Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  Chanel has won the Glorieuses three times, and he has the blue vase traditionally sent in thanks by the president—then Jacques ­Chirac—prominently displayed among other trophies and awards in a cabinet by the back door that leads to the farmyard. Clean shaven, with thinning hair and a Gallic nose, Chanel explains that his flock must come from the only Bresse chicken hatchery, and that no flock can exceed five hundred in number. After their first month, each chicken must have at least thirty square feet of open field to wander for four months. They can never be fed genetically modified grain and subsist on a carefully calculated diet of local corn, wheat, and skimmed milk. Protein is limited so that the birds will find their own amid the grassy fields on his thirty-acre farm, where he also grows their feed. “I prefer to see my poultry eat insects and worms than antibiotics,” he says. Drugs can be administered to sick birds, but this requires a written report by a veterinarian and subsequent government approval.

  We leave the kitchen, warmed by a roaring fireplace, and step into a cold November drizzle. At first, I’m not sure what I’m seeing. Then I realize that the green field ahead is spotted not with faraway sheep but with nearby chickens. In all my travels, I’ve never seen a large flock feeding in an open field. “The main problem is predators,” he says, as we pass the feathers and bones of a recent kill. One in five succumbs to foxes and hawks. But the most dangerous predators are human. Since a Bresse chicken can cost $30 per pound, and a capon might fetch a total of $275, theft is an ever-present threat.

  In the final couple of weeks, the birds are herded into cages for fattening. “If they are left outside the meat is too tough,” Chanel explains as I follow him to a small wooden shed. Eighty birds are in wooden cages called épinettes. They are like battery cages, except their wooden frames and slats give them a more rustic air. There is no burning smell of ammonia in the well-ventilated shed. Each cage holds about four chickens—there’s room for each bird to stand and move around—and they poke their heads out occasionally to peck at the mash and cast a glance our way. “It’s the happy time,” he says through my translator, a Lyon woman in heels. I look at her, baffled. She smiles, explaining as if to a child that the birds get to rest, relax, and eat in their final ten days to two weeks. She describes the épinettes as a sort of spa, with dim lighting and unlimited food. One local website asserts in a charming translation that the chickens in épinettes “love the attention attended them with their regular meals of whey-rich porridge.”

  In the next wooden shed are several dozen capons. Chanel motions for me to be silent. I look through the door. They are huge, nearly twice the size of the others, and lack combs, though they also lack the misshapen breasts and legs of the American broilers I’ve seen. While outside, each must have sixty square feet of meadow. In the épinette, each has its own cage. When Chanel enters, there are some quiet clucks, but as soon as I duck my head into the room, they panic and flap their wings as one, and I quickly retreat. Without their gonads, the farmer says, they don’t crow and lack the natural fierceness of roosters. Veterinarians now perform castrations, and Chanel estimates that only one in a hundred doesn’t survive the operation. These nine-month-old birds are the most prized for a French Christmas dinner. After slaughter they are hand-plucked, washed, and laboriously sewn into linen corsets. This spreads the fat around the meat and limits air exposure to ensure preservation. This was essential in the days when it took two weeks to reach the Paris market, and it remains the common way to present the bird.

  As we trudge back across the muddy driveway, I overhear my translator making what seem to be arrangements to come by in December to purchase a capon. “It is much cheaper to get it from him than to buy it in Lyon,” she tells me. “I’ll bring my kids and let them see the farm.” Unlike an American grower, Chanel is a truly independent operator who can choose his customers but who also assumes the full financial risk. He says that he makes a decent living raising four thousand birds annually, so long as he doesn’t count the hours. Summers are hard, since the chickens don’t go to bed until dark comes around after 10 p.m. Along with caring for the birds, he also raises all their feed, gesturing at the bulging corncribs. The appellation requires careful record keeping and frequent government inspections. The scattered sheds required don’t lend themselves to automation, and he is worried that the younger generation is losing interest in the hard work required to maintain the flocks. “It’s like raising children,” he says with a rueful smile. I ask him about the bus sitting beside the barn. It is part of his supplemental income. “I’ve been a school bus driver for twenty-five years,” he explains.

  About 250 farms raise 1.2 million Bresse chicken a year, only a little more than the number processed in a single week by the Tyson plant in Temperanceville. Just one in three hundred French chickens is a Bresse, and each is given a distinctive label and a metal ring around one leg. Given the high cost to produce the birds, the Bresse is reserved primarily for upscale restaurants and butchers. A 2006 avian influenza scare forced anguished farmers to lock up their birds, and the fate of the French institution was for a time in question. “The problem is to find enough producers,” says Georges Blanc, chair of the Bresse poultry trade committee. Blanc—gastronomy magazines tend to attach “legendary” to his name—is a famous chef with a three-star restaurant and upscale spa in the village of Vonnas outside Bourg-en-Bresse.

  Though dressed simply in his chef whites, he gives off a feudal air sitting behind a massive desk in his multimillion-dollar half-­timbered complex. Across the square is a store where you can buy Georges Blanc wine, snail pâté, pheasant terrine, and tripe packed in Calvados. There is an imitation traditional dovecote in the park nearby. Our chat is more audience than interview. Blanc describes his successful effort to fight off an attempt by farmers in the 1970s to lower standards so they could sell more birds. “It was tradition versus change, and we won,” he adds, a three-star culinary general describing a hard-fought battle. He makes an incredulous face when I ask him if he ever uses fowl from factory farms. “I never cook an industrial chicken!” Only the finest-quality products go into his dishes, Blanc adds with a touch of Gallic indignation.

  Two or three times a week, he partakes of the Bresse chicken. Despite his concerns about production, Blanc is confident that the bird will continue to hold top rank among poultry aficionados who travel from as far away as Japan to sample his famous cuisine. The regional government provides start-up funds to young farmers who want to maintain the tradition. His business, he adds, is to cater to his specialized clientele, not to worry about the future of the industrial chicken.

  Blanc glances at his watch, and I excuse myself. He does not ask me to stay for dinner, nor can I afford the $122 price tag for the Bresse chicken dish listed on his restaurant menu, although, granted, that includes foie gras and Champagne. Instead I return to Bourg-en-Bresse for a leisurely meal at the restaurant Le Français in the heart of town. The old-fashioned brasserie with its belle epoque decor has a livelier and friendlier feel than the stuffy Blanc dining room. Soon after I arrive, there is not an empty seat on this chilly and damp Tuesday evening in November.

  What arrives on the plate is a bit of a shock—a bare roasted leg, its nub still a purplish hue, covered in a white sauce, stark and visceral, unencumbered by vegetables or other distractions. The first taste reminds me vaguely of turkey, but moister and denser. Unlike regular chicken, the skin is buttery, and even the tendons are tasty. Skeptical of the hype, I’m taken by surprise. This is chicken that, thankfully, really does not taste like chicken.

  Bresse poultry will never feed the world, or even many individuals beyond Blanc, his wealthy clients, and a small number of people on a splurge. But other French labels requiring lots of outdoor space and time, careful feeding, and local control have captured a quarter of the national market. One U.S. businessman, frustrated by the industrial food system in his own country, is attempting to import that concept as part of an ambitious dream
of transforming the way Americans buy and eat chicken. When I get back from Bresse, I look up Ron Joyce at Joyce Farms outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

  He is an unlikely revolutionary. Joyce was raised on a thirty-­acre farm in western North Carolina, and his father worked for Holly Farms—an early innovator in packaging chicken parts for ­supermarkets—before starting his own business shipping chickens to fast-food businesses like Bojangles’. Now fifty-seven, Ron took over in 1981 when his father passed away. Soon Tyson muscled into the market, buying up Holly Farms, and began battling with another titan, ConAgra Foods, for control of the growing fast-food market. Joyce sold to ConAgra and began thinking about a specialty business.

  Then, a decade ago, he took a trip to Paris. “It made me angry,” he says in his Carolina accent as trucks on I-40 boom past his office window. “I tasted things that I didn’t know existed. The butcher shops were stacked with an astounding variety of poultry that you could buy fresh every day. I came back to the richest country in the world and we were all eating one chicken—a Cornish Cross that grows faster and faster through genetic selection and has no flavor.”

  Unlike many slow-food and animal activists, Joyce blames not corporate greed but consumer apathy for the sad state of poultry in the United States. “People vote with their pocketbook. In Europe, they will pay a lot more for their food. Here, you put boneless chicken breast on sale for a dollar ninety-nine and it triples your sales.” Whether chicken or carrots, it all comes down to price for the average American, and industry races to oblige. Profit margins for the poultry business, compared to pharmaceutical or other manufacturers, are thin and subject to larger forces like the weather and price of corn. So companies shave costs and prices to maintain an edge over competitors. “I want the consumer to take responsibility,” he says. When his kids wanted to stop recently for a thirty-nine-cent taco, Joyce shuddered. “I told them, I don’t want a thirty-nine-cent taco. I mean, how low can it go?”

  Overuse of antibiotics, adding arsenic compounds to feed to improve digestion, soaking slaughtered birds in dirty chlorinated water, and then adding chemicals to kill dangerous bacteria are the result of this relentless push to lower costs. So are birds with massive breasts and weak legs that must be euthanized because they can’t stand up to get to feed and water bins. “You can’t put an American chicken outside,” Joyce adds, struggling to contain his outrage. “Its immune system is not developed enough in six weeks, when it is shipped to the processing plant.” Such practices, particularly the chlorinated water procedure, explain why the European Union bans imports of all U.S. poultry. The National Chicken Council is trying desperately to overturn this embargo to gain access to large and profitable European markets like France.

  As an alternative to this race to the bottom, and to find a niche unoccupied by the big corporations, Joyce set out to copy the French approach. He began by selling a free-range and organic chicken, but quickly realized that the genetics of American birds are all the same, no matter how you feed and care for them. The meat was still tasteless. Marinating was the only way to put flavor back in the bird. Then he discovered Label Rouge. It is Bresse-lite, with a price tag that many consumers could afford. I had seen it in the display cases of Bourg-en-Bresse shops for about half the price of its more famous cousin. “This chicken feeds outdoors, but with less room, and is slaughtered after ten or twelve weeks rather than sixteen,” one butcher with a shop across the street from the town’s live poultry market had explained.

  First, Joyce sought out aging Carolina farmers who had raised heritage birds in the days before the Chicken of Tomorrow dominated. Then he imported eggs from France, though his French suppliers were skeptical. “They laughed and said Americans would never pay for it.” Joyce imitated the Label Rouge approach to care, feeding, and hand processing. Enter the Poulet Rouge de Fermier du Piedmont, the red farm chicken of central North Carolina, though it does sound better in French. Joyce cultivates chefs along the East Coast, many of whom had no idea that the chickens they used were genetically identical to those sold to McDonald’s. How much value can you add with sauce? By educating these influential players in the American food system, Joyce hopes to create a demand for a bird that both tastes better and is more humanely grown.

  Imported eggs, smaller flocks, more grain, and nearly twice the growing time means a price at least twice that of a Tyson chicken. Joyce is betting that improved taste will be the main driver in bringing customers to his door. The animal welfare aspect to his system, however, is what impresses Leah Garces, who directs the U.S. office of Compassion in World Farming. She says that improving the lives of American chickens hinges on better living conditions and slower growth. Doubling their life span of forty-five days is key to ensuring adequate bone growth before they begin to put on weight. And with natural light, more space, and greater variety—straw bales, planks, and ladders give them something to do in their coops—the Joyce chickens are scored among the best treated in the industry. They are not a heritage variety, since they come from one of the three companies that controls 80 percent of all chicken breeding stock, but they are an older traditional breed called the red naked neck that is quite different from the ill-proportioned, fat-breasted, and thin-legged chickens in the United States.

  Joyce introduces me to his son, who works in the next office, and the three of us go on a tour of the plant. Their casual and frank manner is a stark contrast to Big Poultry. Not only do they let me see what I want but they answer every question without hesitation. I’m welcome to take pictures and film. Our first stop is the hatchery across the parking lot, where two men are moving eggs out of an incubator. With a capacity of fifteen thousand eggs, it is tiny by industry standards. Then we walk into the slaughtering area. That job takes place in the morning, and two employees in bright-blue smocks are mopping up the gleaming stainless steel equipment as we walk through. The birds live within a one-and-a-half-hour radius, so travel time is minimal, an important factor in welfare and meat quality. The trucks back up to the loading dock and employees take the live birds, hang them upside down, stun them electrically, and then slit their throats. A hot-water bath, though not hot enough to remove flavor, loosens the feathers. The remains are then eviscerated by hand.

  If a chicken doesn’t go through rigor mortis, it will be tough on the plate, and U.S. plants plunge the carcass into cold chlorinated water to cool it down. The birds can absorb the water, which adds weight—and therefore profit—but they also can absorb unwelcome bacteria in the bath. Often a chemical spray is added to kill the bugs. Joyce, as do many Europeans, uses fans to air cool the birds instead. It takes a little longer, but it is a cleaner process. In the next hall, women are deboning birds by hand. The meat is packaged, boxed, and shipped to customers. Though there is modern machinery, a good deal of hand skill goes into the process. The pace is slower and the quantities produced are minuscule compared to the massive poultry processing plants in the area. Five thousand Rouge chickens leave his plant a week. Just a couple of hours away, one of the world’s largest poultry plants, owned by Mountaire Farms, produces millions of chickens per month.

  Yet Joyce is creating an alternative, however small and elite, in a country with shockingly few options between the industrial chicken and vegetarianism. He’s branched out to include other birds such as the guinea fowl and turkey, working with breeders to improve taste while keeping welfare in mind. A few weeks after my visit to the Winston-Salem plant, I’m surprised to see ring-tailed pheasant on a restaurant menu in my own town. This is the bird imported from China in the 1880s for the benefit of Western hunters. Yes, the waitress confirms after checking with the kitchen, it comes from Joyce Farms. Confident that the bird led a better life than any industrial chicken, and grateful to have the alternative, I order it. Tender and dense but not too gamey, it is delicious.

  12.

  The Intuitive Physicist

  I looked at the Chicken endlessly, and I wondered.
What lay behind the veil of animal secrecy?

  —William Grimes, My Fine Feathered Friend

  Hens might be skittish and roosters horny, but fowl in the ancient and medieval worlds were rarely considered unintelligent. Their role in royal menageries, religious rituals, and healing potions made them worthy of respect, emulation, and even awe. In 1847, as The Fancy took flight in Britain and America, a New York magazine published a ridiculous riddle that, however, did not ridicule the animal. “Why does a chicken cross the street?” The answer was, of course, “Because it wants to get on the other side!” In L. Frank Baum’s 1907 Ozma of Oz, Dorothy Gale survives a shipwreck thanks to a poultry crate and a smart and savvy hen named Billina that guides the innocent Kansas girl through a strange land.

  This view of the bird as a sagacious creature went all the way back to Aesop, but it began to erode in the wake of World War I and the rise of mass poultry production. As Americans left the farm, moved to cities, and bought refrigerators, live chickens began to slowly vanish from daily life, and attitudes toward the bird hardened. “Get away, yuh dumb cluck!” yells a character in Edmund Wilson’s 1929 novel, I Thought of Daisy. The term birdbrain first turns up in 1936, and the insults to chicken out and chickenshit were first used during World War II. Chicken Little made its screen debut in 1943, with hysterical fowl standing in for Germans manipulated by Hitler. The only thing dumber than a chicken was a geek, the sideshow freak who would bite the head off a chicken, a term popularized in a 1946 novel and 1947 film noir starring Tyrone Power.