Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Page 23

  Burnham was a gentleman scoundrel, newspaperman, and poultry breeder who helped stoke the American poultry fancy. A month after the Boston show, he purchased a half-dozen Cochin China fowl from Lord Heytesbury, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at the height of the potato famine. These were from the same stock that Queen Victoria and her prince consort, Albert, had sent from their poultry house at Windsor Castle for the Dublin show held that previous spring. He paid the enormous sum of ninety dollars—about twenty-five hundred in today’s dollars.

  The arrival in Boston of these birds, which a local paper deemed “extraordinary, and strikingly peculiar,” created a sensation. Nine months later, Burnham received sixty-five dollars by selling just four young birds raised from the original fowl, proving that he had made a wise investment. In 1852, he sent a pair to Queen Victoria in a publicity stunt. In gratitude, the grateful monarch sent her portrait to Burnham, and the entire affair was covered in the newspapers. At a time when a factory worker earned an average of seven cents an hour, the price for a pair of Cochin fowl shot up from $150 to $700.

  The consummate American showman, P. T. Barnum, fell under the spell of fancy chickens as well, building large coops on his lavish Iranistan estate in upstate New York and serving as president of the National Poultry Society. The abolitionist editor Horace Greeley and Burnham were vice presidents. Barnum organized the first national poultry show in February 1854, using the buzz about the birds as a way to pull people into his museum on Broadway in New York City. “There will be a marvelous cackling as the sun gets up this morning,” noted the February 13 New York Times. Offering $500 in prizes—the equivalent of about $13,500 today—Barnum advertised “all foreign and just imported” chickens. The crowds prompted Barnum to extend the show a full six days. He repeated the wildly successful exhibition that October, when he had a composer create a “National Grand Poultry Show Polka.” Like Burnham, the showman made a fortune from hen fever.

  The big money, extensive publicity, and near hysteria surrounding hen fever alarmed the nation’s sober-minded agricultural press. Chickens were minor players and associated with women in a male farm culture dominated by grain and large livestock. Editors warned the public against paying exorbitant sums for “Shanghaes, Chittagongs, Cochin-Chinas, Plymouth Rocks, and a half a dozen other puffed-up worthless breeds of fowls.” Few heeded this advice. An upstate New York newspaper reported that one farmer who sold his Cochin China birds for $10 a pair and $4 for a dozen eggs made $433 in a year—a hefty fortune for a small farmer in the 1850s. New England clergy speculated heavily in Chittagongs and Brahmas, and white Southerners complained that their slaves had access to the new and expensive varieties. A plantation owner in Rome, Georgia, asserted in 1853 that his black workers raised five hundred Shanghai fowls the previous year, hefty-breasted chickens “on which they daily luxuriate.”

  The writer Herman Melville satirized hen fever at a time when ten Shanghais could cost six hundred dollars. In his 1853 short story “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo! or The Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano,” his protagonist becomes so obsessed with a Shanghai rooster that he is willing to mortgage his farm to obtain it. He wrote:

  “A cock, more like a golden eagle than a cock. A cock, more like a field marshal . . . Such a cock! He was of a haughty size, stood haughtily on his haughty legs. His colors were red, gold, and white. The red was on his crest alone, which was a mighty and symmetric crest, like unto Hector’s helmet, as delineated on antique shields. His plumage was snowy, traced with gold. He walked in front of the shanty, like a peer of the realm; his crest lifted, his chest heaved out, his embroidered trappings flashing in the light. His pace was wonderful. He looked like some Oriental king in some magnificent Italian opera.”

  As it did in Britain, the bubble burst in 1855. Like the more famous California Gold Rush that boomed and busted in the same years, hen mania was short in duration but had dramatic long-term effects. By the time the Civil War broke out, new varieties of chickens peppered American farms on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Collectors who sought fowl with dramatic colors and outrageous feathering began to experiment with breeding meatier birds that laid more and larger eggs. When the bloody conflict was over, American enthusiasts were poised to create the chickens that now account for the vast majority of the world’s poultry.

  The Plymouth Rock, one of the most common modern varieties, was first shown at the 1849 Boston show by John Cook Bennett, a onetime leader of the Mormon movement who advocated free love and launched the use of the anesthetic chloroform. His new variety combined genes of English Dorkings with the Asian Cochins and Malays, and one poultry fancier dismissed it as “a mongrel of little worth.” Later versions mixed the genes of Dominiques with Cochins or Javas to create a meaty bird that also was a reliable egg layer.

  In 1875, a Maine farmer bred the first white Plymouth Rock, a bird descended from Asian and European varieties that would eventually spread worldwide. Rhode Island Reds, meanwhile, came from crossing Asian varieties with the Leghorn, a bird imported from Italy in the 1840s. British-bred crosses like the Cornish hen and Orpington also gained popularity. Some new breeds specialized in churning out eggs or increasing meat productivity.

  Railroads, mines, and manufacturing plants spread across the North as the Industrial Revolution gathered steam. Urban populations ballooned and food demand jumped while traditional ways of farming gave way to new industries such as the cattle business. By the 1880s, beef from Texas cattle slaughtered in Chicago ended up on plates in New York, London, Paris, and Berlin. The complex system of cattle drives, rail shipment, slaughterhouses, and steamship transportation helped ensure that beef would remain Americans’ meat of preference for a century. Pork processors did their best to imitate the cattle system.

  Chicken was different. The bird required only a protective coop and could survive on kitchen and garden scraps. Free feed and labor—usually performed by farm women—made it difficult to imagine poultry on an industrial scale. Some nineteenth-century Americans turned to ancient Romans for advice. While holding the bird sacred, Romans also loved roast chicken. In the first century AD, the scholar and farmer Marcus Terentius Varro had detailed advice for “one who wants to set up a poultry-farm . . . to gain a large profit by the exercise of knowledge and care.” Varro recommended housing a flock of two hundred birds indoors. Peacocks and guinea fowl could also be kept, but “it is chiefly the barnyard fowls which are fattened.” These chickens, he adds, “are shut into a warm, narrow, darkened place, because movement on their part and light free them from the slavery of fat.” They might be sacred, but they were not free range.

  Writers like Pliny the Elder and Columella discuss in great detail the rate of egg production, the advantages of certain breeds, the diseases that afflict chickens, and methods to house, feed, and protect them. Pliny kept his chickens in tiny pens, which we would today call battery cages, so that they would continually eat. “We disregard the chief purpose of the Greeks, which was to train all the fiercest birds for fighting,” explains Columella, who expresses a patrician Roman’s disapproval of gambling. “Our object is rather to bring in an income to the hard-working family man, and not to the trainer of fighting cocks whose whole patrimony has often been lost by betting on cock fights.”

  Yet much Roman knowledge of raising chickens appears to have come from the Greek island of Delos, a center of a lucrative poultry production that likely provided a model for the business at home. By the height of the Roman Empire, chickens were a common sight in the bustling marketplaces. A second-century AD stone relief from Rome’s port of Ostia depicts a lively market scene of a woman selling freshly slaughtered chickens that hang upside down from a wooden beam.

  The Roman Empire’s only surviving cookbook, the Apicius, features chicken in seventeen recipes, including one that calls for plucking the chicken while it is alive, a method still used in some parts of China since it is believed to make the meat tastier. The author
who compiled the text around AD 500 included all parts of the chicken in his dishes, from the testicles and fatty spot where the tail feathers attach to diced brain and cooked comb. Chicken dishes even accompanied some Romans and Celts in Britain and Germany to the grave, where the bird bones mingle with human. The empire’s disintegration also destroyed the Roman chicken industry, which required careful organization, well-constructed buildings, and good and safe roads. Not until the nineteenth century were conditions ripe for resurgence.

  The central obstacle to mass chicken farming is reproduction. The chick embryo takes three weeks to come to term as the mother incubates the egg using her body warmth, rolling them three to five times a day to ensure normal development. The temperature around the egg must hover between 99 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit with relative humidity remaining close to 55 percent for most of that time, increasing in the last few days. Hens that spend so much time caring for their eggs have less time to lay more, so building up a large flock is time consuming.

  The solution is an artificial incubator to mimic the hen and divert the bird to more egg laying. The West, however, was oddly slow to grasp the basic technology and adapt it to European and American conditions. Jefferson complained in 1812 to a friend that inventors had yet to focus on the practical application of science to incubation. But ancient Egyptians and Chinese had practiced artificial incubation as early as the fourth century BC, by heating large rooms with fires of straw and camel dung as attendants turned the eggs or by covering them with rotting manure that would provide the necessary heat. The technique appears to have initially applied primarily to goose eggs in Egypt and duck eggs in China. Over time, however, the chicken displaced other birds, as hens can lay more than waterfowl, and their eggs hatch faster.

  By the medieval era, Europeans marveled at multichambered incubators in the Nile delta capable of handling thousands of eggs at a time. The exact techniques, however, were closely guarded secrets passed down within a few Coptic families over generations. The Arabic term for incubator translated as “chicken machine.” A Medici managed to bring an Egyptian to Renaissance Florence to set up an incubator, and two French kings funded efforts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to increase poultry production with the help of artificial breeding facilities. None was successful, perhaps because of the chilly and unstable European climate or the notable lack of camel dung.

  The French polymath René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur visited Egypt, and estimated that the 386 ovens he counted could hatch an astonishing 92 million chicks a year. No Western country could match that sort of production until the twentieth century. Réaumur developed an innovative incubator heated by a woodstove governed by a sensitive thermometer. The resulting chicks delighted French king Louis XV, but the invention proved economically impractical.

  New technologies in the late nineteenth century made possible efficient incubators capable of handling thousands of eggs. This development coincided with a wave of European immigrants fleeing west. In 1880, there were 100 million chickens in the United States producing 5.5 billion eggs worth $150 million. A decade later, more than 280 million chickens laid 10 billion eggs worth $275 million. New York City Jews were the single most concentrated market for chicken. The Talmud calls for Orthodox believers to enjoy the Sabbath, and that includes eating well. Beef, however, was expensive. While fish was the most popular main dish among those who fled pogroms and poverty, chicken was a close second. This preference began to drive the nascent poultry industry. Between 1880 and 1914, some 2 million Jews—one-third of the entire Jewish population of Eastern Europe—arrived in the United States, and most gravitated to New York City.

  At first, most of the city’s supply of live poultry was brought by boat from the Virginia coast, but by the 1870s the first trains filled with live chickens arrived from the Midwest at the old West Washington Market in Manhattan. Eggs were so valuable in the burgeoning city that many were imported from abroad. “Two hundred thousand dozen eggs have been received at this port from Europe during the past nine months,” reported the New York Times in 1883. “The eggs came packed in straw in long cases containing 120 dozen each.” As African Americans dominated poultry markets in the antebellum South, Jews—particularly Jewish women—became the most successful poultry merchants in the nation’s largest city.

  Jewish housewives typically would buy a live chicken from a market and then take it to a kosher butcher for ritual slaughter, but the enormous volume of birds often made a mockery of laws designed to prevent suffering of the animal—such as use of a razor-sharp knife—and honor its sacrifice. One horrified rabbi wrote in 1887 of “rivers of mud, mire and blood” so crowded with people and birds that the butchers “lack room to turn” and must slay birds without time to test the knife’s sharpness. In 1900, there were fifteen hundred kosher butcher shops in New York City, and two thousand train cars of live chickens arrived in Manhattan, a figure that quadrupled by 1920.

  African Americans began to flee their own pogroms and poverty in the rural South. Jim Crow laws and the cotton-eating boll weevil appeared simultaneously in the 1890s, forcing tens of thousands to leave their homes in search of a livelihood in the factory towns of the industrial North. Humiliated as they fled, since trains in that era denied them entry to white-only dining cars, they often had to pack their own food, and the West African tradition of fried fowl came with them. The emigrants called the trains “The Chicken Bone Express” for the remains of meals littering the tracks that carried them, as well as their expertise and love of the bird, to the expanding cities.

  The growing urban need for meat and eggs rippled out to farms across Appalachia, the Midwest, and California, and rural women were key to meeting the demand. As late as the 1930s in the United States, women were the primary caretakers of chickens, as they still are in developing nations today. Men busy planting cash-crop fields or herding cattle left chickens to their mothers, wives, and daughters. After all, the bird was a homebody. Fed on leftovers, kitchen and garden scraps, and barnyard bugs, chickens on small farms prefer to stick close to home.

  The South lagged far behind California and the Midwest in the poultry business at the turn of the last century, when chickens emerged as the nation’s most profitable agricultural business behind corn and cattle. Although 90 percent of North Carolina farms had chickens, the average flock was only twenty-two birds; the average flock in the Midwest was almost three times as large. Since poultry was considered women’s work and the bird was associated with African Americans, even the promise of quick profits failed to entice many Southern white men to convert their dirt farms to chicken production. One North Carolina extension agent complained in 1917 that his exhortations were met with ridicule. “Poultry is looked upon on most farms as being an unnecessary nuisance.”

  Southern women were quick to see the financial possibilities, however, in part thanks to growing literacy and the spread of cheap farming periodicals. In 1909, a teenager named Mollie Tugman in the mountains of western North Carolina announced to her family that she intended to make more money from poultry than the family made growing corn in the rocky hills in one of the poorest places in the United States. Her father and older brothers laughed at her. Ignoring their guffaws, Tugman enlisted her eleven-year-old brother and two oxen and set to work building a fenced yard and chicken coop. Impressed by her determination, the family eventually gave in and lent a hand.

  Tugman was inspired by articles—often written by women—in the Progressive Farmer that passed on tips about poultry rearing. So she knew to grow grain to feed her birds rather than give them just scraps and rougher corn, and to keep an eye out for disease. Once her flock was laying, she bought a chemical called water glass to preserve eggs, which she could then sell in the winter for much higher prices. When she married the following year, Tugman was on her way to making an income that gave her a large measure of independence unusual for a woman of her day.

  Another Carolinian named
H. P. McPherson wrote in 1907 that chickens provided greater profit than vegetables, butter, or milk, and relieved her of “a feeling of dependence.” She concluded “there is little excuse for a woman to be without money if she has room to raise poultry.” Between 1910 and 1920, gross sales of North Carolina chickens and eggs doubled, and then doubled again in the following decade. Poultry was the state’s fastest-growing livestock business.

  World War I transformed the chicken from barnyard adjunct to national security necessity. Herbert Hoover, head of the effort to keep U.S. troops and European civilians fed, encouraged Americans to raise backyard birds for both patriotism and profit. “Save hens, raise hens, eat eggs, eat roosters!” crowed an April 1918 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. An American soldier holds his bayoneted rifle as a perch for a hefty chicken. “The more eggs the more beef and pork to Europe. The more meat on the ships the more man-killers under the Stars and Stripes. The more soldiers the more near the end of the baby-killer of Potsdam. Johnny, get your hen!” Another poster featuring a hen stated: “In Time of Peace a Profitable Recreation, In Time of War a Patriotic Duty.” Egg prices doubled.

  That March, the post office agreed to ship chicks from the country’s 250 hatcheries by Express Mail, a service then controlled by the Department of War. This minor bureaucratic decision had immense consequences for the future of the chicken. Many farmers in that period argued that artificial incubation was immoral, since it separated chick from mother hen. There were bitter battles in state legislatures to ban the sale of chicks less than six weeks old and forbid their transport via the mail. The War Department’s move suddenly opened the vast national market to hatcheries, and resistance to incubation collapsed. A decade later, there were ten thousand hatcheries, most concentrated in Northern California and western Missouri, and more than half the nation’s chicks pecked through their shells in an incubator rather than a farmyard. One entrepreneur in California wrote a 1919 bestseller called How I Made $10,000 in One Year with 4200 Hens, the equivalent of $125,000 today.