Why Did the Chicken Cross the World By Andrew Lawler

 Why Did the Chicken Cross the World

By Andrew Lawler

Andrew Lawler is an American Journalist and author was born in Norfolk Virginia on May 25th, 1961. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1983 with a B.A in Interdisciplinary Studies. He landed his first reporting job just days before the explosion of Challenger in 1986 and spent the next 15 years or so as a science reporter in Washington. After that, he spent a year as a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and founded the New England Bureau of Science. His articles have appeared in the Smithsonian, National Geographic, Audubon, New York Times, and Washington Post. In addition, he has written two books with a third book set to be released in November of 2021. Today we are reviewing his first book, Why Did the Chicken Cross the world published in 2014 with a reprinting in 2016.

Chicken is the cornerstone source of protein in the modern world, the average Chinese citizen will eat over 22 pounds of chicken meat this year and the average American will eat 4 times that (Honestly we eat way the hell too much meat generally.). In the United States, the chicken is the most commonly eaten meat, surpassing beef in the last decade, and you likely ate chicken if not today at least a day or so ago before reading this. Nor is the United States alone in its appetite, Mexico is the world's single greatest consumer of chicken eggs, importing 20,000 tons of eggs in 2019 alone. There are an estimated 26 billion chickens alive on the planet right now (With an extremely high turnover rate.). Making them the most numerous bird and one of the most numerous vertebrates on the planet, or at least on land (Given plummeting fish stocks, probably don’t need that qualifier. {given that the Bristlemouth fish is numbered in the trillions by most sources… We need the qualifier} Fair.). The modern chicken is used for everything from food production to vaccine creation to helping health experts guard us against West Nile Virus. Which begs a question, where are all these chickens? I mean think about it, there are only 400 million or so cats on the planet but I'm willing to bet my mostly American audience has seen a lot more cats in their lives than chickens. Never mind dogs at 900 million or even rats, who we are often locked in a battle to remove from our lives. Beyond that, I'm sure most of you can remember the last time you saw a cow from your car as you drove past a farm with a horse or three. At 25 billion chickens, with over 9 billion of them living in the US alone, shouldn't we be drowning in these birds? For that matter, where did this bird even come from? Has our relationship always been like this? How is it even in the deepest, reddest part of the Bible belt I picked up the evolutionary history of animals like the horse, pig, cow, and dog but I can't even remember a vague discussion of the chicken? These are some of the questions that we grapple with in this book as Mr. Lawler attempts to trace the creation of the chicken from a wild jungle fowl to a product of American Scientific Farming and Capitalism without restraint (But he’s being redundant.). To our relationship to it as a spiritual symbol and divine herald to barely considered but often eaten meat dish.

Lawler traces the chicken to Southeast Asia using a combination of archaeological, genetic, and biological evidence (Honestly, it isn’t that hard.  They’re the same species, recognizably so, as a wild bird you can still find hanging around.  At least for their species and place or origin.  Time of domestication is harder. {Actually!  There was a huge amount of argument as a number of biologists favored other species, I think it’s settled now but the book is 7 years old.} Likely one of the other closely related species?). Now archaeological evidence is difficult because chicken bones are unlikely to survive long enough to become such evidence. However, there is a bunch of other evidence, based on carving and other art, as well as primary written accounts. For example, we know that the Egyptians considered the chicken a foreign animal in the Bronze age with written accounts of chickens being brought over from Babylon and Mesopotamia as gifts for the Pharaoh. For that matter, the Greeks would call the Chicken the Persian bird and often use it as a mocking symbol of the Persian Empire. Tracing the bird from Babylon, we find it was called the royal bird during the Akkadian Empire and was associated with a lot of goddesses. Like almost all of them, it was also considered a creature of light due to its crowing at dawn, symbolically banishing the darkness of night (Okay, that’s kinda cool). With that we're sent further east, where the history of the Chicken in India is rather mysterious, this is because a lot of the early Indian civilizations like the Happara and Mohenjo-Daro civilizations left behind records but we can't read them. In fact, when it comes to the repeating symbols that we find in both cities we're not even 100% sure that they're a writing system. Some of those symbols sure look chicken-like though. Through the magic of genetics and fragmentary archaeological evidence, we can follow the Chicken back to Vietnam and its most likely ancestor the Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus.  The domestic chicken is Gallus gallus domesticus.  If you’ve ever wondered what wild roosters look like, the chicken minstrel in Disney’s Robin Hood.  He’s a straight-up Red Jungle Fowl.). We also learn that the Red Jungle Fowl has interbred so much with its domestic counterpart that's in danger of genetic extinction. However, due to a group of American Farmers who have maintained pure strain Jungle Red Fowl for decades, it may be possible to reseed the population (It wouldn’t take much, to be honest.  Even interbred, there aren’t that many genetic differences. {The geneticist and biologists who specialize in these birds disagree, apparently the mutation that separates the two is a big deal, the pure bred Red Jungle Fowl for example is so skittish that even being picked up a handler it’s known for years can cause a stroke or a heart attack (Woah, that’s impressive.  I stand corrected.)}. It's here also we learn that we might not have even eaten the damn birds for the first 1000 years of their domestication! Birds were mostly kept for religious reasons, to keep down pests, for their eggs (Hens lay at least an egg a day when they’re well-fed, can be left to forage or be fed scraps.  That’s way more useful than the meat to a pre-industrial society.), as pets (They are wonderful animals and do make pretty good pets.), or even as fighting animals. That said eating the chicken didn't become really common until the Roman period, but the Romans made up for that by loving roasted chicken and exporting chickens as food animals to every corner of the Empire. It's at this point the book focuses on how the chicken became a staple part of the diet of basically the whole world. 

You see after the Empire fell, the chicken itself fell out of favor. There were just other birds that people preferred. At least in Europe, the preferences of Africa and Asia aren't really discussed at this point. The book takes us through how the chicken was present in the middle ages and mostly kept for its eggs with people preferring the meat of pheasant and other game birds over chicken (A live chicken will feed the family for years.  A dead one...once.  Also, fun linguistic side note for you English speakers.  Ever wondered why we have separate words for the animal and the meat, for things other than chicken?  Well, words like beef, pork, and venison are derived from the French, while the word for Cow, Pig, and Deer are derivations from the original Old-English and thus Germanic languages.  This happened because after the Norman Conquest, the people who raised the animals used their words for them, while the people who ate them used their own.  Chickens are the same word because the people raising them were the people eating their eggs and sometimes them.  Probably also why historical records specify a preference for game birds.  The nobility did the writing, and the peasants got executed if they hunted the pheasants.  The peasants almost certainly ate their chickens when they got long in the beak. {I’m not saying they didn’t eat chickens but records were kept of even what the peasants ate and the peasants had a marked preference for waterfowl and other types of birds over the chicken, in fact in large parts of Europe there were more ducks kept than chickens.  Chickens mostly show up as fighting animals in the records, as every culture who keeps them has a sport of rooster fighting}).  Things changed when we hit the Victorian Era and the first big so-called “hen crazes” started with wealthy British folks collecting exotic chicken breeds from Asia and other places and cross-breeding them with the goal of creating a better bird (They did this with everything.  Dogs, pigeons, rats…). Charles Darwin was even able to use this as evidence for his emerging theory of natural selection. It's not until after the civil war that “hen crazes” start spilling over to the United States, which is where we switch gears and focus on the history of the bird in the US because it's in the US that the chicken's modern situation came about.

The chicken was not a big part of our colonial diet, folks often preferred game birds, turkeys, and waterfowl to chickens (Again, the eggs.  And their usefulness for pest control…). On top of that men were encouraged to focus their energies on larger livestock, especially cattle and pigs. There was one group of people who were encouraged to spend a lot of energy in rising and maintaining chickens, however. Slaves. The south became the main source of chicken meat and eggs in the United States with almost the entire production under the control of enslaved African Americans. In fact, owners encouraged this mostly by letting enslaved African Americans keep all the profits from chicken meat and egg sales, but also refusing to buy chicken from other groups which pushed poor whites completely out of the industry until after the civil war (Huh.  Neat.). Now European recipes usually called for roasting or baking the chicken but no one shared these recipes with the African Americans who didn't have the time for them anyway. That said the west African people of the time had domesticated chickens for centuries before Europeans showed up and they had their own traditions on how you cook a chicken. They fried those birds in oil (And that is where that stereotype comes from.). This would spread like wildfire pushing out most European traditions in the US until our chicken cooking traditions were mostly from the continent of Africa, or to be specific Nigeria and the Yoruba people. However, the chicken was distinctly 3rd place on American plates at best until the single most fundamental event in modern history, World War II. With the government rationing beef and pork and encouraging chicken, big business got involved and pushed out the African Americans and women who had controlled the market until this point (Because of course, it did.  Can’t let them have anything when there is a profit to be made, after all.). In the 1950s, in the spirit of scientific farming, scientists were rallied to create the bird of tomorrow. A massive breasted bird that can grow to full size in under 3 months, convert 2 pounds of feed into a pound of meat and endure the hellish state of factory farms just long enough to be killed (Poor birds.  Normal chickens can still fly…{fuck some of those birds can barely stand!}). 

Interestingly enough, the factory farm industry wasn’t willing to let him into the farms themselves (There’s a shock!). In fact, Mr. Lawler makes a point of just how much work is put in to keep people out and prevent people from thinking about what is going on in these factory farms. Now you don't have to be a PETA member to find what we do now horrific or to find this little tidbit incredibly shady (No.  No you don’t.  And yes, factory farms are terrible for the chickens.  They are also terrible for the farmers.  See, the way Tyson and the like work is that they own the birds and they contract out to “independent” farmers.  Farmers who have to buy their birds, and put up with constantly changing requirements and low per-bird contract rates, which means they are stuck in a massive debt trap with no control over their own business.  To the point where they are punished for trying to not be assholes to the birds, and get black-listed if they speak out.  Fun fact, by the way, the factory farms create a literal shit ton of effluent that pollutes rivers and drinking water supplies, but they are not covered by...basically any clean water regulations thanks to lobbying.). It turns out that due to lobbying by companies like Tyson Foods, factory-farmed chickens are exempt from almost every animal cruelty law that usually governs the treatment of livestock (And this, kids, is what we Marxists talk about when we talk about the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, or when liberals talk about regulatory capture.  The people who actually raise the chickens don’t want this, but they’re in a debt trap.). Look I'm no Vegan but this? This is concerning. Thankfully there are dozens of movements made up of hundreds of thousands of Americans and more beyond our shores working to provide alternatives; from the backyard Chicken movement to producers working to convince the restaurant industry to go with a slightly more expensive chicken that is raised more ethically and tastes better than factory farm breeds, which are also pretty bland so low bar to clear here. Whether they'll matter in the grand scheme of things is something time will tell.

Now some of you may be asking why bother delving into all this historical or biological stuff about chickens of all things! Well, first of all, context matters, some of our biggest failures as a society or individuals are often linked to our inability to grasp that. Second of all, how can we really understand where we are if we have no idea where we've been? How can we see where we're going? Also, there is nothing more basic to society than what it eats. The history of your food is just as much the history of you (Literally, in a Ship of Theseus kind of way.), which is why learning about the history of the animals and plants you eat is something that can be incredibly helpful to understanding missing parts of history or cultural information. For that matter to stand up on my Anthropologist soapbox, perhaps to my editor's dismay because he's heard this so often, everything is a cultural artifact, everything, and your food and how you prepare it tells us a lot about your culture (No dismay.  It’s true.). I've often joked that I can tell you a lot about a culture just by looking at their booze, food, and weapons. I stand by that and Mr. Lawler's work makes me feel justified in doing so. Mr. Lawler's does a good job of informing us of the general history of chicken with a large number of amusing anecdotes while showing us the long westward march of the chicken as well as its journey from a bird mostly kept for religious rituals to the center of our diet, while at the same it the bird itself is increasingly exiled from our presence as a living animal and we increasingly come into contact with it as only a prepackaged commodity. That said, the organization of the book is rough and there are times where Lawler can't seem to decide if he's heading west or east, or if he wants to discuss the history of the bird and its cultural significance or the modern problem of factory farms and the state of opposition to it. I'm not saying the book can't do both but you should try to maintain a consistent direction from chapter to chapter is my advice. Still, I can excuse that because this is a book that informs you while also provoking you to start asking questions and that's invaluable. Why Did the Chicken Cross the World By Andrew Lawler gets an A- and a recommendation from me. Go check it out.

I do hope you enjoyed this weeks review, which was chosen by our ever-wise patrons! For just a dollar a month they get to decide what book I read next, discuss theme months and vote on future topics. If you would like to join their wise ranks consider dropping by https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads and signing up. Next week is another book they selected, Salt, a world history. Until then, stay safe and of course, Keep Reading.

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders