Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?

by Andrew Lawler

  167Clinton’s surprising conclusion: D. Zhao et al., “Somatic Sex Identity Is Cell Autonomous in the Chicken,” Nature 464, no. 7286 (2010): 237–42, doi:10.1038/­nature08852.

  168“Successful chicken-sexing”: Lyall Watson, Beyond Supernature: A New Natural History of the Supernatural (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1988), 65.

  168In the United States alone, more: Associated Press, “Chicks Being Ground Up Alive Video,” The Huffington Post, September 1, 2009, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/01/chicks-being-ground-up-al_n_273652.html.

  168For such sex detection: Clinton, interview.

  9. Feeding Babalu

  170There is a day when: Leon Rubin and I. Nyoman Sedana, Performance in Bali (London: Routledge, 2007), 4.

  171Ida Pedanda Made Manis: Ida Pedanda Made Manis, interview by Andrew Lawler, 2013.

  171Pedanda means “bearer”: Tom Hunter Aryati, translations via email message to author, May 13, 2014.

  172Though they enjoy a reputation: Hugh Mabbett, The Balinese (Wellington, N.Z.: January Books, 1985), 97.

  172A Balinese king told one: J. Stephen Lansing, Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2012), 56.

  172The focus today is on animal: Leo Howe, The Changing World of Bali: Religion, Society and Tourism (London: Routledge, 2005).

  172Terrorist bombings at a packed: “The 12 October 2002 Bali Bombing Plot,” BBC News, October 11, 2012, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-19881138.

  172To redress the imbalance: Richard C. Paddock, “Prayerful Balinese Gather to Purge Bombing Site of Evil,” Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2002, accessed March 21, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/nov/16/world/fg-bali16.

  172That ritual paled in comparison: Cameron Forbes, Under the Volcano: The Story of Bali (Melbourne, Vic.: Black, 2007), 76.

  172“Night and day”: Tom Hunter Aryati, translations via email message to author, March 10, 2012.

  173Pura Penataran Agung Taman Bali: Ibid.

  175“We appear to substitute”: Yancey Orr, interview by Andrew Lawler, 2013.

  175Technically, only three matches: “Cockfighting: Cockfighting in Indonesia,” indahnesia.com, last modified September 15, 2009, accessed March 21, 2014, http://indahnesia.com/indonesia/INDCOC/cockfighting.php.

  175“To anyone who”: Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 417.

  176“Children of men who”: John A. Hardon, American Judaism (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1971), 179.

  177The Roman Jewish writer: Ronald L. Eisenberg, The JPS Guide to Jewish Traditions (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004), 713.

  177“How often I have longed”: Matthew. 23:37 (The New Jerusalem Bible: Standard Edition).

  177The Mishnah, an older part: Eisenberg, The JPS Guide, 712.

  177A later portion of the Talmud: Ronald L. Eisenberg, What the Rabbis Said: 250 Topics from the Talmud (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 266.

  177The Hebrew word for rooster, gever: Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 164.

  177The practice of kapparot: Adele Berlin, The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), s.v. “Kapparot”; Nancy E. Berg, Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 60.

  178Thirteenth-century rabbis: Israel Drazin, Maimonides: The Exceptional Mind (Jerusalem: Gefen Pub., 2008), 203.

  179In 2005, a chicken vendor: Tanay Warerkar and Oren Yaniv, “No One Here but Us (Dead) Chickens! Thousands of Birds Die from Heat, Not Jewish Sin Ritual,” New York Daily News, September 12, 2003, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/birds-die-annual-ritual-slaughter-article-1.1454098.

  179“The industrialization”: Associated Press, “Activists Cry Foul over Ultra-­Orthodox Chicken Ritual,” NewsOK, September 8, 2010, accessed March 21, 2014, http://newsok.com/activists-cry-foul-over-ultra-orthodox-chicken-ritual/article/feed/189277.

  180“Kapparot is not consistent”: Goren quoted by Nazila Mahgerefteh, “A Wing and a Prayer,” September 28, 2006, accessed May 15, 2014, www.endchickensaskaporos.com.

  180The day before my visit: Rachel Avraham, “Minister Peretz Opposes the Kaparot Tradition: ‘Prevent Animals from Suffering,’ ” JerusalemOnline, September 11, 2013, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www.jerusalemonline.com/news/politics-and-military/politics/minister-peretz-opposes-the-kaparot-tradition-1616.

  180Hundreds of fowl slated for use: Warerkar and Yaniv, “No One Here but Us (Dead) Chickens!”

  180James Frazer noted: James George Frazer and Robert Fraser, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14.

  180Frazer notes that: Ibid., 545.

  181“You may kill animals”: Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993).

  181Drawing on ancient African: Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo, The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “Santeria.”

  181“What can we do”: Ronald J. Krotoszynski, The First Amendment: Cases and Theory (New York: Aspen Publishers, 2008), 881.

  182Lukumi is another term for Santeria: George Brandon, Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 145.

  182“Babalu,” Ricky Ricardo’s: Migene González-Wippler, Santeria: The Religion, Faith, Rites, Magic (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Worldwide, 1994), 68.

  182White hens and roosters: Caracas vendor who declined to give name, interview by Andrew Lawler, 2013.

  182About AD 1200, a settlement: Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 59.

  182According to one Yoruba tradition: Abraham Ajibade Adeleke, preface to Intermediate Yoruba: Language, Culture, Literature, and Religious Beliefs, part 2 (Bloomington, IN: Trafford Pub, 2011).

  183“Such a name for”: Daniel McCall, “The Marvelous Chicken and Its Companion in Yoruba Art,” Paideuma Bd. 24 (1978).

  183The first mention of the bird: Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 239; R. Blench and Kevin C. MacDonald, The Origins and Development of African Livestock: Archaeology, Genetics, Linguistics, and Ethnography (London: UCL Press, 2000).

  183In a 2011 Ethiopian dig: Catherine D’Andrea, email message to author, 2013.

  184Stephen Dueppen, a professor: Stephen Dueppen, interview by Andrew Lawler, 2012; see Stephen A. Dueppen, Egalitarian Revolution in the Savanna: The Origins of a West African Political System (London: Equinox Pub., 2012).

  186Among neighboring Mali: Jean Chevalier et al., A Dictionary of Symbols (London: Penguin Books, 1996), s.v. “Rooster.”

  186In his 2010 paper in American Antiquity: S. A. Dueppen, “Early evidence for chicken at Iron Age Kirikongo (c. AD 100–1450), Burkina Faso,” Antiquity 85, no. 327: 142–57.

  186In the Congo basin, a female: Victor Turner, “Poison Ordeal: Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual,” Object Retrieval, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www.objectretrieval.com/node/273.

  186Yoruba proverbs are liberally: Oyekan Owomoyela, Yoruba Proverbs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 467.

  187Before any major undertaking: Federico Santangelo, Divination, Prediction and the End of the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 27.

  188“Scarcely any matter out”: Marcus Tullius and Clinton Walker Keyes, eds., Cicero, De Re Publica, De Legib
us (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 255.

  188A specialist called a pullarius: Santangelo, Divination, Prediction, and the End of the Roman Republic, 27.

  188The sacred chickens kept: Cicero, De Re Publica, De Legibus, 393.

  188A senior Roman general: Ibid., 451.

  189“I think that, although”: Ibid., 226.

  189“In a world of instant”: Ócha’ni Lele, Teachings of the Santeria Gods: The Spirit of the Odu (Rochester, VT: Bear & Co., 2010), 7.

  190Testifying to the U.S. district: Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah.

  190Sanitary workers at the Miami-Dade: “Miami Courthouse Littered with Sacrifices to Gods,” New York Daily News, April 10, 1995, accessed March 21, 2014, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1241&dat=19950410&id=AZ1YAAAAIBAJ&sjid=G4YDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6744,5351003.

  190In June 1993, all nine: Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah.

  10. Sweater Girls of the Barnyard

  192Food grew so short in 1610: Rachel Herrmann, “The ‘Tragicall Historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 68, no. 1 (January 2011).

  192In New England, where chickens arrived: Keith W. F. Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 185.

  192Grateful for the exotic: A. R. Hope Moncrieff, The Heroes of Young America (London: Stanford, 1877), 221.

  193On Winslow’s farm, wild: “Archaelogy of the Edward Winslow Site,” http://www.plymoutharch.com/.

  193“Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century”: Andrew F. Smith, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), s.v. “Chicken Cookery.”

  193In 1692, after several: Patricia A. Gibbs, “Slave Garden Plots and Poultry Yards,” Colonial Williamsburg, accessed March 21, 2014, http://research.history.org/historical_research/research_themes/themeenslave/slavegardens.cfm.

  193The chicken “is the only”: Eugene Kusielewicz, Ludwik Krzyżanowski, “Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz’s American Diary,” The Polish Review 3 (Summer 1958): 102.

  193When Washington ordered: “From George Washington to Anthony Whitting, 26 May 1793,” Washington Papers, Founders Online, accessed March 21, 2014, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-12-02-0503.

  193Virginia planter Landon Carter: Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 16.

  194As early as 1665, Maryland: James D. Rice, Nature & History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 136.

  194A century later: James Mercer to Battaile Muse, April 3, 1779, Battaile Muse Papers, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, William R Perkins Library, Duke University.

  194In one letter to his overseer: Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 364.

  194In what likely was a typical: “Economy,” Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello, accessed March 21, 2014, http://www.monticello.org/mulberry-row/topics/economy.

  194Chickens and eggs were: Gerald W. Gawalt, “Jefferson’s Slaves: Crop Accounts at Monticello, 1805–1808,” Journal of the AfroAmerican Historical and Genealogical Society, Spring/Fall 1994, 19–20.

  194In 1728, a white owner named: Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 361.

  194“Adjoining their little habitations”: John P. Hunter, Link to the Past, Bridge to the Future: Colonial Williamsburg’s Animals (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2005), 50.

  194One traveler passing: Morgan, Slave Counterpart, 370.

  194In Charleston, black women: Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, 24.

  195“The slaves sell eggs”: Fredrika Bremer and Mary Botham Howitt, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America (New York: Harper & Bros., 1853), 297.

  195Chicken-rich slaves on one: Billy G. Smith, Down and Out in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 113.

  195In one South Carolina rhyme: Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 176.

  195In a deposition, Prosser: Harry Kollatz, True Richmond Stories: Historic Tales from Virginia’s Capital (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2007), 43.

  196Her fame as a chef spread: Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-wife (Washington: printed by Davis and Force, 1824), 75.

  196A century later, another: Josh Ozersky, Colonel Sanders and the American Dream (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).

  196More than ten thousand people: John Henry Robinson, The First Poultry Show in America, Held at the Public Gardens, Boston, Mass., Nov. 15–16, 1849: An Account of the Show Comp. from Original Sources (Boston, MA: Farm-Poultry Pub., 1913), 8.

  196“Everybody was there”: Geo P. Burnham, The History of the Hen Fever: A Humorous Record (Boston: J. French and Co., 1855), 24.

  197These were from the same stock: Ibid., 16.

  197In gratitude, the grateful monarch: Ibid., 129.

  197The consummate American showman: Ibid., 194.

  197“There will be a marvelous cackling: “The National Poultry Show,” New York Times, February 13, 1854, 8.

  197He repeated the wildly successful: Francis H. Brown, “Barnum’s National Poultry Show Polka,” 1850.

  198Editors warned the public: “The Hen Fever,” Genesee Farmer, January 1851, 16.

  198An upstate New York newspaper: “A Valuable Hen,” Southern Cultivator 11 (reprint from Rochester Daily Advertiser), 1853.

  198A plantation owner in Rome, Georgia: “Hard Fare for the Poor Negroes,” Southern Cultivator 11 (reprint from Northern Farmer), 1853.

  198In his 1853 short story: William B. Dillingham, ed., Melville’s Short Fiction, 1853–1856 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977).

  198“A cock, more like a golden”: Ibid., 60.

  199The Plymouth Rock, one: Andrew F. Smith, The Saintly Scoundrel: The Life and Times of Dr. John Cook Bennett (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 168.

  199In 1875, a Maine farmer: B. F. Kaupp, Poultry Culture Sanitation and Hygiene (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1920), 37.

  199While holding the bird sacred: “Marcus Terentius Varro on Agriculture,” accessed March 21, 2014, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Varro/de_Re_Rustica/3%2A.html.

  200Varro recommended housing: Ibid.

  200“We disregard the chief purpose”: Robert Joe Cutter, The Brush and the Spur: Chinese Culture and the Cockfight (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1989), 141.

  200A second-century AD stone relief: John R. Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.–A.D. 315 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 124.

  200The Roman Empire’s only surviving: Apicius, Apicius: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and an English Translation of the Latin Recipe Text Apicius, eds. C. W. Grocock and Sally Grainger (Totnes, U.K.: Prospect, 2006), 231.

  201The temperature around: “Incubation and Embryology Questions and Answers,” University of Illinois Extension, Incubation and Embryology, accessed March 22, 2014, http://urbanext.illinois.edu/eggs/res32-qa.html.

  201Jefferson complained in 1812: H. A. Washington, ed., “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,” accessed March 22, 2014, http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/jefferson/1812.html.

  201But ancient Egyptians and
Chinese: “Hatching Eggs with Incubators,” from Lessons with Questions, 1–20 (Topeka, KS: National Poultry Institute, 1914), 185.

  201By the medieval era, Europeans: Paulina B. Lewicka, Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 202.

  201A Medici managed: The editors and contributors to The Journal of Horticulture, The Garden Manual for the Cultivation and Operations Required for the Kitchen Garden, Flower Garden, Fruit Garden, Florists’ Flowers (London: Journal of Horticulture & Home Farmer Office, 1893), 253.

  202The French polymath: René-Antoine Ferchault De Réaumur, The Art of Hatching and Bringing up Domestick Fowls of All Kinds at Any Time of the Year: Either by Means of the Heat of Hot-beds, or That of Common Fire, ed. Charles Davis (London: printed for C. Davis, 1750), 6.

  202The resulting chicks delighted: Bridget Travers and Fran Locher Freiman, Medical Discoveries: Medical Breakthroughs and the People Who Developed Them (Detroit: UXL, 1997), 247.

  202In 1880, there were 100 million: Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Animal Industry, vol. 19 (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903).

  202The Talmud calls for Orthodox: Norman Solomon, The Talmud: A Selection (London: Penguin, 2009); Isaiah 58:13.

  202At first, most of the city’s supply: Jay Shockley, “Gansevoort Market Historic District Designation Report,” part 1 (New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, September 9, 2003).

  202“Two hundred thousand dozen eggs”: “Eggs from Foreign Lands,” New York Times, June 14, 1883, 8.

  203One horrified rabbi wrote: Sue Fishkoff, Kosher Nation (New York: Schocken Books, 2010), 58.

  203In 1900, there were fifteen hundred: Kenneth T. Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), s.v. “Kosher Foods.”

  203The emigrants called the: Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, 116.

  203Although 90 percent of North Carolina: William S. Powell, ed., The Encyclopedia of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), s.v. “Poultry.”