A Dozen Dino-Wings, Please

Just what is going on with chicken?  Having just come from the grocery store, I can attest that there are a confusing range of terms and types of chickens and eggs.  Does it really matter if my eggs popped out of pampered free-range chickens?  Does a drumstick from a “factory” chicken taste as good as one from a humanely raised chicken?

Since I’m a historian, let’s start at the beginning…. Well, we can’t because no one is really sure where the chicken originated, though it was probably somewhere in southeast Asia.  We know it absolutely wasn’t in the New World or Africa, chiefly because there were predators in those places that probably would have made the species extinct long before anyone perfected a recipe for buffalo wings.  (Have you ever considered that a chicken is more closely related to a tyrannosaurus than to a buffalo?  Would a name change help or hurt marketing?)

Nor do we know exactly when the chicken was domesticated but it was somewhere between 10,500 and 4,500 years ago—a spread large enough to be useless.  What we are fairly certain of is that the birds were kept primarily for their eggs, not their meat.  It would be centuries before carefully selected crossbreeding produced a bird big enough to supply a meaningful amount of meat.

For millennia, relatively few people ate chicken meat, as the cost was too high for most people to afford until after World War II.  In my grandfather’s day, people ate far more pork, mutton, and beef than we do today, and chicken was considered a delicacy.  Even the price of eggs was too high for most ordinary people.  Part of the reason for this was that relatively few people raised the birds and those who did usually kept the birds in barns, since specialized chicken coops were relatively rare.  The birds were expected to scrounge around for their food, augmented by the addition of occasional kitchen scraps that weren’t consumed by pigs or the family dog.   Those who did raise egg-laying chickens could expect to lose 40% of the birds a year to accidents (meaning that something ate them) or disease.  The birds that were lucky enough to survive only produced 80-150 eggs a year.  (And the eggs were small.)

It seems strange today to remember that just a century ago, people were far more likely to eat mutton or lamb than chicken.  I’m not even sure that there’s a grocery store in town that sells mutton.  Anyway, you would need a bank loan to purchase enough lamb to feed a family of four.  This changed, however, in the 1920’s with the discovery of Vitamin D.  During the cold months of winter, chickens rarely got enough sunlight to remain healthy until spring, but with the addition of cheap dietary supplements, more chickens survived the winter and produced healthier and larger chicks in the spring.

In 1923, Mrs. Wilmer Steele of Delaware bought 500 chicks to raise, not for eggs, but for meat.  Her gradual improvements in housing and feeding the birds led to the first real “industrial” production techniques with indoor caging and better feed.  While some today might call these innovations cruel, Mrs. Steele’s 10,000 birds had a mortality rate of only 5%…Until someone ate them for dinner, I mean.   Better feed and dietary supplements raised egg laying up to 250 eggs a year.

During World War II, such industrialized chicken production increased rapidly.  The large numbers of chickens being slaughtered for consumption led to the development in 1942 of the ‘online eviscerator’, a machine that removed the internal organs of the bird making it ready to cook.  Since this meant that the carcass cooled more rapidly, it was safer to transport to market and less meat spoiled.  Up until this point, gutting and preparing a chicken was considered a kitchen skill.  Since the process by hand was time-consuming, butcher shops charged extra for preparing the birds for the home, meaning that the mechanized process lowered the price of chicken.  For the first time it became common for butcher shops to sell butchered chicken, so that the consumer could buy breasts and thighs, separately, without purchasing the entire bird. 

Shortly after the war, chicken production grew dramatically, in part aided by the rapid introduction of home refrigerators, making the meat safer to keep and use.  (I can remember being told sometime during the Eisenhower administration that if uncooked chicken attracted flies, it was no longer fresh enough to eat.  I doubt if that advice is still being taught today.)

Ever larger industrialized ‘chicken mills‘ producing both table meat and eggs, quickly put the small family egg farms out of business, forcing the USDA to begin a grading system for eggs.  So much chicken was sold, that mutton began vanishing from the dinner table.  By the end of the century, chicken consumption surpassed that of pork and beef and all across the plains of Texas, cowboys (poultry punchers?) herded vast flocks of clucking chickens to market….  Well, no.

What was actually developed were mechanized chicken and egg factories where birds rarely had enough room to exercise.  Antibiotics and hormones were added to the feed, making the birds grow faster and all but eliminating diseases.  Mortality rates dropped to low single digits and egg producers began striving for an egg a day.  These techniques also produced a backlash in publicity by people who believed that such practices were cruel and amounted to animal abuse.

In the last decade, a surprising number of people have begun to raise chickens at home again—and not only for food.  Pet chickens are now more popular as pets in American than either hamsters or guinea pigs.  Inevitably, people began pressuring stores to sell chickens and eggs that were more humanely raised.  This heralded the introduction of the free-range chicken.

Most consumers probably believe that a free-range chicken happily frolics among the flowers and trees while occasionally laying an egg on a velvet pillow.  This sounds suspiciously like the Happy Farm that parents describe to children to explain the sudden disappearance of a family pet.

The reality is that according to USDA guidelines, it means a free range chicken is a bird raised in a mechanized cage that has a ‘pophole’ large enough for the bird to stick its head through to observe the factory parking lot.  ‘Certified Humane Free Range’ chickens have it slightly better, since they are allowed two square feet of space per bird and are outdoors—weather permitting—at least six hours a day.  In practice, this means the cages have doors to access a fenced in yard, but the doors are open during good weather only.  While the word ‘range’ brings to mind vast open spaces, the math works out to a bird every seventeen inches in any direction.

If you factor in the size of a person versus the size of chicken, a free-range chicken is more crowded than a 300-pound man on a Southwest Airlines flight to Phoenix.  

But what about the taste?  Well, I’ve spent two days reading about taste tests conducting in America, England, France, and Italy.  Those tests boil down to this:  Of every kind of chicken you can name—including flash-frozen bags of breasts sold at Sam’s Club—each has won at least one of the tests, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe that more humane treatment of birds produces better flavor or nutrition.  Well, there is one exception:  all of the taste tests done by the producers of chicken proved dramatically that their own product tasted wonderful and might cure cancer.  I disregarded those tests.  

Reading those widely varied tests, it was almost like those chickens had been selectively bred for thousands of generations for size, not brains.

I can summarize the taste tests for you.  First, the more people paid for their chicken, the more likely they were to believe it tasted better.  When these same people were presented with blind anonymous choices, they rarely picked the expensive chicken.  If you buy the really expensive chicken from Holey Moley Foods, you are buying a Veblen good.  (A Veblen good is something that the higher the price, the more people want to buy it.  You know, Ferrari, Cartier, and anything made by in China with a Gucci label on it.  This is why some bottles of wine sell for thousands of dollars a bottle despite not tasting as good as grape Kool-Aid.).   The folks at the store over charging you for a plain chicken raised in a wire cage want you to believe that it spent its life resting on a mink lined nest while an au pair read Proust out loud.  In French, of course.

The second bit of information gleaned from those tests is that fresh eggs tasted better than older eggs regardless of whether the eggs came from birds were living in “humane” factories or were living on a family farm where a ten-year-old boy chased them around the yard beating them with a stick.  Any remaining difference between varieties of eggs is most likely due to the chef.

When buying chicken or eggs, you should buy what you want, what you can afford, and what tastes best to you.  Keep in mind that there are almost no stories about chickens that end with the phrase, “they lived happily ever after”.  There is a name for a book with stories about chickens:  it is called a “cookbook” and the stories in it usually end with “season to taste”.