hunters, nor is he convinced that preserving the wild fowl will benefit future poultry breeders. His reason has nothing, really, to do with ecology, breeding stock, or the sanctity of wildlife. “Most people’s experience with chicken is in a shrink-wrapped package at the grocery store,” Brisbin grouses as we jostle down the rough track of his driveway. “Most people don’t even see it as a bird.”

  By returning a pure red jungle fowl, in all of its skittishness and heightened senses, to the forests and jungle from whence it came, his goal is simple. The act would pay homage to an animal that has proven itself as our most steadfast and versatile companion. “It’s the last cause I want to take on,” he says as we pull up at the front door and he reaches into the back for his cane and the bag with the dead squirrel that he collected on the highway. Brisbin wants to save the red jungle fowl not for science, industry, or even future generations. He wants to save the bird as a way to say thank you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The name on the cover does not reflect the many people unmentioned in the text who made this book possible, including Jenny Cook, David Amber, Tom Hunter Aryati, Wayan Ariati, Psyche Williams-Forson, Tristana Brizzi, Tomas Condon, Rudy Ballentine, Collin Brown, Mark Fleming, Ed Rihacek, Eduardo Montero, Paul Farago, Nathan Lilly, and all the staff at Tod’s, the people of AMC, my agent Ethan Bassoff, editor Leslie Meredith, Jessica Chin, Stephanie Evans Biggins, and Mahan Kalpa Khalsa, who hatched the idea. For those who patiently shared their experiences and knowledge of all things chicken, I am deeply grateful.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrew Lawler landed his first job as a reporter just days before the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster and spent the next decade and a half covering science and technology politics as a staff writer for several publications in Washington. After a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism fellow, he founded the New England bureau of Science and began reporting frequently o
n archaeology in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Far East. His articles and op-ed pieces have appeared in more than a dozen publications, including National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New York Times, Audubon, Slate, and The Washington Post, as well as in The Best of American Science and Nature Writing. Lawler is a contributing writer for Science and a contributing editor for Archaeology. He owns no chickens, preferring to visit those of his friends. For more, see www.andrewlawler.com.

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  NOTES

  Introduction

  1Pope Francis I: Revista, “Bergoglio: El Cardenal Que No le Teme al Poder,” July 26, 2009, accessed March 25, 2014, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1153060-bergoglio-el-cardenal-que-no-le-teme-al-poder.

  1In Antarctica, chickens are taboo: “Introduction of Non-­Native Species in the Antarctic Treaty Area: An Increasing Problem” (paper presented to the XXII ATCM, Tromso, Norway, May 1998), World Conservation Union.