Chapter 38
Built for the 1930 World’s Poultry Congress in London, the United States Department of Agriculture’s exhibit used a seven-foot-tall mechanical chicken that “ate” food, then “digested” it through a copper-lined stomach and rubber intestines, before laying an oversized—and artificial—egg. Powered by an electric motor set, the display also used a phonograph tucked behind the exhibit with a recording that explained each step of the egg-making process and scientific advances in chicken-farming technology to curious onlookers.
Made of wood and wallboard, the massive hen, like the Congress itself, was part of a long-term effort to promote the consumption of chicken. When the First World’s Poultry Congress was held in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 1921, Americans gobbled a paltry ten pounds of chicken on average each year, just a fourth the rate at which they chowed down on beef. But with a chuck roast costing nearly 25 percent less than what spring chickens did in the early 1930s, it was an uphill battle for the Congress and its flightless namesake.
A driver of the increasing sophistication of the poultry industry, the Congresses helped evolve chicken meat production from a cottage to a corporate enterprise. Previously a junior part of the egg industry, poultry found its tipping point with the broiler—that is, a chicken raised explicitly for its meat. Additionally, in the period from the 1940s to the 1960, feed mills, hatcheries, farms, and processors had all been distinctly separate entities in the average chicken’s crossing the road from farm to plate. But as the demand for fowl grew, industry players realized that true economies of scale for cost and efficiency could best be realized by consolidating these scattered components into the foundation of an integrated industry. These changes radically transformed the way chickens were individually processed: Up until the 1940s, chickens were characteristically sold as “New York dressed”—that is, with head and feet attached, and only their blood and feathers removed. Then, in 1942, the government awarded an Illinois plant the opportunity to begin what was known as “on-line” evisceration, meaning that whole carcasses could be thoroughly gutted and then packed ready-to-cook in ice inside wooden crates in one location.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Thus began the reign of the chicken. By 1952, the specially bred broilers exceeded farm chickens as the chief source of chicken meat in the United States. By the early 1980s, the industry began producing fewer traditional whole chickens in favor of cut-up chickens consumers preferred.
Chickens from the time of the Congress would today be considered Save-the-Children-thin compared to the modern twenty-first century chicken with Dolly Parton-like cleavage. The reason behind the growth spurt was the vast improvement in the “breast conversion rate” (that is, the measure of grams of feed that it takes to turn into grams of breast meat). Today that rate is roughly three times as efficient as it was in the 1950s. A broiler now can reach a five-pound market weight in five weeks. Forty years ago, it took twice that amount of time, ten weeks, to attain a four-pound market weight.
Selective breeding, careful feeding, and strict environmental control resulted in the 2005 creation of the Ross 308 broiler. Arguably more Frankenstein than fowl, the breed grows to be nearly 400 percent larger than an equivalent 1957 breed. If an infant grew at the same rate as the Ross 308, one academic journal concluded, a baby would weigh an elephantine 660 pounds at two months.
As breast size inflated in ways comparable only to a blow-up sumo wrestler costume, the price of poultry deflated proportionately, with the cost of chicken rising at about 50 percent the rate of other consumer goods from 1960 to 2004. Chicken’s relative cheapness coincided with further advances in breeding to elevate it to the leading protein consumed in the United States. Commercial poultry farms in the country now produce almost nine billion broilers a year, exporting about 19 percent of them to destinations as far apart as Mexico and Hong Kong.
With the chicken industry’s sales hitting $90 billion, the average annual consumption of chicken bettered that of pork in 1985, and beef in 1992. A host of culinary innovations, from Chicken McNuggets and Buffalo wings to chicken tenders and popcorn chicken, have made fowl the gustatory choice for consumers. Annual consumption of chicken grew from twenty-eight pounds per person in 1960 to more than ninety-two pounds per person today, nearly 75 percent more than its meaty nemesis, beef.
The mechanical hen itself enjoyed a longer life and kindlier fate than its organic kin. After returning home from London, the exhibit was sent on a tour of state fairs, eventually ending up at the top of the world in the U.S. government’s exhibit at the Jeshyn International Fair in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1956 where the competition, instead of cows, was communists.