Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  Women no longer kept only a half-dozen chickens to sell the odd egg. Church cooperatives sprang up to market eggs and dress hens to be shipped to urban areas. The wife of a textile manufacturer in western North Carolina owned a large hatchery that could handle a hundred thousand eggs. And a woman is credited with founding an entirely new line of business devoted solely to raising chickens for meat. In Delaware, Celia Steele ordered fifty chicks from a hatchery in 1923. By mistake she received five hundred. Instead of sending them back, she housed them in a small square wooden building furnished with only a coal stove. Steele and her coastguardsman husband fed them until they were large enough to sell for meat. With the profits, she boldly ordered a thousand more of what are now called broilers. Most were shipped to Jewish markets in New York City that also were largely run by women.

  In 1925, farmers on the Delmarva Peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean raised fifty thousand chickens. Within a decade, that figure had grown to 7 million. A U.S. Department of Agriculture study in the 1930s estimated that eight in ten chickens arriving in New York were bought by Jewish customers who quadrupled from 500,000 in 1900 to nearly 2 million by 1930. A quarter century later, the modest wooden building where Steele raised her first broilers was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1928, the Republican National Committee put out an ad backing presidential candidate Hoover, titled “A Chicken for Every Pot.” The phrase harked back to the sixteenth-century pledge by French king Henry IV. This time it seemed attainable. African Americans and rural white women slowly were edged out of the business, as poultry science departments sprang up at universities and Wall Street financiers took note of the profits to be made with the lowly chicken.

  The Great Depression finally convinced many Southern men to heed their wives’ advice and turn to poultry. Synthetic fabrics and the boll weevil killed King Cotton, the only source of income for many farmers across the region, and the bird became a lifeline for desperately poor families. What had begun as “an unimportant farm chore—throwing out a little corn and collecting a few eggs,” according to a 1933 issue of the Progressive Farmer, was now “a scientific business and a major source of farm income.” By then, ten thousand railroad cars filled with live poultry clicked north each year to the industrial cities that, despite the economic downturn, still required a steady flow of meat and eggs. The chicken was still considered less desirable and tasty than red meat, and it remained more expensive, but on the eve of World War II, it was poised to enter the center ring of the American diet.

  On a sunny June day in 1951, ten thousand chicken fans filled Razor­back Stadium at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in the culmination of a nationwide effort to create the fowl of the future. As a band played and the crowd cheered, U.S. vice president Alben Barkley handed a California farmer named Charles Vantress a five-­thousand-dollar check for his winning entry to the Chicken of Tomorrow.

  The award marked the rise of a vast new industry and the metamorphosis of the backyard bird into a technological wonder akin to missiles, the transistor, and the thermonuclear weapon that had been tested for the first time six weeks earlier. The winning bird was chosen not for its exotic stature or pure breeding but for its similarity to a wax model of the perfect carcass as devised by a team of poultry scientists. The grilled chicken in your sandwich or wrap comes from a descendant of the Vantress bird.

  Like the bomb, the Chicken of Tomorrow was the child of World War II. Beef and pork were rationed during the conflict to feed the troops, but chicken was good enough for civilians, so the federal government set high poultry prices to encourage farmers to produce more poultry for the home front. Unlike in World War I, attention was focused not just on eggs but on chicken meat itself, given the sudden recent growth of the broiler industry. As a result, a black ­market in fowl sprang up while beef and pork stocks dwindled and the conflict on both European and Pacific fronts dragged on.

  With Chicken Little playing in theaters, President Franklin Roose­velt organized the War Food Administration to cope with shortages. The agency promptly seized all the broiler chickens on Delmarva. Made up of Delaware and parts of Maryland and Virginia, this was the national center of poultry production, where Steele’s broiler business began. Soon chicken was standard fare for wounded and recuperating veterans, and in training camps across the South, black cooks introduced thousands of young Northern and Western soldiers to the joys of fried chicken. Propaganda posters drummed into civilians the virtues of keeping backyard poultry, and defense chickens were said to be churned out at Flockheed, a jokey take on the warplane manufacturer Lockheed. But the internment of Japanese Americans, who made up a large percentage of those highly skilled workers who could determine if a young chick was a hen or a rooster, led to an unanticipated poultry crisis. “War conditions are creating an extreme shortage of competent sexers,” one company noted.

  By the time the war ended, Americans were eating nearly three times as much chicken as they had at the start, but the meat came from a dramatic increase in industrial-sized farms. Huge hatcheries churned out thousands of chicks, which were shipped to farmers, who raised them in vast sheds until they were ready to be sent to slaughterhouses and prepared for market. Just twenty years after Steele penned her first broiler flock into a wooden building in rural Delaware, raising chickens for meat was a matter of national security as well as a major industrial enterprise.

  Just as the Manhattan Project brought together university scientists, industrial engineers, and government administrators to unlock the secrets of the atom, the Chicken of Tomorrow project drew on thousands of poultry researchers, farmers, and agriculture extension agents to fashion a new high-tech device. Unlike the bomb effort, however, the contest was anything but secret. It was the brainchild of an Iowa poultry scientist named Howard Pierce who was a senior manager at the country’s largest food retailer, A&P, the Walmart of its day. In a 1945 meeting in Canada, Pierce listened to colleagues express fear that the poultry business faced calamity in the fast-­approaching world where beef and pork were no longer rationed. He suggested that what industry and the consumer needed was a chicken that looked like a turkey, with a broader and thicker breast and meatier thighs and drumsticks.

  Pierce convinced A&P management to sponsor a nationwide effort to realize this ambitious goal. The chain that dominated the growing trend toward supermarkets was looking for new ways of packaging food, and it began to install freezer cabinets in some larger stores in 1946 to sell frozen meat, seafood, and vegetables. Smarting from a federal conviction for conspiring to monopolize the retail food business, the company was eager to bolster its reputation. Pierce pulled together all the major American poultry organizations, two trade publications, and employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

  On the Chicken of Tomorrow Committee there were no women or African Americans; after three centuries of black and female control, the American bird was now firmly in the hands of white male professionals. Poultry authorities created a scoring system, wax models with rounded breasts, and strict rules for the contest. The goal was to draw on the expertise of small farmers as well as large commercial breeders to create the ideal broiler, with “breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks.” Given the relatively scrawny fowl of yesterday, this was a formidable objective.

  To drum up interest, A&P paid for a short movie narrated by the nation’s most famous newsreel reporter, Lowell Thomas, full of serious men in ties and white coats examining chickens as women and blacks in the background go about more menial tasks like feeding and dressing the birds. Given the old emphasis on egg production, “relatively few poultrymen took steps to develop better meat-type chickens,” Thomas explained. The committee also cosponsored a Chicken Booster Day that included a New York City banquet and screening of the 20th Century Fox movie called Chicken Every Sunday starring ­Celeste Holm and a young child actress named Natalie Wood. The real star, of course, was the reassuri
ng meal that brought a broken family back together without breaking the bank. The bird that provided three seasons of eggs, pin money for rural women, and the occasional special dinner was recast as a serious competitor to beef and pork.

  Contests in forty-two of the forty-eight states led to regional finals and two national competitions. Fertilized eggs from contestants were hatched under the same conditions, fed the same food, and given the same vaccinations. Then they were weighed, slaughtered, and dressed. Judges, recruited from universities, industry, and governments, scored for “economy of production” and “dressed carcass.” Vantress won both the 1948 and 1951 national contests with a breed made by crossing California Cornish males with New Hampshire females. This hardy bird with just the right mix of European and Asian genes weighed an average of more than four pounds, twice the size of a typical barnyard chicken of the day. The speed with which it became the industry norm is astonishing. As early as 1950, most commercial broilers came from this stock and those of the ­runners-up. A 1951 issue of the Arkansas Agriculturalist declared that “the day of the slick-hipped chick is over” thanks to “the leaders of the ­Chicken-of-Tomorrow program.” Newspapers hailed the scientifically engineered birds as “these sweater girls of the barnyard.”

  Women and barnyards were relics of the past in the brave new world of the postwar poultry industry. Modern chickens lived indoors, ate processed feed from automated bins, consumed a host of vitamins, breathed ventilated air, and were protected from illness by vaccinations and antibiotics. The goal was to convert feed into meat as efficiently and cheaply as possible. It worked. While beef and pork prices shot up in the decade after World War II, chicken prices fell dramatically. In the new system, farmers were contractors. The company owned the hatcheries and the slaughterhouses, as well as the birds themselves, and provided the feed and medicine. The grower raised the chickens in their own coops—now long and low ­warehouses—until they reached their full size and were ready for shipping.

  Until the early 1950s, most American flocks contained no more than two hundred chickens, about the size advocated by ancient Roman agricultural writers. In the wake of the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, farms raised tens of thousands of birds and as many as one hundred thousand. A hen that might live a dozen years on a farm now could be fattened and slaughtered in six brief weeks.

  There had been nothing like this in human history. There is no record of any other major food—meat, dairy, grains, fruits, or ­vegetables—expanding so quickly in volume and scale. The only exception might be orange-juice concentrate, which, thanks to scientific tinkering and clever advertising, expanded rapidly in this same period. Advances in nutrition and breeding techniques made it possible to grow a bird in half the time possible in 1940, as the price per pound plummeted from sixty-five to twenty-nine cents.

  What made chickens different from, say, cows? With a long, entrenched history, ranchers were slow to embrace academic genetics and corporate methods and were generally suspicious of radical change. A rising generation of poultry magnates by contrast happily drew on the extensive research by scientists on chicken genetics to create a more efficient product. Most of these new chicken magnates were not farmers but the middlemen who shuttled birds from farm to city.

  John Tyson, for example, founder of the nation’s largest poultry company, which now is the world’s largest meat producer, began as an independent trucker. Barely scraping by in the early days of the Depression, he started hauling broilers from Arkansas to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. By providing feed and water to the birds—a novelty at the time—he could transport them over longer distances. During World War II, as demand for chicken skyrocketed, Tyson bought up hatcheries and feed factories as well as broiler houses from failed growers, pioneering the assembly-line system that is at the heart of today’s modern business.

  As chickens were concentrated in huge numbers, disease could sweep through and wipe out whole flocks, while feed prices could fluctuate wildly. Only the largest operations survived and thrived, and Tyson earned a reputation as a smart and hard-nosed entrepreneur apt to fly into rages. He was not sentimental about poultry. “Just keep it simple,” he said. “Kill the chickens, sell ’em, and make some money.” Tyson’s son Don studied agricultural nutrition at the University of Arkansas before joining the company as general manager in 1952. The father-and-son team drew on the latest science in feed, genetics, and management to expand their operations throughout the 1950s. Vitamins, vaccines, and antibiotics became essential elements of success. The fact that the product was chicken was almost incidental. “We’re not committed to the broiler business as such,” Don later told one interviewer. “We’re committed to so many dollars invested on dollars returned on that investment.”

  The Tysons benefited from the Chicken of Tomorrow, which supplanted the traditional breeding culture engendered by hen fever a century before. Older varieties began to vanish. Just as auto manufacturers required uniform parts, these new industrialists wanted a bird that matured quickly using as little feed and with as little variation as possible. So the new generation of scientific breeders focused on creating hybrids with a biological lock that ensured this uniformity. This approach assured a high-yielding, predictable product, but it also meant that growers could not breed their birds to produce the same uniform results. Like hybrid corn strains, farmers had to buy the next generation from the companies controlling the genetic traits. Breeding companies kept these traits under lock and key, as classified as nuclear weapons or Colonel Sanders’s famous Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe.

  A few livestock experts expressed alarm at the pace of change. “Modern science . . . threatens to become dogma,” warned one in 1960. “The scientist might well be advised to go occasionally to the farmyard to learn rather than teach, or, what is far less excusable, to preach.” The new approach to poultry, he added, was being applied “too uncritically and with too great haste.” By then, more than 70 percent of the business was in the South.

  The thriving poultry industry brought jobs to some of the country’s poorest regions, from Arkansas’s Ozarks to the hills of north Georgia. Friends in Washington ensured minimal federal oversight. Arkansas senator William Fulbright became the industry’s vocal supporter in Congress. When a bill to tighten inspections was under consideration, Don Tyson wrote a brief note to Fulbright. “Bill, this would hurt the chicken business.” The proposed legislation swiftly died. By 1960, 95 percent of Arkansas growers were under contract with major corporations like Tyson. While they muttered about their status as modern-day sharecroppers, public complaints could lead to cancellation of those contracts and immediate bankruptcy. Attempts by growers and poultry plant workers to organize never went very far in the Midwest or South.

  For the first time in American history, chicken was cheaper than beef or pork and available neatly packaged according to cut. Picking out pin feathers, removing the guts, and chopping the feet off chickens had long been a laborious chore for housewives in cities as well as in the country. Now they did not have to buy an entire chicken, which made the bird increasingly popular for meals beyond just an elaborate Sunday dinner. The chicken proved ideal for America’s postwar boom, since it could be easily packaged. “It soon became obvious that the meat-type chicken and modern-day supermarkets were meant for each other,” one poultry expert observed. Meanwhile, as people became more conscious of the dangers of fat in red meat, the low-fat bird became a more appealing choice.

  Tyson’s $10 million in net sales in 1960 topped $60 million by the end of that decade, reflecting that shift in consumer tastes. The actual number of broiler chickens in the United States at any one time remained remarkably stable after the start of World War II. But each bird weighed twice as much and required half the feed and half the time to mature. And the number of chicken farms plummeted from more than 5 million to half a million by 1970.

  Falling prices and thin profit margins, however, left the industry scram
bling to come up with ever-new ways to sell their prosaic product, from frozen dinners to precooked army rations. Hungry markets opened up overseas, and by 1960 more than 100 million pounds of U.S. chicken were shipped annually to West Germany alone. Tyson, like other major poultry operations, began to spread its product as well as its plants and way of doing business to Mexico, Europe, Asia, and South America. Upstart businessmen like Frank Perdue on the Delmarva Peninsula pioneered advertising campaigns that branded chickens, even though broilers across the country are nearly ­identical—a marketing ploy that the beef industry has yet to copy successfully.

  Perdue lay to rest any qualms about the masculine nature of his business that for so long was disdained as women’s work. “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” he famously told television audiences in the 1970s, a century after the industry made its first halting steps. It also still takes women and minorities behind the scenes. More than half of the nation’s 250,000 poultry workers are women, 50 percent are Latino, and an estimated one in five is an illegal immigrant. It is often ugly, low-paid, and dangerous work, as is well documented in newspaper articles, government reports, and books by writers who worked undercover in poultry plants. But it makes cheap chicken widely available for consumers, including those who wait for sales on boneless breasts to stock their freezers.

  Fifty years after the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, chicken overtook beef as the meat of choice among Americans. The 1980s introduction of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets and other highly processed poultry—tenders, patties, hot dogs—helped push the bird over the top. Food scientists discovered that the meat, like the bird of old, was infinitely versatile, absorbing flavors more readily than pork or beef and perfectly suited for fast food. By 2001, the average American ate more than eighty pounds of chicken a year, quadruple the 1950 amount.