Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (30 page)

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.

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 reassuring 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.