Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (33 page)

It is a haunting refrain that predates the Australian philosopher Peter Singer's 1975
Animal Liberation,
which helped set the modern animal-rights movement in motion. Her words echo back to the ancient mathematician and mystic Pythagoras, who is said to have been an ethical vegetarian as the first chickens arrived on Greek shores. Devout Jains, Hindus, and Buddhists for millennia have avoided meat, given their belief that animals share soul material with humans. “No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being,” the first-century AD Greek essayist Plutarch wrote about farm animals. “The eating of flesh is not only physically against nature, but it also makes us spiritually coarse . . . it is perfectly evident that it is not for nourishment or need or necessity.”

More recently, the writer J. M. Coetzee warned that “we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.” Miserable and tortured animals will not in the long run make for a happier humanity and a better world. Most of us would be appalled, as Plutarch was, at the ancient practice of thrusting red-hot iron pikes into the throats of live pigs in the belief that it would make the flesh tenderer. What goes on in the chicken cities of our own century, though still largely shielded from public scrutiny, may someday be seen by a majority of humanity in a similar light.

Davis's stance is by her own admission impractical, her actions ineffectual, and her views wildly anthropomorphic. Her tenacity as a Don Quixote of poultry, tilting at Tyson and Perdue in their very backyard while caring for the fowl flotsam that comes her way, is undeniable, and strikes me as worthy of attention and respect. As I drive away in the autumn dusk, uncomfortably pondering my own cowardly reckoning as a chicken eater, she's heading for the backyard to shoo her flock into their cages for the night.

American-style factory farms are spreading inexorably around the globe, but there are a few pockets of stubborn resistance. Shoppers in some countries are still willing to pass up less expensive imported birds in favor of the traditional varieties that they find much tastier. And the chicken still performs functions that don't require high-tech animal engineering. When a Western aid organization introduced the Rhode Island Red to rural Mali in sub-Saharan Africa, it was literally a flop. Villagers seeking a prophetic sign watch to see if a dying chicken falls to the right or left. The new birds proved useless for divination, since they fell forward on their massive breasts.

In the bastion of Bresse, in eastern France, chickens exert a nearly mythic hold that the industrial chicken has yet to break. The Latin word for rooster and France is the same—
gallus
. Though linguists say this is a coincidence, ancient Celtic tribes in the area held the cock sacred. A rooster often accompanied their god Cissonius. The bird's high status among medieval Christians in this Catholic country and its fierce fighting abilities eventually made it the national symbol. With the exception of a brief period in Napoleonic times—the emperor was not a rooster fan—eagles were left for Hapsburgs and Germans. ­According to one account, there was “a fierce zoological debate” within Napoleon's Council of State that ended with the choice of the rooster as the government's emblem. “It's a barnyard creature!” scoffed the emperor, who nullified their decision in favor of the Roman eagle.

During the 1789 revolution, citizens carried flags emblazoned with the cock, and in 1830 it replaced the fleur-de-lis as the national emblem. France's official seal is Liberty sitting by a ship's tiller decorated with a proud rooster. The bird appears on coins and on war memorials, surmounts the gate of the presidential Élysée Palace in Paris, and even sits atop the golden pen set on the president's desk.

One of the perks of that high office is a gift of four of the country's finest poultry for the ritual Christmas meal. The chickens come from Bresse, an old French province lodged between the city of Lyon to the
southwest and the Swiss border to the east. The region has long been famed for its food. “We wired to the Picassos that we were delayed,” writes Gertrude Stein's partner, Alice B. Toklas, in
The
Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
. The couple was traveling south from Paris to the Mediterranean for a summer holiday with the painter and his wife in the 1920s when they encountered the countryside and food in the foothills that led up to the Swiss Alps and stopped in the bustling market town of Bourg-en-Bresse, “renowned for its chickens of the large and thick breasts and short legs.”

That chicken is mentioned in Bourg-en-Bresse archives as early as 1591, when citizens bestowed two dozen on the local feudal lord for saving the city from invaders. When Henry IV—famous for his pledge to put a chicken in the Sunday pot of every peasant—showed up a decade later, he was delighted by the quality of the poultry. The celebrated gastronomical author Anthem Brillat-Savarin praised the Bresse chicken in 1825 as “the queen of poultry and the poultry of kings.” In 1862, a local count organized a contest to select the best-tasting chicken from among black, gray, and white varieties. The winner was a well-proportioned white bird with a bright-red comb and dark-blue legs, its colors the colors of France. Thanks to railroads, the Bresse chicken soon was a favorite dish among the elite from Paris to St. Petersburg. Along with regular birds, the ­farmers specialized in the ancient and difficult art of castrating young roosters to make tender capons and sterilizing young hens called poulardes.

The fowl drew the attention of Darwin's collaborator William Tegetmeier, who at first wasn't impressed by what looked like an ordinary European bird, inferior in size to the big new Asian varieties. But a French colleague explained to him in 1867 that the secret to their superb taste was “the skill and the habits handed down from one generation to another among the farmers of La Bresse.” The special property of the Bresse soil; a careful regimen of local corn, wheat, and whey; and an unusual method of slaughter were the key. Flocks were kept small to avoid disease, the birds were placed in cages for the last couple of weeks of their lives to fatten them up, and a knife driven quickly into their palate bled them efficiently.

In the era of hen fever, Bresse farmers crossed Asian chickens like the Cochin with their smaller birds, and the result was a larger but coarser-tasting chicken. Rather than sacrifice taste for quantity—a choice capon in Tegetmeier's day might sell for the equivalent of a hundred dollars today—they passed the next century and a half ­quietly sticking to their old ways and traditional breed. Every December, four contests, grandly called the Les Glorieuses de Bresse, are held across the region to choose the finest chickens, which arrive at the Élysée ­Palace by Christmas Eve with the kind of pomp that Americans ­reserve for the lighting of the tree at New York's Rockefeller Center.

Today, the Bresse chicken is in the august company of the sparkling wine called Champagne and the rich cheese called Roquefort. Granted an
appellation d'origine contrôlée
,
the bird is now licensed to ensure that it was made in the region under exacting and traditional standards. This required an act by the French National Assembly in 1957. It is the first and only animal to receive such a designation, apart from the salt-marsh lamb of the Somme that in 2006 was also granted a comparable license. When I sit down at the kitchen table of Pascal Chanel, a poultry farmer who lives just outside Bourg-en-Bresse, I'm astonished to hear him describe methods virtually identical to those laid out by Tegetmeier's French informant at a time when Americans were still recovering from the trauma of the Civil War.

Chanel has won the Glorieuses three times, and he has the blue vase traditionally sent in thanks by the president—then Jacques ­Chirac—prominently displayed among other trophies and awards in a cabinet by the back door that leads to the farmyard. Clean shaven, with thinning hair and a Gallic nose, Chanel explains that his flock must come from the only Bresse chicken hatchery, and that no flock can exceed five hundred in number. After their first month, each chicken must have at least thirty square feet of open field to wander for four months. They can never be fed genetically modified grain and subsist on a carefully calculated diet of local corn, wheat, and skimmed milk. Protein is limited so that the birds will find their own amid the grassy fields on his thirty-acre farm, where he also grows their feed. “I prefer to see my poultry eat insects and worms than antibiotics,” he says.
Drugs can be administered to sick birds, but this requires a written report by a veterinarian and subsequent government approval.

We leave the kitchen, warmed by a roaring fireplace, and step into a cold November drizzle. At first, I'm not sure what I'm seeing. Then I realize that the green field ahead is spotted not with faraway sheep but with nearby chickens. In all my travels, I've never seen a large flock feeding in an open field. “The main problem is predators,” he says, as we pass the feathers and bones of a recent kill. One in five succumbs to foxes and hawks. But the most dangerous predators are human. Since a Bresse chicken can cost $30 per pound, and a capon might fetch a total of $275, theft is an ever-present threat.

In the final couple of weeks, the birds are herded into cages for fattening. “If they are left outside the meat is too tough,” Chanel explains as I follow him to a small wooden shed. Eighty birds are in wooden cages called
épinettes
. They are like battery cages, except their wooden frames and slats give them a more rustic air. There is no burning smell of ammonia in the well-ventilated shed. Each cage holds about four chickens—there's room for each bird to stand and move around—and they poke their heads out occasionally to peck at the mash and cast a glance our way. “It's the happy time,” he says through my translator, a Lyon woman in heels. I look at her, baffled. She smiles, explaining as if to a child that the birds get to rest, relax, and eat in their final ten days to two weeks. She describes the
épinettes
as a sort of spa, with dim lighting and unlimited food. One local website asserts in a charming translation that the chickens in
épinettes
“love the attention attended them with their regular meals of whey-rich porridge.”

In the next wooden shed are several dozen capons. Chanel motions for me to be silent. I look through the door. They are huge, nearly twice the size of the others, and lack combs, though they also lack the misshapen breasts and legs of the American broilers I've seen. While outside, each must have sixty square feet of meadow. In the
épinette
, each has its own cage. When Chanel enters, there are some quiet clucks, but as soon as I duck my head into the room, they panic and flap their wings as one, and I quickly retreat. Without their gonads, the farmer says, they don't crow and lack the natural
fierceness of roosters. Veterinarians now perform castrations, and Chanel estimates that only one in a hundred doesn't survive the operation. These nine-month-old birds are the most prized for a French Christmas dinner. After slaughter they are hand-plucked, washed, and laboriously sewn into linen corsets. This spreads the fat around the meat and limits air exposure to ensure preservation. This was essential in the days when it took two weeks to reach the Paris market, and it remains the common way to present the bird.

As we trudge back across the muddy driveway, I overhear my translator making what seem to be arrangements to come by in December to purchase a capon. “It is much cheaper to get it from him than to buy it in Lyon,” she tells me. “I'll bring my kids and let them see the farm.” Unlike an American grower, Chanel is a truly independent operator who can choose his customers but who also assumes the full financial risk. He says that he makes a decent living raising four thousand birds annually, so long as he doesn't count the hours. Summers are hard, since the chickens don't go to bed until dark comes around after 10 p.m. Along with caring for the birds, he also raises all their feed, gesturing at the bulging corncribs. The
appellation
requires careful record keeping and frequent government inspections. The scattered sheds required don't lend themselves to automation, and he is worried that the younger generation is losing interest in the hard work required to maintain the flocks. “It's like raising children,” he says with a rueful smile. I ask him about the bus sitting beside the barn. It is part of his supplemental income. “I've been a school bus driver for twenty-five years,” he explains.

About 250 farms raise 1.2 million Bresse chicken a year, only a little more than the number processed in a single week by the Tyson plant in Temperanceville. Just one in three hundred French chickens is a Bresse, and each is given a distinctive label and a metal ring around one leg. Given the high cost to produce the birds, the Bresse is reserved primarily for upscale restaurants and butchers. A 2006 avian influenza scare forced anguished farmers to lock up their birds, and the fate of the French institution was for a time in question. “The problem is to find enough producers,” says Georges Blanc, chair of the Bresse poul
try trade committee. Blanc—gastronomy magazines tend to attach “legendary” to his name—is a famous chef with a three-star restaurant and upscale spa in the village of Vonnas outside Bourg-en-Bresse.