Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? : The Epic Saga of the Bird That Powers Civilization (9781476729916) by Lawler Andrew

Author:Lawler, Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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

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