The publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the images:
Frontispiece: Gamborg Gallery, Moscow, Russia; figure 1, bariskarad eniz/ istock; 2, Nastasic/ istock; 3, Alf Ribeiro/ Shutterstock; 4, travelview/ istock; 5: Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; 6, zilli/ istock; 7, Africa Studio/ Shutterstock; 8, bluebird13/ istock; 9: Gloszilla Studio / shutterstock; 10, N-sky/ istock; 11, Photoagriculture/ shutterstock; 12, : ben/ Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/16693144@N00/2512789670); 13, https://www.tvc.ru/news/show/id/57784#gid=gid_57784_0&pid=142286; 14, M M (Padman aba01)/ Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicken_market_in_Xining,_Qinghai_province,_China.jpg); 15, TommL/ istock.
“Ryaba, the Hen,” Maria Uspenskaya (1987).
Introduction: Egg First
I must have been hungry,
I ate another chicken.
With my hands
and noticed at the chicken dinner,
that I had eaten a
Cold and dead chicken.
– Gunter Grass, “Saturn”1
Sometime in the early 2000s, when traveling abroad, I noticed a different taste in the fresh chicken distributed in the European Union (EU) from that delivered to the supermarket in the United States. One could say that US poultry left a bad taste in my mouth. Equally, one could say that there’s no accounting for taste. To answer my taste confusion, I commenced investigation of how meat chickens are produced and delivered to stores. That olfactory and gustatory journey resulted in this political, cultural and environmental history of the broiler – precisely, of the meat chicken, an industrial object, hatched, shipped as chicks, raised to slaughter weight in but six or seven weeks, and then dispatched on an evisceration line for processing, transport and consumption around the globe. This study shows that the modern chicken, engineered over a century for rapid growth with meatier breasts and thighs, and the modern chicken industry, deployed for speed, efficiency and profit, leaves much to be desired from animal welfare, social and environmental perspectives. The broiler not only symbolizes, but actually is, billions of tons of chickens produced in tightly packed sheds, and billions of tons of poorly handled or stored fecal matter and offal including guts, feathers, and piles – millions – of dead animals. The broiler is generally produced by poorly paid contract workers at massive factory farms. On top of all this, the broiler presents a series of new health and safety risks, including new disease vectors for bacterial diseases and Avian Influenza.
1 Over the course of less than a century, chickens were transformed from farmyard birds to factory birds that are confined to sheds for all of their short, seven-week lives.
The major production unit for the broiler, the concentrated animal feed operation (CAFO), consists across the globe of thousands of huge sheds erected in the last 10, 20, 30 years or so, with some of the sheds containing tens of thousands of fowl, each bird unable to move a more than a step, and each denied fresh air and free range – a kind of chicken gulag, where the purpose of each inmate is to devote all of its energy to the Chicken State before its eventual slaughter. The owners of CAFOs and other factory farms resist change in their chicken manufacture practices that might alter the production system in the direction of animal welfare or greater pollution control by pointing to the uncertainties and costs associated with change. Their owners claim the CAFOs need not be regulated more carefully for animal welfare because they meet national – and occasionally international – standards, they satisfy real and growing consumer demand for meat protein, and the solution to pollution and waste is being engaged head-on. Yet factory farms persist in pushing their employees, the environment and the chicken itself harder and harder, and when a factory farm is built in a pastoral, rural community, no one is happy, least of all the local residents who find their daily lives disrupted by the smell of ammonia, the sounds of trucks, and the domination of the local economy by an industry – the factory farm – that owes allegiance to owners, bosses and managers, not those residents. And, yes, European CAFO-generated chicken leaves a better taste in the mouth than the American broiler that suffers through weaker regulations in comparison to EU ones that cannot guarantee bird health or welfare.
Factory-farm chickens have spread across the world, and they are grown to maturity so quickly that it is difficult to determine even roughly what their total number is. I have tried to make sense of broilers’ numbers. Over 53 billion broiler chickens are killed annually for their meat. The broiler’s life is short and under the total control of its industrial handlers. Chickens peck out of eggshells after 21 days in an incubator. The incubator and the brooder, both nineteenth-century inventions, enabled separation of chicks from mother hens, and eggs from meat production. Being quite successful in producing eggs and freeing up human labor, the incubator and brooder accelerated the path to the complete industrialization of an animal. But, if chicks can walk at birth, then they are denied that possibility and stuffed into massive sheds. Were they only to be comfortable in their temporary homes with temperatures of 32 to 35 °C and humidity of 60 to 70 percent! But their purpose is not to move, but to eat and gain weight as quickly as possible – in the United States to, on average at 47 days, 2.6 kg, and in the European Union, at 42 days, to 2.5 kg. Since they reach slaughter weight within several weeks, they have poorly developed immune systems. Yet the overpacked sheds, filled with shit, feathers, shavings and dead birds, are breeding grounds for infections. The broilers must be fed or sprayed with antimicrobials (“vaccinated”) against Salmonella, Newcastle disease virus, infectious bronchitis, Avian Influenzas, Marek’s disease and others. The broiler is a bird, but it is also an industrial object, an output made of energy, chemical, and water input in carefully controlled environments.
The broiler is a prisoner in a technological panopticon with no prospects of hunting, pecking and roosting as chickens normally hunt, peck and roost. In the twentieth century, a kind of free-range life persists in many places, and even in urban and suburban backyard settings where they are pets, egg producers, insect swallowers, and also a source of food. In the unforgiving factory farm, various technologies of control focus the chicken’s metabolism on rapid weight gain. But free-range chickens are in the distinct minority. At factory farms, chickens occasionally get natural daylight and natural ventilation, but they are rare exceptions. Only a few countries – the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden, for example – require windows in chicken sheds. The barren, seemingly infinite sheds that prevail in factory farms have only feeding and drinking points. Higher welfare would necessitate more space (reduced stocking density), slower-growing breeds, a later slaughter time, and access to outdoors. Very few chickens in the world (less than 1 percent) are raised free-range – that means at least half the time outdoors.2 Since chickens are outdoors animals, this means a forced change in their behavior. They have been invited inside, under lock and key, for less than a century, but in this century they have become a major source of protein for billions of consumers.
This books aims at a global history of the industrial chicken. By the late 1950s, led by the United States, agricultural manufacturers had embarked on integrating the industry from bottom to top, from egg layers to chick producers to contractors responsible for shed raising, to processing plants for slaughter and reassembly as whole birds, parts, and various other products. The integrators own and control the delivery of the inputs – the birds, the feed, the antibiotics – all of which are to be tended and applied as specified