Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (31 page)

As chickens were concentrated in huge numbers, disease could sweep through and wipe out whole flocks, while feed prices could fluctuate wildly. Only the largest operations survived and thrived, and Tyson earned a reputation as a smart and hard-nosed entrepreneur apt to fly into rages. He was not sentimental about poultry. “Just keep it simple,” he said. “Kill the chickens, sell 'em, and make some money.” Tyson's son Don studied agricultural nutrition at the University of Arkansas before joining the company as general manager in 1952. The father-and-son team drew on the latest science in feed, genetics, and management to expand their operations throughout the 1950s. Vitamins, vaccines, and antibiotics became essential elements of success. The fact that the product was chicken was almost incidental. “We're not committed to the broiler business as such,” Don later told one interviewer. “We're committed to so many dollars invested on dollars returned on that investment.”

The Tysons benefited from the Chicken of Tomorrow, which supplanted the traditional breeding culture engendered by hen fever a century before. Older varieties began to vanish. Just as auto manufac
turers required uniform parts, these new industrialists wanted a bird that matured quickly using as little feed and with as little variation as possible. So the new generation of scientific breeders focused on creating hybrids with a biological lock that ensured this uniformity. This approach assured a high-yielding, predictable product, but it also meant that growers could not breed their birds to produce the same uniform results. Like hybrid corn strains, farmers had to buy the next generation from the companies controlling the genetic traits. Breeding companies kept these traits under lock and key, as classified as nuclear weapons or Colonel Sanders's famous Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe.

A few livestock experts expressed alarm at the pace of change. “Modern science . . . threatens to become dogma,” warned one in 1960. “The scientist might well be advised to go occasionally to the farmyard to learn rather than teach, or, what is far less excusable, to preach.” The new approach to poultry, he added, was being applied “too uncritically and with too great haste.” By then, more than 70 percent of the business was in the South.

The thriving poultry industry brought jobs to some of the country's poorest regions, from Arkansas's Ozarks to the hills of north Georgia. Friends in Washington ensured minimal federal oversight. Arkansas senator William Fulbright became the industry's vocal supporter in Congress. When a bill to tighten inspections was under consideration, Don Tyson wrote a brief note to Fulbright. “Bill, this would hurt the chicken business.” The proposed legislation swiftly died. By 1960, 95 percent of Arkansas growers were under contract with major corporations like Tyson. While they muttered about their status as modern-day sharecroppers, public complaints could lead to cancellation of those contracts and immediate bankruptcy. Attempts by growers and poultry plant workers to organize never went very far in the Midwest or South.

For the first time in American history, chicken was cheaper than beef or pork and available neatly packaged according to cut. Picking out pin feathers, removing the guts, and chopping the feet off chickens had long been a laborious chore for housewives in cities as well as in the country. Now they did not have to buy an entire chicken, which
made the bird increasingly popular for meals beyond just an elaborate Sunday dinner. The chicken proved ideal for America's postwar boom, since it could be easily packaged. “It soon became obvious that the meat-type chicken and modern-day supermarkets were meant for each other,” one poultry expert observed. Meanwhile, as people became more conscious of the dangers of fat in red meat, the low-fat bird became a more appealing choice.

Tyson's $10 million in net sales in 1960 topped $60 million by the end of that decade, reflecting that shift in consumer tastes. The actual number of broiler chickens in the United States at any one time remained remarkably stable after the start of World War II. But each bird weighed twice as much and required half the feed and half the time to mature. And the number of chicken farms plummeted from more than 5 million to half a million by 1970.

Falling prices and thin profit margins, however, left the industry scrambling to come up with ever-new ways to sell their prosaic product, from frozen dinners to precooked army rations. Hungry markets opened up overseas, and by 1960 more than 100 million pounds of U.S. chicken were shipped annually to West Germany alone. Tyson, like other major poultry operations, began to spread its product as well as its plants and way of doing business to Mexico, Europe, Asia, and South America. Upstart businessmen like Frank Perdue on the Delmarva Peninsula pioneered advertising campaigns that branded chickens, even though broilers across the country are nearly ­identical—a marketing ploy that the beef industry has yet to copy successfully.

Perdue lay to rest any qualms about the masculine nature of his business that for so long was disdained as women's work. “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” he famously told television audiences in the 1970s, a century after the industry made its first halting steps. It also still takes women and minorities behind the scenes. More than half of the nation's 250,000 poultry workers are women, 50 percent are Latino, and an estimated one in five is an illegal immigrant. It is often ugly, low-paid, and dangerous work, as is well documented in newspaper articles, government reports, and books
by writers who worked undercover in poultry plants. But it makes cheap chicken widely available for consumers, including those who wait for sales on boneless breasts to stock their freezers.

Fifty years after the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, chicken overtook beef as the meat of choice among Americans. The 1980s introduction of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets and other highly processed poultry—tenders, patties, hot dogs—helped push the bird over the top. Food scientists discovered that the meat, like the bird of old, was infinitely versatile, absorbing flavors more readily than pork or beef and perfectly suited for fast food. By 2001, the average American ate more than eighty pounds of chicken a year, quadruple the 1950 amount.

The figure now is close to one hundred pounds. In 2012, Tyson recorded a third of a trillion dollars in sales, and its weekly production topped 41 million chickens in sixty plants. The broiler business is booming in the United States and abroad. The vertical integration model pioneered by Tyson has spread to rapidly urbanizing South America, India, and China, and now the cattle and pork industries are rushing to copy the approach. Once ignored and despised by many in the farm sector, poultry is now an international multibillion-dollar complex that is setting the pace for the world's agribusiness.

In Fayetteville, just off the Fulbright Expressway, a historical marker stands on the campus of the University of Arkansas near the site of the Chicken of Tomorrow's final contest. The sign commemorates the “entrepreneurs who built Arkansas' poultry industry into a major force in the world economy.” The marker near Razorback Stadium stands on Maple Street at the entrance of the John W. Tyson Building, an impressive modern complex of a hundred laboratories, a ten-thousand-square-foot pilot processing plant, a host of classrooms, and, as its brochure notes, “tasting booths for sensory evaluation.” Funded by the federal government, poultry companies, and a state bond approved by public referendum, it is modern and clean, a $20 million concrete-and-steel monument to the success of science and industry. There's not a live chicken in sight.

11.

Gallus Archipelago

Wilhelm had a queer feeling about the chicken industry, that it was sinister. On the road, he frequently passed chicken farms. Those big, rambling, wooden buildings out in the neglected fields; they were like prisons. The lights burned all night in them to cheat the poor hens into laying. Then the slaughter. Pile all the coops of the slaughtered on end, and in one week they'd go higher than Mount Everest or Mount Serenity. The blood filling the Gulf of Mexico. The chicken shit, acid, burning the earth.

—Saul Bellow,
Seize the Day

T
he modern chicken has a model number rather than a name. There is the Ross 308, the Hubbard Flex, and the Cobb 500. This last is touted by its maker as “the world's most efficient broiler” with “the lowest feed conversion, best growth rate and an ability to thrive on low density, less costly nutrition.” As a result, this bird offers “the competitive advantage of the lowest cost per kilogram or pound of live-weight produced for the growing customer base worldwide.”

Like cars, new models are periodically introduced. The Cobb 700 made its debut in 2007 as a slightly souped-up version of the 500. It is
designed for a fast-growing South American market that craves the highest yield for the lowest possible price. In 2010, as the backyard chicken craze took hold, there was the CobbSasso 150, “ideally suited to traditional, free-range, and organic farming.” All new models are carefully engineered to suit their particular market.

The world looks to the United States for the latest chicken as it used to await the arrival of next year's Chevy or Oldsmobile. Three major breeding companies control the stock of more than 80 percent of broiler chickens, and two are American. The Cobb 700, for example, is the product of the Tyson-owned Cobb-Vantress. Based in Arkansas like its parent company, it has subsidiaries around the world but began in 1916 as a small New England operation that later absorbed the line of birds created by Vantress for the Chicken of Tomorrow contest.

More than three hundred U.S. breeder hatcheries produced more than 9 billion broiler chicks in 2010. The market weight of broilers has been edging up for decades, while death rates and the amount of feed required have dropped. In 1950, before the Chicken of Tomorrow took hold, a broiler required an average of seventy days to reach the average weight of 3.1 pounds, with three pounds of feed needed per pound of bird. In 2010, only forty-seven days were needed to make a 5.7-pound bird that needed less than two pounds of feed. This revolution was not solely due to breeding. Chickens, particularly those crowded together, are subject to a legion of diseases. New vaccines based on intensive research into chicken illness were the key to reducing mortality rates in this same sixty-year period by half, to 4 percent. Improved nutrition, particularly the addition of key vitamins to feed, was the third factor in this transformation of yesterday's bird into the chicken of today.

No other livestock program in history has come close to matching that steady increase in productivity and decrease in feed costs. The result is a testament to the bird's living organic clay that so impressed William Beebe a century ago. Yet the overriding goal of producing maximum meat with minimum feed has come at costs that are not apparent to consumers. During the 1990s, for example, strains of rapist roosters spread through the facilities that breed broilers. Ag
gressive males, either unable to understand the usual courtship dance or incapable of mating because of their huge breasts, took out their fury on hens, sometimes killing them in the process.

Leg and hip ailments brought on by inadequate bone structure hinder health in an animal designed to put on meat so fast the developing skeleton can't keep up. Some broilers can't walk to their water and feed stations, and there are signs that large numbers are in chronic pain. One study showed that broilers learned to self-­administer a pain reliever by choosing food containing the drug over food that lacked it. And there is always room for a new idea. An Israeli team recently developed a featherless chicken to reduce processing costs, using a mutant strain bred in California. Images of the bald bird sparked outrage around the world. Other scientists pointed out that a chicken without feathers is an impractical option, since it could injure its partner during mating, be more vulnerable to skin diseases, and have increased sensitivity to temperature fluctuations.

Academic researchers such as Ian Duncan at Canada's University of Guelph blame broiler genetic problems on the industry's fixation with developing birds with ever-bigger breasts. The results of modern selection have maximized profit and kept consumer costs low, but at the expense of individual birds. Even industry representatives say that they may be reaching the limits to reducing feed while increasing weight productivity in chickens.

What the French call with Gallic candor the industrial chicken is the end point of the breeding frenzy that began with The Fancy. The bird that once delighted or awed or healed today raises uncomfortable questions about who we are, what we eat, and how we should care for and relate to animals. You don't have to be a vegan to wonder if it is right to put another entire species in perpetual pain in order to satisfy a craving for chicken salad and deviled eggs. As a longtime meat eater, I found myself wishing to avoid books on my shelf with disturbing and depressing titles like
Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs
;
Their Fate Is Our Fate;
or
Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food
.

Finally I took a road trip that began in Washington, D.C., to visit the National Chicken Council and explore the territory of the modern
industrial bird. The council has a name with a serious giggle factor, suggesting a
New Yorker
cartoon with cigar-chomping fowl gathered around a boardroom table. The hushed offices high in a glass-and-steel building a few blocks from the White House are staid and resolutely chickenless. The conference room has little stuffed cows sporting slogans urging visitors to eat more chicken, part of a successful campaign by the fast-food company Chick-fil-A to convert beef lovers.

Founded in 1954 by broiler industry magnates—all white, male, and mostly Southern—the council represents 95 percent of the U.S. companies involved in chicken meat production. This sprawling industry employs three hundred thousand workers who annually turn 9 billion birds into 37 billion pounds of chicken that consumers around the world will spend $70 billion to consume. Another two hundred thousand people on thirty thousand farms and in thousands of trucks raise and transport the product. The American broiler industry is the largest in the world and only recently took second place to Brazil as the biggest exporter. These are meat makers with economic and political muscle that surpass that of twentieth-century cattle ranchers.

With heavyweight members like Tyson Foods, Pilgrim's Pride, and Perdue Farms, which are among the biggest food producers on the planet, the council has the ear of the capital's power brokers. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware and Johnny Isakson of Georgia—­respectively a Democrat and a Republican in major chicken-­producing states—recently formed a Senate Chicken Caucus to match one launched in the House of Representatives two years earlier that now boasts fifty members. The goal, Coons told council members who met in a luxury hotel ballroom near the National Mall, is to educate other senators about the contributions and concerns of U.S. chicken producers, Washington-speak for lobbying on behalf of business. “As it does in the House,” council president Mike Brown helpfully explained, “the Senate caucus will give a united voice to chicken producers as we navigate the many issues of importance to our industry in the months ahead.” Those issues are legion, from labor disputes to changes in federal inspection procedures to ethanol production that affects the price of chicken feed.

The go-to guy on many of the thorny issues confronting the chicken business is Bill Roenigk. He arrived in 1974 at the council during the pre–Chicken McNugget era when no chicken wings were served in bars and Americans still preferred beef to the bird. He is now a consultant but still very involved in the business. Despite his neat suit, bright tie, and shiny black shoes, Roenigk can't hide a grizzled look under bushy eyebrows when he joins me in the council's conference room. He grew up on a farm outside Pittsburgh. “Get up and help,” his father told him one morning when he was ten. Along with corn and squash, they raised pigs and cows, and he did chores every morning before leaving for school, a whiff of manure trailing him in the halls. “I was snobbish about the big animals,” he tells me. “I didn't want to piddle with little chickens.”

Roenigk wanted to see the world, and he landed a job at the Foreign Agricultural Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture with the hope of doing so. But his wife balked at a posting in Africa, and he found his way, in classic Washington fashion, from regulator to regulated. He helped expedite the sale of chicken legs to Russia in the early 1990s, when starvation stalked that country, and now backs the controversial idea of shipping American chicken carcasses to China, where they would be cooked, repackaged, and sent back for sale to U.S. consumers (“It's a good way to get the door open to the China market”).

Like any experienced lobbyist, Roenigk is too self-assured and savvy to find himself on the defensive while discussing controversial issues. This is a top-down and tight-knit industry that has repeatedly and successfully halted efforts by the government to tighten its labor and inspection practices. It has little to fear from the carping of critics. Leaning back in his chair at the conference table, he explains affably that antibiotic use in poultry poses no threat to human health, that ventilation systems ensure quality air for broilers, and that American methods of slaughter are more humane than those used in Europe.

Yet even he acknowledges that public worries about food contamination and chicken welfare are inexorably on the rise in the United States and around the world. A delegation of worried ­Japanese
­poultry-industry officials recently visited to discuss how to cope with an increasingly outspoken animal-rights community there. Just a week earlier, a salmonella outbreak at a California plant made national headlines and sent jitters through the industry. Not long after my visit, the Federal Drug Administration banned two of three arsenic compounds used in chicken feed to improve feed digestion and then limited antibiotic use in livestock that is designed to boost productivity rather than just maintain health.

Despite political influence, the chicken business now finds itself under an increasingly relentless spotlight. It's not the quiet and behind-the-scenes position of the past, and the industry is not as adaptable as the chicken. “We must become much more transparent and show people what is going on,” Roenigk says, and I believe that he is sincere. The National Chicken Council, however, cannot find a company willing to let me visit any of their dozens of plants on the Eastern Shore, which lies just across the Chesapeake Bay from Washington, though I made my request weeks in advance.

The next morning, a bright fall day, I cross the Bay Bridge, which begins at Annapolis and leads to Delmarva. One out of every fifteen American chickens lives and dies on this 170-mile-long strip of land that bulges in Delaware, tapers into Maryland, and then tails off in Virginia, coming to a point at Cape Charles, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the bay.

Though surrounded by major urban centers—to the north are Wilmington and Philadelphia, to the west are Washington and Baltimore, and to the south are Norfolk and Virginia Beach—the region of watermen and farmers remains stubbornly rural, poor, and conservative. For three-quarters of a century, the backbone of its struggling economy has been poultry. Hundreds of long broiler sheds and a dozen massive slaughterhouses owned by five companies dot the flat and swampy countryside. Every week, they process 12 million birds in a region that has barely half a million residents.

My first stop is on the drab outskirts of Dover. There, inside the
Delaware Agricultural Museum and Village, a cutout of Celia Steele stands behind chicken wire in front of a rough wooden building no bigger than a one-car garage. She is not quite middle-aged, and has full lips, a fleshy nose, and a Victorian-era blouse cinched at the sleeves. Steele's right hand reaches for something, her eyes dark and intelligent. In front of the life-sized cardboard black-and-white cutout is a little plastic sign declaring her a Sussex County poultry pioneer. It is the most modest of memorials.

Yet what began in the housewife's backyard in the little coastal town of Ocean View, fifty miles to the southeast, in fact dramatically altered the fate of two species. Steele's broiler business laid the foundation for a global industry, augured a radical change in humanity's diet, and opened a Pandora's box of vexing ethical, labor, environmental, and health issues. Chickens now produce 100 million tons of meat each year, twice what was produced only two decades ago. Egg production in the same period also has doubled. Seven billion hens lay more than a trillion eggs a year. The bird now is a critical staple of our modern industrial society. This sudden and dramatic proliferation coincides with the global migration to cities, which now hold more people than rural areas for the first time in our species' history. Steele's success, after all, hinged on the nearby market of New York City, which just two years after she began her broiler business surpassed London as the world's largest city.