by Bryant Simon
Curious about the triumph of chicken in the South, in 1989 New York Times reporter Peter Applebome headed to the broiler belt, a swath of counties that overlapped quite closely with the Bible Belt. He watched the blur of birds get disassembled in a violent flash and heard firsthand about the impact of the slaughterhouse speed-up. At a Cagle’s processing plant in Macon, Georgia, where chickens on their way to places like Imperial Food Products went by line workers at a rate of nearly one hundred per minute, Applebome met Betty Harpe.
“I’m in pain the whole time at work and at home,” Harpe told him. Reaching up to the line, deboning chicken breasts, and cutting chunks of meat with heavy scissors strained the tendons in her hands and wrists, producing tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome, a painful nerve disorder caused by repetitive motions and capable of producing permanent damage. Harpe was not alone in her discomfort. A 1989 North Carolina Department of Labor study calculated that twenty-five out of every one hundred poultry workers in the state suffered from some kind of occupational injury. That added up to three times the rate for all private-sector workers across the country. Later that same year, the Institute for Southern Studies, a North Carolina–based nonprofit research and advocacy group, estimated that two-thirds of employees in the state’s chicken plants suffered from a cumulative trauma disorder to their hands, wrists, and backs as a result of repetitive motions.29
Applebome collected more anecdotal evidence at the Cagle’s plant on workplace injuries from Jessie Lee Moss, a nine-year employee of the company. Most nights, sharp pains raced up her arms and chased her out of bed. To make the stinging go away, she ran water over her wrists. When she couldn’t take the sleepless nights anymore, she opted for costly surgery. She showed Applebome the scars on her wrists.30
As workers and animals suffered from injuries, restaurants and cafeterias featured more chicken products, with consumers paying less for the items. Between 1950 and 1999, chicken production in the United States, led by gains in the South, increased on average by 7 percent each year. As it did, the price of chicken dropped, and then dropped again. By 1990, it cost one-ninth of what steak cost and 20 percent less than pork, though this gap would close in the years to come as pork production, in the words of one investigative journalist, became “chickenized.” “It’s the cheapest protein out there,” a hotel chef noted about chicken as he searched for more recipes to put on his menu and cut his costs.31 Looking for a deal and maybe a little less fat, shoppers tossed chicken products into their shopping carts or ordered them from fast food outlets without much thought or knowledge about where the birds came from, how they got from the farms to their kitchen counters, or how they ended up on their plates as salt-filled marinated chicken breasts or battered and fried chicken tenders. Poultry capitalism, like the beef capitalism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and most other modern food capitalisms, discouraged knowing.
While consumers, at least in the short run, benefited from the drop in chicken prices and the downward pressure that it eventually put on pork prices and other commodities, Cagle’s and other broiler producers found themselves locked in a vicious cycle of destructive competition. Making money in poultry capitalism meant pushing growers, workers, and animals to do more, and make more, with less. But it also meant finding new ways to add value and profit to raw materials, and that meant paying more attention to consumer budgets, eating habits, and tastes—especially tastes, because making cheaper, bigger chickens with inexpensive, chemically laced feed meant making blander chickens with less flavor in each bite.
“Man, this shit is right, yo,” beams Wallace, one of the fresh-faced drug dealers from the first season of the HBO show The Wire, as his friend Poot dips a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget into a small plastic container of honey mustard sauce. Reaching for another piece of deep-fried, breaded chicken and filler product, he pauses for a moment to think, and then launches into a tribute to the inventor of his favorite food.
“Got the bone all the way out of the damn chicken,” Wallace tells his associates, Poot and D’Angelo, who are sitting with him on an orange couch in the courtyard of a low-rise Baltimore housing project. “Till he come along they be chewing on drumsticks getting their fingers all greasy.” As just compensation for the foresight and genius it took to pull off this impressive feat of extraction, Wallace guesses that the McNugget’s inventor must be “richer than a motherfucker.”
That’s when D’Angelo, the twenty-something, just out of prison, crew leader, who in a later episode will offer an insightful reading of The Great Gatsby, stops him. In a voice dripping with distain at his partner’s naiveté about the way that markets and the larger economy of capitalism work, he tells him, “The man who invented them things is just some sad ass down at the basement of McDonald’s, thinking of some shit to make some money for the real players.”32
Robert C. Baker was that guy in the basement who invented the chicken nugget sometime around 1963, nearly twenty years before it first appeared on a McDonald’s menu. But he didn’t work for the fast food giant. His laboratory sat in Bruckner Hall, home to the Institute of Food Science and Marketing, on the Cornell University campus. And Baker wasn’t some sad ass. He was a well-liked, hardworking, and widely respected professor. Even now, Cornell cafeterias still use his vinegar-based recipe for barbeque chicken. As a tribute to Baker’s lifelong work with chickens, the American Poultry Institute named him to its Hall of Fame in 2001. When Baker died a few years later, the New York Times ran an obituary that stretched over two columns and called him “something of a chicken Edison.”33
Like the Wizard of Menlo Park, Baker was an inventor, an innovator, a researcher, and a popularizer. While Baker wasn’t the easily duped fool that D’Angelo imagined, he did work closely with the chicken industry, helping it conquer beef for protein supremacy in the United States in the early 1990s, and his office was, for a time, in a basement.34
“He was a very practical, very applied guy,” Joe Regenstein, one of Baker’s Cornell colleagues, recalled. Born in 1921 in Newark, New York, a town a little smaller than Hamlet that was located eighty miles south of Lake Ontario, Baker grew up on a farm. His family tended to apple orchards and the chickens roaming around the house. They started the day by collecting the eggs laid by the hens. On special Sundays, Baker’s mother sent him out into the yard to grab a chicken. She told him which one to pick—usually the oldest one and the one who had stopped producing eggs. Once he caught the chicken, he wrung its neck, cut its throat, hung it upside down to bleed it out, and then brought it to his mom. She put it in boiling water, and then Baker helped her pull off all of the feathers and the yellow fuzz on the skin. Once they finished cleaning the outside, they cut off the feet and head and gutted the inside. His mom then cooked the chicken and served it to the family, Baker warmly recalled, with buttery homemade biscuits. This wasn’t just a family tradition. This was how many Americans ate chicken in the 1930s.35
As the Great Depression waned, Baker left Newark to study pomology, the science of fruit cultivation, at Cornell. After finishing his training, he got a job working for Cornell Extension Services traveling around the Finger Lakes area teaching best practices to local farmers. After a few years riding the bumpy backroads, Baker returned to the lecture halls and seminar rooms, shifting the focus of his studies and earning a master’s degree in marketing at Pennsylvania State University and then a PhD in animal science at Purdue University. In 1947, Baker returned to Ithaca to help expand Cornell’s fledgling poultry science program. The study of chickens as an academic field had only just begun in the early years of the twentieth century, but it intensified and flourished in the postwar era. This was when Baker and his colleagues started to garner support to study consumer tastes and how to better market and manipulate the biology and genetics of egg-laying hens and meat-rich broilers.
“He really believed in using the total material,” Regenstein remembered. “He was opposed to waste.” Tightening up the system, Baker thought, could shore up pro
fits for chicken processors and offer solutions to problems of hunger and starvation in an increasingly overpopulated, underdeveloped world. Carrying these values with him into the lab and into the field, he tried to devise ways to use leftover poultry parts and unused scraps in new and novel ways. Though he wrote hundreds of reports and research papers, Baker wasn’t an academic in the most common sense of how scholars operated then or now. He didn’t just apply for grants from the National Science Foundation and other scholarly organizations. He focused on product development and market testing for industry, mostly the chicken industry, with some side work devoted to fish companies. He specialized in, and virtually invented, the field of further-processed chicken, the market niche that Imperial would later operate in.36
Robert Baker’s unstated job at Cornell was to resolve the contradictions of poultry capitalism by searching for ways to sell the glut of chicken churned out by Cagle’s and other highly efficient producers. Selling chicken in postwar America, though, was not all that different from selling dish soap, blue jeans, or sports cars. It wasn’t about manipulating consumers, but rather was about making products that fit the circumstances of people’s lives, whatever they were. Understanding the 1970s in the United States meant, in particular, recognizing the deep impact of inflation and declining wages. Both factors combined to shrink the purchasing power of working people and the poor at Shoney’s, supermarkets, and corner stores. It made them dependent on cheap meat and cheap calories. Even though overall food prices dropped somewhat during the 1970s because of the impressive efficiencies and massive output of industries like poultry and corn, the poorest of the poor still spent close to 30 percent of their income on food, while the working poor spent between 15 and 20 percent and the upper-middle-class families spent less than 10 percent of what they made on feeding themselves and their families.37
Food, however, remained one of the few “fudgeable” items in the family budget. Poultry plant operatives and fast food and service workers—the vanguard of the new working class of the 1970s and beyond—couldn’t cut back on rent, car insurance, or weekly loan payments for bedroom sets and washing machines. For them, these were fixed expenses. Food, however, provided some wiggle room. You could buy less meat and make soups and stews if you had the time or owned a slow cooker. You could replace beef with chicken. You could watch out for sales, clip coupons, and pick up boxes of generic cereal and macaroni and cheese. A few dollars here and there might stop the power company from cutting off the electricity or the phone line from going dead. Cheap supermarket goods became, then, a necessity much more than they were a target of bargain-hunting adventures. As steady blue-collar work disappeared, like those positions at Clark Equipment and on the railroad, and rates of unionization dipped, families started to depend on cheap food to make ends meet. Soon, they came to expect food items to be cheap; their budgets demanded it.
Looking for bargains, consumers in the 1970s began to toss more packages of cut-up chicken into their shopping carts. That’s because by this point chicken was the cheapest meat in the store. Further-processed chicken cost a little more than whole birds or pieces did, but it too remained relatively inexpensive and was easy to prepare.
The trade-off between time and money was another thing on the minds of working-class shoppers in the 1970s. By the time the Watergate hearings made it onto TV and the oil-producing countries of the Middle East formed OPEC, convenience trumped flavor in the kitchens of many Americans. This development was part of a long and complicated process. Food makers had pushed canned goods and cake mixes since the early days of the twentieth century. Along the way, they helped to transform American tastes and habits. Mostly, though, they made convenience a factor in every family’s cooking calculations, with the balance in the postwar years tipping heavily toward quick and easy. By the 1970s, Americans had, according to one food researcher, “gotten into the hurry up mode.”38 Easy to make. Easy to eat. Easy to clean up. That’s what sold in America, with its increasing numbers of mothers and married women working outside the home for pay. Families mobilized female labor for a slew of reasons, none more important than coping with the long-term drop in blue-collar wages that began in the 1970s, the same drop that made cheap food not a choice but a necessity. Yet, despite the feminist stirring for equality reflected by the formation of the National Organization of Women (NOW), the near bra burnings at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, and the appearance of magazine feature stories about caring men, like Alan Alda, chipping in at home, in most American households, going to the grocery store and making dinner remained women’s work no matter how many hours they sat in an office or stood along an assembly line. So too did cleaning, laundry, and getting the kids to baseball practice, Bible study, and 4-H meetings. In single-parent homes, the fastest-growing kind of home in poor communities across rural and urban America from the 1970s forward, it didn’t matter because there was no one else around but the mom, usually, to do all of the things that needed to be done.39
When it came to cooking, many women looked to cut down the time they spent over the stove or in front of the oven. Few women, of course, stopped cooking altogether. They just needed some easy alternatives for weekday meals in order to balance all of the tasks on their to-do lists. The push for less kitchen time translated into less cooking from scratch and a heavier reliance on processed and hyper-processed foods like hot dogs, instant mashed potatoes, and chicken nuggets and tenders.
In 1960, the average cook, almost always a woman, spent two hours a day in the kitchen. Three decades later, a very different average American domestic manager, who by then most likely had a job outside the home, commuted to work, and was maybe the only parent in the house full-time, spent, on average, less than thirty minutes in the kitchen each day, the lowest amount among the world’s thirty-four industrial nations.40
As convenience began to dictate food choices, the very notion of cooking changed. This could be seen in cakes and casseroles and in recipes for chicken and side dishes. By the time the Imperial plant opened in Hamlet, cooking a chicken no longer meant roasting a whole bird for hours on end or simmering it with cut-up vegetables for even longer, let alone catching it, killing it, and cleaning it. Maybe it meant dredging pieces of pre-cut chicken in peppery flour and frying them in a heavy, well-seasoned skillet a couple of breasts or thighs at a time. For some, it meant barbequing on a grill or tossing a boneless chicken breast in a pan. But, by the 1980s, that chicken breast might come pre-seasoned and portioned out. Chicken for dinner could also mean “Shake and Bake” with Stove Top Stuffing or Minute Rice and a can of corn. But when time was really short, chicken meant zapping chicken nuggets and other further-processed chicken(ish) products in the microwave, itself a product of the less-is-more ethos of cheap.
In 1978, less than 10 percent of American households had a microwave. Twenty years later, just about every kitchen, office, and lunchroom had one, and the machines, usually made in factories in faraway places in the developing world, cost about as much as a meal for a family of four did at a mid-priced restaurant like Red Lobster or Shoney’s. With food ready in a jiffy, families feasted on dishes made of newly processed foods and old foods processed in new ways.41 When microwaving would take too long or entail too much work, families and individuals went out and ordered from value menus at fast food outlets.
In 1940, Americans spent 15 percent of their food budgets on eating outside the home. Thirty years later, this number had climbed to 28 percent. By 1987, it had jumped to 35 percent. Most of the visits, if not most of the money, especially for working people, went to buying processed burgers and further-processed chicken nuggets, often priced at a dollar each or on sale in two-for-one specials, at McDonald’s or Burger King or Hardee’s. This quickly added up in terms of both dollars and calories. By 1990, Americans consumed 15 to 20 percent of their total caloric intake at fast food chains.42
Marketers encouraged the consumption of convenience foods. They portrayed cooking as a slog, as somethi
ng that no one would do if they didn’t have to. Some ad men went a step further, labeling microwave meals and eating out as a sign of freedom. “Don’t cook, just eat,” implored one advertisement. McDonald’s urged families in the 1980s to give “Mom a Day Off.” Going a step further, Kentucky Fried Chicken ran a spot showing a bucket of its secret recipe fried chicken under the banner “Women’s Liberation.”43
As fast food restaurants multiplied and freezers stuffed with highly processed meals stretched over several supermarket aisles, the idea of food, including chicken, changed. Food as a concept drifted further and further away from its natural form as a plant or an animal. “I grew up on a farm,” remembered Robert Baker, as he explained how he would chop the head off a chicken and “then we’d scoop it into a pail and it would lie in the house a bit before my mother would get around to cooking it.” During the war and afterward, city dwellers stopped by a place like Cagle’s and left with a whole bird. By the 1960s, consumers purchased cut-up pieces of chicken. That way they got what they wanted, which was always part of the promise of modern buying. If they wanted just legs, that’s what they got. Same with breasts and thighs. By the 1970s, the skin came off (for health reasons) and the bone came out of the breasts (for convenience). From there, the chicken men, like Baker, tried to figure out the bird’s next incarnation.