The Best American Food Writing 2021 by Gabrielle Hamilton

Author:Gabrielle Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358531869
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

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At the ACGG’s poultry research facility in Addis, there’s a rectangular barnlike structure with segregated enclosures of various test breeds of chicken: one gated room for the South African breed, Potchefstroom Koekoek; the French selection from the company Sasso; and a strain named “DZ-White” collected from local farmers. A refrigerator-sized incubator filled with special eggs from Belgium sits in the corner of a spare concrete room.

In 2016, ACGG partnered with the Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen, who had been crossbreeding chicken varieties for about twenty years—as art. By continuously crossbreeding endemic chicken breeds from around the world, he hopes to create “a Cosmopolitan Chicken carrying the genes of all the planet’s chicken breeds.” His Cosmopolitan Chicken Project in Ethiopia—entitled Incubated Worlds and referred to as an “installation” on his website—brings his latest generation of bird together with ACGG-selected local breeds to synthesize a new bird that is both Ethiopian and international.

It is, of course, impossible for a bird to acquire “all” of the genes; it has a set number, like all other living creatures. While you could, perhaps, genetically engineer more genes into your chicken, they couldn’t all be expressed at the same time. If they did, you would not have a chicken—at best, you’d have some kind of chicken puddle. Vanmechelen has to know this; it’s just the way the project gets presented, its ideological dressings, that makes it sound like a diversity buffet.

Once mature, the Cosmopolitan Chicken will be crossbred with one of the local breeds, probably the Horo, supposedly making the ideal blend of global and local, cosmopolitan and Ethiopian. The local breed has ecological suitability and a long history of living in Ethiopia. Blended with the worldly resilience of the Cosmopolitan Chicken—a truly capitalist, cultured chicken—it will become the best chicken for Ethiopia. Likewise, the Cosmopolitan Chicken bred with the local Nigerian chicken will be the best chicken for Nigeria. Of course, this also benefits Vanmechelen: Every time he convinces a country to accept this crossbreeding endeavor, he adds another chicken to his gene-pool art show. It’s also the ideal development project, scratching every ideological itch with tie-ins to diversity initiatives, climate change adaptation, local empowerment, and ecological resilience.

The ACGG project leader, Dr. Tadelle Dessie, hopes that Ethiopia can substitute a portion of cattle production with industrialized chicken production to help the country achieve the federal government’s Climate Resilient Green Economy plan, which seeks to modernize and diversify the agricultural sector while reducing carbon output. Despite his continual insistence that Ethiopia needs to do its part to mitigate climate change, the country is responsible for a negligible share of the world’s carbon output. Yet, the Ethiopian government hopes to increase chicken’s share of national meat consumption to 30 percent with the explicit ostensible intention of lowering overall carbon emissions, a goal that will require a 500 percent increase in national poultry production. This might seem like a way to reduce carbon output, but only if it offsets beef production—and it simply won’t.

Others, like Olivier Hanotte,

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