Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (32 page)

The fowl is now so central to our urban lives that price hikes and supply problems can quickly transform into ominous political threats. Just as members of the British Parliament worried in the 1840s that the potato blight could spark revolution, so do politicians in developing nations today fear the wrath of a populace denied a chicken in every pot. Saudi Arabian leaders now grant generous government subsidies for imported grain to feed Saudi chickens in a move designed to keep prices low and a potentially restless population happy.

Like Londoners in the nineteenth century and New Yorkers in the twentieth, Africans, Asians, and South Americans crowding into twenty-first-century megacities like Lagos, Manila, and São Paolo are quickly developing an insatiable appetite for the bird, on a scale
unimaginable in Steele's day. To feed this demand, companies are copying the Tyson approach of controlling every aspect of the supply chain. This interlocking system of large companies that breed, hatch, raise, slaughter, and market chicken involves far more than just shipments of processed meat. Chicken feed is now a misnomer, since it is a multibillion-dollar international business, as is chicken medicine and the equipment needed to house, water, feed, and process the bird.

Driving down Delmarva's highways and back roads, I don't see a single chicken. The situation would have been unthinkable in Steele's time, despite the fact that only a fraction of the fowl existed then compared with today. As chickens have become more numerous, they paradoxically have become less visible. Vast new metropolises of fowl now mirror our growing megacities. These shadow cities across Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Europe are typically set outside our urban world in the increasingly empty countryside like that of Delmarva.

Just like human municipalities, the complexes require electricity, water, food, and sewage systems, as well as road, rail, ship, and air connections to maintain and move millions of inhabitants. Many American plants, such as those in Delmarva, slaughter and process a million broilers a week. The expanded Fakieh Poultry Farms in Saudi Arabia will soon be producing 1 million broiler chickens and 3 million eggs
a day
. Privately owned, these poultry polities are largely off-limits to outsiders, and regulations vary widely from country to country. It is now possible to live an urban life eating chicken meat and eggs daily and never see an egg laid, witness a single slaughter, or even glimpse a live bird.

The abrupt segregation of the two species is almost as remarkable as the chicken's population explosion. “The attitude of a gentleman towards animals is this,” said the Chinese sage Mencius some twenty-­five hundred years ago. “Once having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die, and once having heard their cry, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. This is why the gentleman keeps his distance from the kitchen.” Such distance was long a luxury available only to the rich. In his
Remembrance of Things Past
, Marcel Proust recalls the cook's
ability to make the flesh of a roast chicken “so unctuous and so tender” with a skin “gold-embroidered like a chasuble.” Yet one day he spies her savagely killing a bird in the courtyard while crying, “Filthy creature! Filthy creature!” He would have insisted on her immediate dismissal, except that he could not bear to lose the sumptuous meal she made with the slaughtered animal. “And, as it happened, everyone else had to make the same cowardly reckoning.”

Long after World War II, the slaughtered and plucked bird typically came into American kitchens with head, feet, and guts intact—what is still called a New York dressed chicken. That changed in the late 1960s, when Holly Farms introduced packaged pieces. Even those recognizable parts—breast, wings, and thighs—have since proliferated into hundreds of products that bear no obvious resemblance to chicken anatomy, like the Chicken McNugget.

While we eat far more chicken than we did in Steele's time, we know it far less. Traits long admired by humans, such as courage and devotion to family, no longer are modeled by the bird. When we get our hackles up or feel henpecked, there is no visceral connection to the cockpit or barnyard. While pigs and cows are turned into pork and beef,
chicken
today is more likely to refer to meat than an animal. The bird has vanished from our sight even as it proliferated. When it lands in our shopping basket or on our plate, we can only trust that it was humanely handled, safely processed, and carefully inspected.

Driving south from Dover into Sussex County, I rendezvous with Bill Brown, an extension agent for the University of Delaware, at the site of the first Chicken of Tomorrow contest, in 1948, near the little town of Georgetown. He's agreed with only a couple of hours' notice to give me a brief tour of a miniature broiler house at this rural research station set amid flat fields. Brown, a stocky man with a goatee, rummages through his trunk and hands me a white hazmat-style suit. Disease rather than predators is the primary threat to today's meat birds, since they are concentrated in large numbers and harvested before their immune systems can fully develop. What I carry on my shoes could kill them all. Once we are dressed, he leads me through
a metal door and into an open warehouse. “It's a small flock,” he says apologetically. “Maybe twenty-four hundred birds.” He's not being facetious. At home, Brown and his wife raise two hundred thousand chickens in a half-dozen houses under contract with Perdue. Even that is considered a modest number today.

A warm and humid wave of air swiftly replaces the October chill amid the high-pitched peeping of day-old chicks. Bright overhead lights reveal long pipes punctuated by bright red feed and water stations crowded with the fuzzy yellow chicks. The space seems roomy now, Brown says, but it will quickly fill up as the chicks quadruple their weight in the first week. In less than two months, they will head to a processing plant, still three months shy of sexual maturity. As Brown steps gently forward, the animals seem unafraid. He scoops one up and holds it in his palm as he explains that these birds are part of an experiment to gather data on the ammonia fumes that already make my eyes smart. The noxious gas is a byproduct of chick urine, and poultry scientists want to find better ways to neutralize its effects by altering the feed or by precipitating it out of the air. “You get used to it,” he says as I blink furiously.

We step outside and I take a grateful lungful of clean air in the sudden quiet. Brown tells me that the toughest problem is coping with the chicks' waste after they are sent to slaughter and the sheds are cleaned. The 600 million chickens raised on Delmarva produce more waste than Los Angeles. The manure is rich in phosphorus and potassium and more than twice as effective as commercial fertilizer, well suited for nutrient-poor fields. The manure's high level of phosphorus was thought by some researchers to bind soundly with alum, lime, and other substances, preventing damaging runoff into streams and rivers. But now soil scientists say that the water table can absorb and move phosphorus in ways that are still poorly understood. And with plant expansions, there is too much manure and too few fields on the peninsula to cope with the mounting waste. Watermen fear it is killing their crabs and fish. Moving it is expensive; Perdue experimented with turning manure into pellets that could then be shipped to the Midwest but abandoned the effort as it was too costly, while
­attempts to turn the waste into gas have yet to bear fruit. The confusing county and state laws make a solution to the growing problem both politically unlikely and technically elusive.

Continuing south, I pass through Maryland and into the narrowing strip that is Virginia's Eastern Shore, stopping for a lunch of soft-shell crab just outside Temperanceville, a village of less than four hundred people where no whiskey has been openly sold since 1824. A few miles on, on the right side of the highway, a low-slung building as long as a football field fronts a wide manicured lawn. This is part of a Tyson plant employing more than a thousand workers to slaughter and package a million chickens each week. Environmentalists singled out this plant as the most polluting poultry facility during the 1990s amid a series of devastating fish kills in Chesapeake Bay. Without permission to visit, I drive on for another forty miles, almost to the tip of Delmarva, pass a massive Perdue facility, exit the highway, pass rusting trailers with yards full of children's toys, and rumble down the grassy lane of a 1920s colonial-­revival house that is the headquarters of United Poultry Concerns.

Though invited, I am apprehensive. When I first contacted Karen Davis, the founder and sole full-time employee of the animal-rights organization, she shot back a curt email response, calling a magazine article I did on the bird “despicable.” What I needed, she wrote, was “a whole different perspective, spirit, and attitude toward chickens.” But she would make time to meet me. I swallow my irritation and knock on her door. Instead of encountering an angry crusader, however, I meet a thin, smiling woman with a thick mop of black hair. On her matching black Windbreaker is a button that says, “Stick up for Chickens.”

The lecture I expect doesn't come. Instead she suggests that I meet her birds, as a parent might proudly offer to show off her young children. I follow her through the living room and kitchen—every horizontal and vertical space taken up with chicken knickknacks, prints, and posters—onto a porch, and into the backyard. There are tall cages amid a large fenced yard bordered by shade trees. She introduces me to Ms. Hendy, Pace, Petunia, Taffy, Buffy, and Biscuit, and proffers the
story of each—this one rescued from the Perdue plant, another from a lab in Norfolk, yet another from a raid on a Mississippi cockfighting ring—then brandishes a rake to protect me from the hot-tempered rooster Bisquick. Some are left anonymously on her doorstep. Since 1998, when she moved here from the Washington suburbs, her modest two-acre sanctuary has been an island for misfit poultry.

After the numbing uniformity inside the Delaware broiler shed, the individuality of each of Davis's birds is startling and unnerving. Beside the spry and lean gamecock, the rescued factory chicken with its pumped-up breast and spindly legs looks grotesque. ­Commercial laying hens typically have the tips of their beaks seared off to prevent them from injuring their neighbors, and I spot one pecking pathetically in the grass, apparently unable to spear a worm with its defective bill. An aging broiler saved from the slaughterhouse sits in the corner of a cage, too heavy and lame to walk. “The industry has created chickens that have chronic pain in order to get birds that grow at the far outer limits of what is biologically possible,” writes Temple ­Grandin, a Colorado animal scientist who has pioneered animal-­welfare systems. Davis's backyard is a stark lesson in the grim realities of the modern chicken.

Davis knows from long experience as an activist that her folksy tour is far more effective than any lecture. The litany of horrors and illusions is well documented in peer-reviewed scientific journals, animal-rights periodicals, and books. Debeaking, even if it is not botched, is a painful procedure typically accomplished with a heated blade that deprives a bird of its primary sense organ. A significant percentage of birds that are not killed by the knife end up scalded to death in hot vats. Most U.S. free-range and organic chickens, like their industrial cousins, never see the sun, eat a worm, choose a mate, or raise a chick. And, I'm surprised to find, poultry grown for food is exempted from any and all U.S. government rules regulating animal welfare. “Is it any wonder that many people regard chickens as some sort of weird chimerical concoction comprising a vegetable and a machine?” asks Davis. Seeing the damaged survivors of the system brings home the extent of the problem.

We mount the porch steps, and Davis points out an area reserved for aging birds, a sort of poultry rest home. In her living room full of chicken tchotchkes, she tells me that she didn't grow up around the birds, though she still broods over a dark memory of a neighbor killing a fowl during her childhood in Altoona, Pennsylvania, just east of the farm where Roenigk grew up. Drawn to the animal-rights movement in the 1980s, Davis quickly became enchanted with chickens. “Guinea fowl aren't going to sit with you or perch on your shoulder, but chickens can be very affectionate,” she tells me. “They are cheerful, friendly, and like to be with you. They look you in the eye, and one of their charms is that they also live an autonomous social life—they aren't waiting for you to release them from boredom. And,” she adds with a laugh, “they have the most balletic way of tripping through the grass.”

Though her poetic description is sentimental—Bisquick clearly would like a piece of me—it is as succinct an explanation for the chicken's close relationship with humans as any I've heard. She owns a sweatshirt that says, “I dream of a society where a chicken can cross the road without its motives being questioned.”

Davis is an unapologetic take-no-prisoners vegan, who believes that no human needs to eat an animal or even an egg. “We can get all the protein we need from plants. We can turn them into chickenlike flavors and textures. We have all this ingenuity, and we pride ourselves on what we can do. There is no need to kill chickens.” Nearing seventy, though looking much younger, she pushes legislation, keeps up on the scientific literature, posts outraged blogs, and protests every year at the Delmarva Chicken Festival and at the Brooklyn
kapparot
rituals on Yom Kippur eve.

She is realistic enough to acknowledge that her efforts will fail. “Chickens are doomed,” she says without hesitation. “It's the doom of proliferation, not extinction. I think it's a worse doom than extinction. I think chickens are in hell and they are not going to get out. They already are in hell and there are just going to be more of them. As long as people want billions of eggs and millions of pounds of flesh, how can all these animal products be delivered to the millions? There will be
crowding and cruelty—it is just built into the situation. You can't get away from it.” She pauses again. “And we are ingesting their misery.”