Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  The young couple’s fascination with fowl began to attract public attention and encourage imitation. The author of the 1844 book Farming for Ladies; Or, a Guide to the Poultry-Yard, the Dairy and Piggery saw the aviary firsthand, and concluded that the royal interest was for the moment purely amusement. But the writer adds that the long-term goal was to establish a poultry yard to supply the royal kitchens on a regular basis. “Nor can there be a doubt that the introduction of foreign breeds will thus—under the example of her gracious patronage—in the course of time, cause much improvement in the stock of our native species.” Chicken, after all, was too expensive for most commoners, states the writer. “In London, the common prices of poultry are generally so high, that people of narrow income, if living in town, can seldom afford to put any on their table.”

  Chickens were already in Britain when Caesar arrived with his troops in 55 BC. The general noted the peculiar fact that it was against the law to eat them. Instead, he observed, the natives raised them “for their own amusement and pleasure,” which suggested that they were used for both religious and gambling purposes. The Romans brought their own varieties of fowl across the English Channel, including one with an extra toe that is today called the Dorking, for roasting as well as for augury, cockfighting, and ritual sacrifice. Roman men carried the right foot of a chicken for good luck and ate rooster testicles to enhance their virility.

  The oldest handwritten documents in Great Britain are the Vindolanda tablets found near Hadrian’s Wall, which two centuries after Caesar’s invasion separated Roman Britain from the Celtic Picts in what is now Scotland. Among these wooden boards is a shopping list given by a commanding officer of a garrison to his slave. The man was sent to a local market to purchase twenty chickens and “if you can find nice ones, a hundred or two hundred eggs, if they are for sale there at a fair price.” The Latin saying “from the egg to the apples”—equivalent to our English “from soup to nuts”—described the Roman passion for starting a meal with an egg dish, and Roman bakers were perhaps the first to make custards and cakes using the hen ovum. Where there were Romans, there were chickens. And in Roman Britain, some people were even buried with the bird.

  Chicken-and-egg eating declined after the Romans abandoned the island in the fifth century AD, but rebounded with the growth of monasteries in the early Middle Ages. The sixth-century AD Rule of Benedict forbids monks from eating the meat of four-legged animals, so fowl and their eggs emerged as an important commodity. Ducks and geese grew larger and fatter and made bigger eggs, but about half of medieval England’s poultry were chickens. Most manor houses and monasteries kept at least a small flock. In times of famine from poor harvests or cattle disease, the chicken was the handy backup. It was, the food scholar C. Anne Wilson says, “the poor man’s bird in medieval times.”

  Until Shakespeare’s day, chicken was cheap. You could buy a whole bird for three or four pence, a pittance even then. It was, however, just one of many options. There were quail, bustards, herons, finches, wood pigeons, gulls, egrets, thrushes, mallards, and snipes. In thirteenth-century London, you could walk into a cookshop, put down eighteen pence—still a modest sum—and walk out with an entire roast heron. But as the human population grew and farmland expanded, wild birds became scarce and farmers began to raise large herds of pigs and cattle. Goose, pork, and beef became the flesh of choice. One historian calculates that, by 1400, chicken accounted for only 10 percent of what people spent on meat in eastern England. “Whoever could afford, substituted chickens with either goose or red meat,” writes the Yale historian Philip Slavin. By this time, he adds, chickens were “a relatively minor contribution” to the late-medieval farm economy.

  Swans and pheasant, by contrast, were strictly reserved for royalty. At Henry VI’s 1429 coronation dinner in London, peacock was served as well. There were, fortunately, several other courses, since the colorful bird is infamously inedible. (The trend continued among the elite, and savvy Victorian diners knew to avoid the splendid peacock on the buffet.) Turkeys from the New World and guinea fowl from Africa arrived by the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, doves were the rage, since they contributed to national security as well as to dinner tables. Besides providing delicious meat, their nitrogen-rich droppings extracted from dovecotes were an essential element in the manufacture of the gunpowder required for Britain’s growing navy and army. Chickens and their eggs remained low on the culinary totem pole. Their profits, sniffed one agricultural handbook from the early 1800s, were “too inconsiderable to enter into the calculations of the farmer.” Real farmers—that is, men—raised sheep and cattle.

  In 1801, Parliament passed an act encouraging landowners to fence their land. The push for privatization had the effect of raising rents. In the decades that followed, poor and landless farmers decamped to the growing cities and burgeoning factories. In 1825, London’s population of 1.35 million surpassed that of Beijing, which for more than a century was the world’s largest metropolis. Food prices edged up. The British cleric and statistician Thomas Robert Malthus warned that disaster loomed. Less food and more people meant that “the poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress.” Ultimately, he argued, the only way the population would stay within the limits of the food supply would be through a combination of starvation, war, disease, birth control, and celibacy.

  Today, demographers know that, as societies industrialize, birth rates spike as people leave the land for cities. But as incomes increase and women marry later and gain access to education, those birth rates steadily decline. Public health measures decrease infant mortality and infectious disease, technological innovations increase the food supply, and new transportation systems distribute that food more widely. This was as true for Victorian England as it was for early-twentieth-century America and twenty-first-century China. But in Victorian England, no one knew this. Malthus’s grim warning appeared to be coming true as millions crammed into slums rife with disease and hunger, conditions that Charles Dickens was busy chronicling. Revolution, chaos, or apocalypse seemed nigh.

  As Captain Belcher arrived back in Britain in the summer of 1842, a half-million workers in Britain were on strike protesting wage cuts as prices for basic staples rose. Supplying adequate and affordable food was essential to stave off revolution and keep Britain’s new factories churning out finished goods to sell across its empire. Prince Albert emerged as a leading advocate of improving the country’s dire food situation through the use of new technology. One of his tutors, Adolphe Quetelet, had been a colleague of Malthus’s, and Albert was the royal patron of the statistical society that Malthus and Quetelet helped found. The prince encouraged the queen’s interest in animals that might have practical benefits for his adopted country. “Agriculture needs encouragement from the Crown,” he writes in a condescending note to his father, “which V. naturally cannot give.”

  The transformation of British agriculture was already apparent at Leadenhall Market, a huge stone building that sat on top of the Roman basilica and forum of ancient Londinium, where vendors two millennia earlier hawked live chickens. Today, it is an upscale mall, but in the fourteenth century it emerged as the center of the country’s poultry industry. Gaggles of honking geese were herded through the city’s streets from outlying farms and ships docked at the nearby Thames to unload French eggs. By the 1840s Leadenhall was the world’s single largest poultry market, selling two-thirds of the city’s fowl, including geese, ducks, turkeys, pigeons, and game fowl, as well as chickens. But the market’s famous chaos, filth, and noise were largely gone. Thanks to the new railroads—Victoria and Albert took their first train trip a few months before their exotic chickens arrived—the animals could be slaughtered on a distant farm and then brought to the capital while still fresh. It was a radical innovation, given the difficulty and expense involved in shipping, storing, and tending to live ones. Refrigeration still lay in the future, but this cha
nge marked a big step toward the plastic-wrapped meats of today’s supermarkets.

  British farms could not begin to supply the 4 million birds that Leadenhall and other London markets sold each year in that era, or the enormous number of eggs demanded by Londoners. Most poultry was brought by ship from Ireland, Holland, Belgium, and particularly France, where the industry had long been more highly developed. The “three French hens” bestowed in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is a reminder of the age-old English dependence on French poultry. As Britain’s population soared, so did the imports. Britons ate about 60 million foreign eggs in 1830 and more than 90 million by 1842. Eggs were also used to soften leather; one factory alone bought eighty thousand eggs a year to produce kid gloves. The British reliance on foreign nations for such a basic foodstuff worried Albert.

  As the Windsor aviary neared completion in 1843, the royal couple appointed a full-time royal poultry keeper named James Walter, praised by the Illustrated London News as the chickens’ “vigilant guardian” who “understands their language, their dispositions, their diseases.” A large drawing shows him covered in a dozen adoring pigeons, two of which are vying for a perch on his top hat. He immediately began to conduct breeding experiments to see if the ­Dorking chicken, the variety likely brought by Caesar’s troops, could be crossed with the Asian ostrich fowl.

  “In order to improve the breed of the genuine Dorking fowl, that it should be crossed with that of the Cochin China fowl, the necessary arrangements were made,” the Berkshire Chronicle reports on September 28, 1844:

  “A Dorking hen, which has been roosted for some time past with the fowls from China, has recently been in the habit of laying twice, and sometimes thrice a week, eggs containing double or two distinct yolks. Mr. Walters [sic], determined to try the experiment of attempting to hatch one of these double-yolk eggs, placed it, with several other eggs, under the hen. The result was that two chickens were produced from this single egg; one is a cock bird of the pure Cochin China breed, and the other is a hen chick of the Dorking species, both of which are now five days old and in good health.”

  The publicity surrounding the royal chickens began to attract widespread interest. London’s first poultry show took place at the zoo in Regent’s Park on June 14, 1845, three years after Victoria visited the orangutan. The modest affair was something of a novelty; the first major dog show in London wouldn’t take place for more than three decades. Agricultural exhibitions were mostly designed for farmers rather than animal enthusiasts; pets were largely an upper-class luxury. Participants walked past the bear pit at the back of the garden, and there was no tent to shield exhibitors from the unusually damp weather afflicting Britain that season. There were only a dozen varieties of chicken, including some from Spain and the Madeiras, at least one said to be from China, and one from Malaysia. Most entrants were, however, domestic birds, and a speckled Dorking won first prize.

  Europe’s wet June continued into July, when a strange disease began to destroy the potato crop, the primary staple of the rural poor across the continent, in a province in King Leopold’s Belgium. Wind blew the stench of the rotting plants with the destructive spores and soon it spread to Prussia and France. In September, it appeared on the Isle of Wight in southern England, where Victoria and Albert were vacationing at the royal residence at Osborne that they had just purchased, and where Victoria would die more than half a century later. “Another fine morning, when we walked down to the beach, where the Children were playing about happily,” she writes September 13. That day, the potato blight was first reported in Ireland. It was the start of what would be remembered in Europe as the Hungry Forties.

  Ireland was then ruled from London, and nearly half of its 8 million overwhelmingly rural people depended solely on the New World tuber for their primary sustenance. Life was already hard in a country where most Irish eked out a living as tenants on land owned primarily by wealthy English and Scottish landlords. An 1845 government report issued before the disastrous fall harvest said “it would be impossible to describe adequately the privations which they and their families habitually and patiently endure.”

  The commission, appointed by Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, found “that in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water” and that “a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury.” One English lord warned the prime minister that the Irish peasant was supported solely by a quarter acre of potatoes. “Deprive him of this, or let his possession be uncertain, and what interest has he in preserving the peace of the country?”

  At Windsor on November 6, Victoria and Albert walked to the aviary after breakfast and took a drive on an unusually sunny and warm day, welcome after the dreary summer. She was relieved to hear later from Peel that the situation in Ireland was not as bad as he had first feared. “Indeed, I think the alarm must have been exaggerated,” Victoria writes in her diary. But while Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium acted quickly to import grain and regulate prices in their own lands, Parliament dithered. A month and a day later, a frustrated Albert sent a harsh memo to the government criticizing the inaction. “Half of the potatoes were ruined by the rot, and . . . no one could guarantee the remainder,” he complains.

  That winter, outraged Irish journalist John Mitchel, later convicted of treason and exiled, warned that a devastating famine had begun among his people as they watched “heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England.” In London, those ships were seen as essential for the industrializing heartland. Without the Irish larder, factory workers would face food shortages that easily could explode into revolution. Meanwhile, the landed gentry opposed repealing laws that imposed steep tariffs on grain and other foods from abroad. And there was more than corn and grain flowing out of Ireland. In 1841, the Irish sent an estimated 150,000 cattle, 400,000 sheep, and 1 million live pigs to England and another 400,000 pigs that had been slaughtered and turned into pork and bacon.

  An unknown number of chickens were also exported. “Eggs also constitute a by no means unimportant article of commerce,” one contemporary British writer notes. “The largest supplies to the English markets are obtained from Ireland.” In 1835, 72 million eggs were sent to England. That figure grew throughout the famine of the 1840s and, by the early 1850s, “it is estimated that we yearly receive one hundred and fifty millions. Of this number London and Liverpool respectively consume twenty-five millions each.”

  On February 23, 1846, the House of Lords bemoaned the state of Ireland, but the focus was on the country’s lawlessness rather than the hunger at its root. Meanwhile, desperate people eating rotting potatoes suffered from terrible bowel disorders. Fever spread in County Cork. A relief commission warned that what was left of the noninfected potatoes would last only until April. The Royal Dublin Society, an organization created to keep the struggling island abreast of the latest agricultural, industrial, and scientific advances, decided to act by voting to offer a gold medal and twenty pounds for the best essay on the potato crop blight.

  Then the society officers moved on to plan their large spring exhibition. Prize cattle and other domestic animals from across the United Kingdom were to be judged for size and beauty. Prince Albert, who had recently become a patron of the society, made plans with Walter to ship some of the exotic and crossbred birds across the Irish Sea to show at the exhibition in the Irish capital.

  The potatoes didn’t last until April. Food riots broke out by March. Lord Heytesbury, the British representative in Ireland, counseled calm, and grain, beef, and poultry continued to be exported from Irish harbors to English markets. On March 23, as Albert helped Walter design the cages to transport three of the crossbred hens and one cock from Windsor to Dublin, a man in Galway was reported to have died of starvation. A million more deaths were to come, while another million would flee the country, most destitute. Those survivors would clamber aboard what became known as coffin s
hips that transported the sick, starving, and suffocating people to Canada and the United States.

  The first famine death went unnoticed in London, but the Cochin fowl’s journey to Ireland made the news. A London paper reported on April 17 that the four exotic chickens had arrived in Dublin “perfectly free from injury.” The landlords and well-to-do farmers who attended the show were in awe of the queen’s entries presented by Walter on the Dublin fairgrounds. He explained to a rapt audience that one of the hens, Bessy, had laid 94 eggs in 103 days, an extraordinary record at a time when half that number would have been notable. There were skeptics. “But if this be a fact,” said one wag of Walter’s claim, then “there is no limit to the improvement, of which these double-barreled Hens are capable, till by the aid of forcing and extra diet, they become, like Mr. Perkins’s steam gun, able to discharge Eggs at the rate of several dozens in a minute.”

  The birds “created such a sensation, from their immense size and weight, and the full, deep tone of the crowing of the cock, that everybody was desirous to possess the breed, and enormous prices were given for the eggs and chickens,” according to the contemporary poultry aficionado Walter Dickson. “With respect to beauty,” he adds, “they have certainly nothing to boast of.” And those were the cocks. “The hens are still more ugly.” Meanwhile, one exhibit-goer watched with horror as hungry locals crept into pens to steal what was left of raw turnips rejected by the well-fed prize cattle.