Have you ever thought about where your chicken comes from, or how it got there? You can buy chicken in the store, or buy it prepared from dozens of restaurants. But it wasn’t always that way. Chicken used to be hard to come by and expensive. So what happened? Would you believe that the chicken you eat today was caused by an ordering mistake, a Federal lawsuit, and a contest? To explain, we have to start back in the 1920s.
AN ORDERING MISTAKE IS MADE
In the 1920s, chicken was grown on small farms with flocks of under 500 birds. Spring chickens, usually the males, were sold off at maturity, and made their way into butcher shops and restaurants. In 1923, Cecile Steele ordered 50 chicks from a hatchery. By mistake, the hatchery sent her 500. She decided to raise them for meat and made quite a profit on them. By 1928, she built barns to house nearly 30,000 chickens. History credits Mrs. Steele with starting large scale industrialized chicken production. Others saw what she did (and the money she made!), and soon started their own chicken farms.
Even with more chickens becoming available, chicken in the 1930s was hard to come by and considered a delicacy. Chickens had a fairly high mortality rate due to nutrition, weather, and housing. The chicken eviscerator wouldn’t be invented until 1942, and the chicken plucker wouldn’t be invented until 1951. Preparing a chicken took a lot of time, and was usually eviscerated by the consumer. Menus of the time show that the price of a chicken dinner was more expensive than swordfish, lobster, or lamp chops.
Chicken of that time was what we know today as layers, heritage chickens, dual purpose chickens, or heavy breed chickens. The modern meat chicken wouldn’t be “invented” for another 20 years.
A GROCERY STORY GETS A LAWSUIT
Let’s jump to the 1940s. Chicken production is steadily rising, and one of the country’s largest poultry retailers was the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, or A&P supermarkets. They were the largest supermarket in America, having pioneered the high-volume, low-cost food chain model. They also put many small “mom & pop” grocery stores out of business. In 1946, the U.S. Justice Department convicted A&P with criminal restraint of trade. The conviction would eventually be overturned, but stories stayed in the headlines for nearly a decade.
A CONTEST CHANGES CHICKEN FOREVER
So what does a lawsuit have to do with chicken? Well to build goodwill with the public, A&P decided to host a contest with a big money prize to see who could produce superior meat-type chickens. The contest desired a chicken “chunky enough for the whole family—a chicken with breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks, with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead of more.” A&P’s contest would be self-serving, since it would grow the poultry market. The US Department of Agriculture shared that goal as well, so they partnered with A&P in what would be called The Chicken of Tomorrow contest. (see https://youtu.be/uPYYwdI0tIc)
Forty hatcheries entered the contest, which had a prize of $10,000 (roughly $110,000 today). It was a very scientific contest. Chickens were hatched and raised by a third-party hatchery, where they were slaughtered and rated in several categories.
Forty finalists were chosen from state and regional contests to compete for the national title in 1948. Henry Saglio won for Carcass Characteristics with a pure line of White Plymouth Rocks. Charles and Kenneth Vantress won for Economy of Production with a cross between New Hampshire and Cornish chickens. The contest was repeated in 1951 with Saglio winning again. Saglio and Vantress eventually merged their two lines though, which became the beginning of the modern-day Cornish Cross, using a Cornish rooster and a White Plymouth Rock hen, the same two breeds used today.
The contest kick-started chicken production. Chicken could now be grown 40% heavier than before, reaching 3.5 pounds in just 86 days. Suddenly there was an oversupply of chicken, and a push to convince people to eat more chicken.
Industry responded to the growing demand for chicken. Chicken breeding programs became concentrated and proprietary. Companies like Purdue and Tyson bought hatcheries, feed mills, and production facilities to decrease the price of chicken. Today, “Big Chicken” controls the breeding programs, growing facilities, feed mixtures, processing, and packaging. Globally, chicken produced today comes predominately from just two sources, Aviagen (Ross chickens) and Cobb (a subsidiary of Tyson).
For the backyard chicken owner, Cornish Cross is not sustainable. The breeding programs are tightly controlled and breeds have been selectively bred since the days of The Chicken of Tomorrow contest. You can buy eggs or buy chicks, but you can’t breed more yourself. The Cornish Cross chicken is too large and lethargic to successfully mate, and even if that happened, the result would not be as good as the parents. If you want more Cornish Cross, you buy more chicks from the hatchery.
Some will naively say that you can breed your own with Cornish roosters and White Plymouth Rock hens. While that may be technically true, it’s not that simple. The industry uses a double or triple cross technique to make a third and sometimes fourth generation before hatching eggs are produced. Breeding is done using artificial insemination. And, the industry has been doing this for 70 years, so you’ll have a lot of catching up to do!
Some may think that meat chickens grow so large today because of hormones. That is not true. Not only have hormone use in chickens been banned since 1960, but it is expensive and must be injected. Instead, improvements in weight have been made through genetics, nutrition, and environment. Selective breeding, better feed, and controlled grow-out barns means larger birds in shorter amounts of time and with less feed.
Of significant importance to the chicken industry is something called the Food Conversion Ratio, or FCR. FCR is how many pounds of feed it takes to make a pound of chicken. Since 1925, FCR has dropped from 4.7 to 1.8, while the time to grow a chicken has dropped from 16 weeks to 6.5 weeks, and the size has doubled.
Meat chickens grow so fast that their bodies can’t keep up with the rapid growth. Some die of cardiovascular complications and others break bones under their own weight. If you compared the growth of the modern meat chicken to humans, a baby would grow to over 500 pounds in 7 weeks!
Using less feed to get more chicken in less time means lower market prices and more availability. Cheaper and more plentiful chicken has resulted in a steady growth in consumption. By 1952, shortly after the second Chicken of Tomorrow contest, “specially bred meat chicken” consumption surpassed farm (heritage) chickens. In 1996, chicken consumption surpassed pork. And in 2012, more chicken was eaten in America than beef, claiming the number one position for meat.
Chicken has evolved from an expensive and rare meat sold whole with head, feet, and guts intact, to a meat you can buy cheaply at every grocery store. It comes in hundreds of forms that are breaded, sliced, ground, marinated, and cured. In fact, what’s rare is that someone buys a whole chicken, unless it’s already cooked!
Some people won’t eat factory grown meat chicken for a variety of reasons, such as living conditions, inhumane treatment, lack of sustainability, post-processing additives, or lack of taste. But the fact is that chicken consumption has steadily grown over the years. Americans like their chicken, and it is plentiful today thanks to an ordering mistake, a lawsuit, and a contest!