How the Chicken Conquered the World

The epic begins 10,000 years ago in an Asian jungle and ends today in kitchens all over the world

  • By Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler
  • Smithsonian magazine, June 2012, Subscribe
View Full Image »
Chicken reigns in the 21st century.
Chicken reigns in the 21st century. (Tim O’Brien)

More from Smithsonian.com


The chickens that saved Western civilization were discovered, according to legend, by the side of a road in Greece in the first decade of the fifth century B.C. The Athenian general Themistocles, on his way to confront the invading Persian forces, stopped to watch two cocks fighting and summoned his troops, saying: “Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other.” The tale does not describe what happened to the loser, nor explain why the soldiers found this display of instinctive aggression inspirational rather than pointless and depressing. But history records that the Greeks, thus heartened, went on to repel the invaders, preserving the civilization that today honors those same creatures by breading, frying and dipping them into one’s choice of sauce. The descendants of those roosters might well think—if they were capable of such profound thought—that their ancient forebears have a lot to answer for.

Chicken is the ubiquitous food of our era, crossing multiple cultural boundaries with ease. With its mild taste and uniform texture, chicken presents an intriguingly blank canvas for the flavor palette of almost any cuisine. A generation of Britons is coming of age in the belief that chicken tikka masala is the national dish, and the same thing is happening in China with Kentucky Fried Chicken. Long after the time when most families had a few hens running around the yard that could be grabbed and turned into dinner, chicken remains a nostalgic, evocative dish for most Americans. When author Jack Canfield was looking for a metaphor for psychological comfort, he didn’t call it “Clam Chowder for the Soul.”

How did the chicken achieve such cultural and culinary dominance? It is all the more surprising in light of the belief by many archaeologists that chickens were first domesticated not for eating but for cockfighting. Until the advent of large-scale industrial production in the 20th century, the economic and nutritional contribution of chickens was modest. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond listed chickens among the “small domestic mammals and domestic birds and insects” that have been useful to humanity but unlike the horse or the ox did little—outside of legends—to change the course of history. Nonetheless, the chicken has inspired contributions to culture, art, cuisine, science and religion over the millennia. Chickens were, and still are, a sacred animal in some cultures. The prodigious and ever-watchful hen was a worldwide symbol of nurturance and fertility. Eggs hung in Egyptian temples to ensure a bountiful river flood. The lusty rooster (a.k.a. cock) was a universal signifier of virility—but also, in the ancient Persian faith of Zoroastrianism, a benign spirit that crowed at dawn to herald a turning point in the cosmic struggle between darkness and light. For the Romans, the chicken’s killer app was fortunetelling, especially during wartime. Chickens accompanied Roman armies, and their behavior was carefully observed before battle; a good appetite meant victory was likely. According to the writings of Cicero, when one contingent of birds refused to eat before a sea battle in 249 B.C., an angry consul threw them overboard. History records that he was defeated.

But one major religious tradition—ironically, the one that gave rise to matzo-ball soup and the Sunday chicken dinner—failed to imbue chickens with much religious significance. The Old Testament passages concerning ritual sacrifice reveal a distinct preference on the part of Yahweh for red meat over poultry. In Leviticus 5:7, a guilt offering of two turtledoves or pigeons is acceptable if the sinner in question is unable to afford a lamb, but in no instance does the Lord request a chicken. Matthew 23:37 contains a passage in which Jesus likens his care for the people of Jerusalem to a hen caring for her brood. This image, had it caught on, could have completely changed the course of Christian iconography, which has been dominated instead by depictions of the Good Shepherd. The rooster plays a small but crucial role in the Gospels in helping to fulfill the prophecy that Peter would deny Jesus “before the cock crows.” (In the ninth century, Pope Nicholas I decreed that a figure of a rooster should be placed atop every church as a reminder of the incident—which is why many churches still have cockerel-shaped weather vanes.) There is no implication that the rooster did anything but mark the passage of the hours, but even this secondhand association with betrayal probably didn’t advance the cause of the chicken in Western culture. In contemporary American usage, the associations of “chicken” are with cowardice, neurotic anxiety (“The sky is falling!”) and ineffectual panic (“running around like a chicken without a head”).

The fact is that the male of the species can be quite a fierce animal, especially when bred and trained for fighting. Nature armed the rooster with a bony leg spur; humans have supplemented that feature with an arsenal of metal spurs and small knives strapped to the bird’s leg. Cockfighting is illegal in the United States—Louisiana was the last state to ban it, in 2008—and generally viewed by Americans as inhumane. But in the parts of the world where it is still practiced, legally or illegally, it has claims to being the world’s oldest continual sport. Artistic depictions of rooster combatants are scattered throughout the ancient world, such as in a first century A.D. mosaic adorning a house in Pompeii. The ancient Greek city of Pergamum established a cockfighting amphitheater to teach valor to future generations of soldiers.

The domesticated chicken has a genealogy as complicated as the Tudors, stretching back 7,000 to 10,000 years and involving, according to recent research, at least two wild progenitors and possibly more than one event of initial domestication. The earliest fossil bones identified as possibly belonging to chickens appear in sites from northeastern China dating to around 5400 B.C., but the birds’ wild ancestors never lived in those cold, dry plains. So if they really are chicken bones, they must have come from somewhere else, most likely Southeast Asia. The chicken’s wild progenitor is the red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, according to a theory advanced by Charles Darwin and recently confirmed by DNA analysis. The bird’s resemblance to modern chickens is manifest in the male’s red wattles and comb, the spur he uses to fight and his cock-a-doodle-doo mating call. The dun-colored females brood eggs and cluck just like barnyard chickens. In its habitat, which stretches from northeastern India to the Philippines, G. gallus browses on the forest floor for insects, seeds and fruit, and flies up to nest in the trees at night. That’s about as much flying as it can manage, a trait that had obvious appeal to humans seeking to capture and raise it. This would later help endear the chicken to Africans, whose native guinea fowls had an annoying habit of flying off into the forest when the spirit moved them.

But G. gallus is not the sole progenitor of the modern chicken. Scientists have identified three closely related species that might have bred with the red junglefowl. Precisely how much genetic material these other birds contributed to the DNA of domesticated chickens remains a matter of conjecture. Recent research suggests that modern chickens inherited at least one trait, their yellow skin, from the gray junglefowl of southern India. Did a domesticated breed of G. gallus spread initially from Southeast Asia, traveling either north to China or southwest to India? Or were there two separate heartlands of domestication: ancient India and Southeast Asia? Either scenario is possible, but probing more deeply into chicken origins is hindered by an inconclusive DNA trail. “Because domesticated and wild birds mixed over time, it’s really difficult to pinpoint,” says Michael Zody, a computational biologist who studies genetics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

The chicken’s real star turn came in 2004, when an international team of geneticists produced a complete map of the chicken genome. The chicken was the first domesticated animal, the first bird—and consequently, the first descendant of the dinosaurs—thus honored. The genome map provided an excellent opportunity to study how millennia of domestication can alter a species. In a project led by Sweden’s Uppsala University, Zody and his colleagues have been researching the differences between the red junglefowl and its barnyard descendants, including “layers” (breeds raised to produce prodigious amounts of eggs) and “broilers” (breeds that are plump and meaty). The researchers found important mutations in a gene designated TBC1D1, which regulates glucose metabolism. In the human genome, mutations in this gene have been associated with obesity, but it’s a positive trait in a creature destined for the dinner table. Another mutation that resulted from selective breeding is in the TSHR (thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor) gene. In wild animals this gene coordinates reproduction with day length, confining breeding to specific seasons. The mutation disabling this gene enables chickens to breed—and lay eggs—all year long.

Once chickens were domesticated, cultural contacts, trade, migration and territorial conquest resulted in their introduction, and reintroduction, to different regions around the world over several thousand years. Although inconclusive, evidence suggests that ground zero for the bird’s westward spread may have been the Indus Valley, where the city-states of the Harappan civilization carried on a lively trade with the Middle East more than 4,000 years ago. Archaeologists have recovered chicken bones from Lothal, once a great port on the west coast of India, raising the possibility that the birds could have been carried across to the Arabian Peninsula as cargo or provisions. By 2000 B.C., cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia refer to “the bird of Meluhha,” the likely place name for the Indus Valley. That may or may not have been a chicken; Professor Piotr Steinkeller, a specialist in ancient Near Eastern texts at Harvard, says that it was certainly “some exotic bird that was unknown to Mesopotamia.” He believes that references to the “royal bird of Meluhha”—a phrase that shows up in texts three centuries later—most likely refer to the chicken.

Chickens arrived in Egypt some 250 years later, as fighting birds and additions to exotic menageries. Artistic depictions of the bird adorned royal tombs. Yet it would be another 1,000 years before the bird became a popular commodity among ordinary Egyptians. It was in that era that Egyptians mastered the technique of artificial incubation, which freed hens to put their time to better use by laying more eggs. This was no easy matter. Most chicken eggs will hatch in three weeks, but only if the temperature is kept constant at around 99 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity stays close to 55 percent, increasing in the last few days of incubation. The eggs must also be turned three to five times a day, lest physical deformities result.


The chickens that saved Western civilization were discovered, according to legend, by the side of a road in Greece in the first decade of the fifth century B.C. The Athenian general Themistocles, on his way to confront the invading Persian forces, stopped to watch two cocks fighting and summoned his troops, saying: “Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other.” The tale does not describe what happened to the loser, nor explain why the soldiers found this display of instinctive aggression inspirational rather than pointless and depressing. But history records that the Greeks, thus heartened, went on to repel the invaders, preserving the civilization that today honors those same creatures by breading, frying and dipping them into one’s choice of sauce. The descendants of those roosters might well think—if they were capable of such profound thought—that their ancient forebears have a lot to answer for.

Chicken is the ubiquitous food of our era, crossing multiple cultural boundaries with ease. With its mild taste and uniform texture, chicken presents an intriguingly blank canvas for the flavor palette of almost any cuisine. A generation of Britons is coming of age in the belief that chicken tikka masala is the national dish, and the same thing is happening in China with Kentucky Fried Chicken. Long after the time when most families had a few hens running around the yard that could be grabbed and turned into dinner, chicken remains a nostalgic, evocative dish for most Americans. When author Jack Canfield was looking for a metaphor for psychological comfort, he didn’t call it “Clam Chowder for the Soul.”

How did the chicken achieve such cultural and culinary dominance? It is all the more surprising in light of the belief by many archaeologists that chickens were first domesticated not for eating but for cockfighting. Until the advent of large-scale industrial production in the 20th century, the economic and nutritional contribution of chickens was modest. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond listed chickens among the “small domestic mammals and domestic birds and insects” that have been useful to humanity but unlike the horse or the ox did little—outside of legends—to change the course of history. Nonetheless, the chicken has inspired contributions to culture, art, cuisine, science and religion over the millennia. Chickens were, and still are, a sacred animal in some cultures. The prodigious and ever-watchful hen was a worldwide symbol of nurturance and fertility. Eggs hung in Egyptian temples to ensure a bountiful river flood. The lusty rooster (a.k.a. cock) was a universal signifier of virility—but also, in the ancient Persian faith of Zoroastrianism, a benign spirit that crowed at dawn to herald a turning point in the cosmic struggle between darkness and light. For the Romans, the chicken’s killer app was fortunetelling, especially during wartime. Chickens accompanied Roman armies, and their behavior was carefully observed before battle; a good appetite meant victory was likely. According to the writings of Cicero, when one contingent of birds refused to eat before a sea battle in 249 B.C., an angry consul threw them overboard. History records that he was defeated.

But one major religious tradition—ironically, the one that gave rise to matzo-ball soup and the Sunday chicken dinner—failed to imbue chickens with much religious significance. The Old Testament passages concerning ritual sacrifice reveal a distinct preference on the part of Yahweh for red meat over poultry. In Leviticus 5:7, a guilt offering of two turtledoves or pigeons is acceptable if the sinner in question is unable to afford a lamb, but in no instance does the Lord request a chicken. Matthew 23:37 contains a passage in which Jesus likens his care for the people of Jerusalem to a hen caring for her brood. This image, had it caught on, could have completely changed the course of Christian iconography, which has been dominated instead by depictions of the Good Shepherd. The rooster plays a small but crucial role in the Gospels in helping to fulfill the prophecy that Peter would deny Jesus “before the cock crows.” (In the ninth century, Pope Nicholas I decreed that a figure of a rooster should be placed atop every church as a reminder of the incident—which is why many churches still have cockerel-shaped weather vanes.) There is no implication that the rooster did anything but mark the passage of the hours, but even this secondhand association with betrayal probably didn’t advance the cause of the chicken in Western culture. In contemporary American usage, the associations of “chicken” are with cowardice, neurotic anxiety (“The sky is falling!”) and ineffectual panic (“running around like a chicken without a head”).

The fact is that the male of the species can be quite a fierce animal, especially when bred and trained for fighting. Nature armed the rooster with a bony leg spur; humans have supplemented that feature with an arsenal of metal spurs and small knives strapped to the bird’s leg. Cockfighting is illegal in the United States—Louisiana was the last state to ban it, in 2008—and generally viewed by Americans as inhumane. But in the parts of the world where it is still practiced, legally or illegally, it has claims to being the world’s oldest continual sport. Artistic depictions of rooster combatants are scattered throughout the ancient world, such as in a first century A.D. mosaic adorning a house in Pompeii. The ancient Greek city of Pergamum established a cockfighting amphitheater to teach valor to future generations of soldiers.

The domesticated chicken has a genealogy as complicated as the Tudors, stretching back 7,000 to 10,000 years and involving, according to recent research, at least two wild progenitors and possibly more than one event of initial domestication. The earliest fossil bones identified as possibly belonging to chickens appear in sites from northeastern China dating to around 5400 B.C., but the birds’ wild ancestors never lived in those cold, dry plains. So if they really are chicken bones, they must have come from somewhere else, most likely Southeast Asia. The chicken’s wild progenitor is the red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, according to a theory advanced by Charles Darwin and recently confirmed by DNA analysis. The bird’s resemblance to modern chickens is manifest in the male’s red wattles and comb, the spur he uses to fight and his cock-a-doodle-doo mating call. The dun-colored females brood eggs and cluck just like barnyard chickens. In its habitat, which stretches from northeastern India to the Philippines, G. gallus browses on the forest floor for insects, seeds and fruit, and flies up to nest in the trees at night. That’s about as much flying as it can manage, a trait that had obvious appeal to humans seeking to capture and raise it. This would later help endear the chicken to Africans, whose native guinea fowls had an annoying habit of flying off into the forest when the spirit moved them.

But G. gallus is not the sole progenitor of the modern chicken. Scientists have identified three closely related species that might have bred with the red junglefowl. Precisely how much genetic material these other birds contributed to the DNA of domesticated chickens remains a matter of conjecture. Recent research suggests that modern chickens inherited at least one trait, their yellow skin, from the gray junglefowl of southern India. Did a domesticated breed of G. gallus spread initially from Southeast Asia, traveling either north to China or southwest to India? Or were there two separate heartlands of domestication: ancient India and Southeast Asia? Either scenario is possible, but probing more deeply into chicken origins is hindered by an inconclusive DNA trail. “Because domesticated and wild birds mixed over time, it’s really difficult to pinpoint,” says Michael Zody, a computational biologist who studies genetics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

The chicken’s real star turn came in 2004, when an international team of geneticists produced a complete map of the chicken genome. The chicken was the first domesticated animal, the first bird—and consequently, the first descendant of the dinosaurs—thus honored. The genome map provided an excellent opportunity to study how millennia of domestication can alter a species. In a project led by Sweden’s Uppsala University, Zody and his colleagues have been researching the differences between the red junglefowl and its barnyard descendants, including “layers” (breeds raised to produce prodigious amounts of eggs) and “broilers” (breeds that are plump and meaty). The researchers found important mutations in a gene designated TBC1D1, which regulates glucose metabolism. In the human genome, mutations in this gene have been associated with obesity, but it’s a positive trait in a creature destined for the dinner table. Another mutation that resulted from selective breeding is in the TSHR (thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor) gene. In wild animals this gene coordinates reproduction with day length, confining breeding to specific seasons. The mutation disabling this gene enables chickens to breed—and lay eggs—all year long.

Once chickens were domesticated, cultural contacts, trade, migration and territorial conquest resulted in their introduction, and reintroduction, to different regions around the world over several thousand years. Although inconclusive, evidence suggests that ground zero for the bird’s westward spread may have been the Indus Valley, where the city-states of the Harappan civilization carried on a lively trade with the Middle East more than 4,000 years ago. Archaeologists have recovered chicken bones from Lothal, once a great port on the west coast of India, raising the possibility that the birds could have been carried across to the Arabian Peninsula as cargo or provisions. By 2000 B.C., cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia refer to “the bird of Meluhha,” the likely place name for the Indus Valley. That may or may not have been a chicken; Professor Piotr Steinkeller, a specialist in ancient Near Eastern texts at Harvard, says that it was certainly “some exotic bird that was unknown to Mesopotamia.” He believes that references to the “royal bird of Meluhha”—a phrase that shows up in texts three centuries later—most likely refer to the chicken.

Chickens arrived in Egypt some 250 years later, as fighting birds and additions to exotic menageries. Artistic depictions of the bird adorned royal tombs. Yet it would be another 1,000 years before the bird became a popular commodity among ordinary Egyptians. It was in that era that Egyptians mastered the technique of artificial incubation, which freed hens to put their time to better use by laying more eggs. This was no easy matter. Most chicken eggs will hatch in three weeks, but only if the temperature is kept constant at around 99 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity stays close to 55 percent, increasing in the last few days of incubation. The eggs must also be turned three to five times a day, lest physical deformities result.

The Egyptians constructed vast incubation complexes made up of hundreds of “ovens.” Each oven was a large chamber, which was connected to a series of corridors and vents that allowed attendants to regulate the heat from fires fueled by straw and camel dung. The egg attendants kept their methods a secret from outsiders for centuries.

Around the Mediterranean, archaeological digs have uncovered chicken bones from about 800 B.C.. Chickens were a delicacy among the Romans, whose culinary innovations included the omelet and the practice of stuffing birds for cooking, although their recipes tended more toward mashed chicken brains than bread crumbs. Farmers began developing methods to fatten the birds—some used wheat bread soaked in wine, while others swore by a mixture of cumin seeds, barley and lizard fat. At one point, the authorities outlawed these practices. Out of concern about moral decay and the pursuit of excessive luxury in the Roman Republic, a law in 161 B.C. limited chicken consumption to one per meal—presumably for the whole table, not per individual—and only if the bird had not been overfed. The practical Roman cooks soon discovered that castrating roosters caused them to fatten on their own, and thus was born the creature we know as the capon.

But the chicken’s status in Europe appears to have diminished with the collapse of Rome. “It all goes downhill,” says Kevin MacDonald, a professor of archaeology at University College in London. “In the post-Roman period, the size of chickens returned to what it was during the Iron Age,” more than 1,000 years earlier. He speculates that the big, organized farms of Roman times—which were well suited to feeding numerous chickens and protecting them from predators—largely vanished. As the centuries went by, hardier fowls such as geese and partridge began to adorn medieval tables.

Europeans arriving in North America found a continent teeming with native turkeys and ducks for the plucking and eating. Some archaeologists believe that chickens were first introduced to the New World by Polynesians who reached the Pacific coast of South America a century or so before the voyages of Columbus. Well into the 20th century, chickens, although valued, particularly as a source of eggs, played a relatively minor role in the American diet and economy. Long after cattle and hogs had entered the industrial age of centralized, mechanized slaughterhouses, chicken production was still mostly a casual, local enterprise. The breakthrough that made today’s quarter-million-bird farms possible was the fortification of feed with antibiotics and vitamins, which allowed chickens to be raised indoors. Like most animals, chickens need sunlight to synthesize vitamin D on their own, and so up through the first decades of the 20th century, they typically spent their days wandering around the barnyard, pecking for food. Now they could be sheltered from weather and predators and fed a controlled diet in an environment designed to present the minimum of distractions from the essential business of eating. Factory farming represents the chicken’s final step in its transformation into a protein-producing commodity. Hens are packed so tightly into wire cages (less than half a square foot per bird) that they can’t spread their wings; as many as 20,000 to 30,000 broilers are crowded together in windowless buildings.

The result has been a vast national experiment in supply-side gastro-economics: Factory farms turning out increasing amounts of chicken have called forth an increasing demand. By the early 1990s, chicken had surpassed beef as Americans’ most popular meat (measured by consumption, that is, not opinion polls), with annual consumption running at around nine billion birds, or 80 pounds per capita, not counting the breading. Modern chickens are cogs in a system designed to convert grain into protein with staggering efficiency. It takes less than two pounds of feed to produce one pound of chicken (live weight), less than half the feed/weight ratio in 1945. By comparison, around seven pounds of feed are required to produce a pound of beef, while more than three pounds are needed to yield a pound of pork. Gary Balducci, a third-generation poultry farmer in Edgecomb, Maine, can turn a day-old chick into a five-pound broiler in six weeks, half the time it took his grandfather. And selective breeding has made the broilers so docile that even if chickens are given access to outdoor space—a marketing device that qualifies the resulting meat to be sold as “free-range”—they prefer hanging out at the mechanized trough, awaiting the next delivery of feed. “Chickens used to be great browsers,” says Balducci, “but ours can’t do that. All they want to do now is eat.”

It is hard to remember that these teeming, clucking, metabolizing and defecating hordes awaiting their turn in the fryer are the same animals worshiped in many parts of the ancient world for their fighting prowess and believed by the Romans to be in direct communication with Fate. A chicken bred for the demands of American supermarket shoppers presumably has lost whatever magical powers the breed once possessed. Western aid workers discovered this in Mali during a failed attempt to replace the scrawny native birds with imported Rhode Island Reds. According to tradition, the villagers divine the future by cutting the throat of a hen and then waiting to see in which direction the dying bird falls—left or right indicates a favorable response to the diviner’s question; straight forward means “no.” But the Rhode Island Red, weighted down by its disproportionately large breast, always fell straight forward, signifying nothing meaningful except the imminence of dinner.

Santería—the religion that grew up in Cuba with elements borrowed from Catholicism, native Carib culture and the Yoruba religion of West Africa—ritually sacrifices chickens, as well as guinea pigs, goats, sheep, turtles and other animals. Devotees of Santería were the petitioners in a 1993 First Amendment case, in which the Supreme Court unanimously overturned local ordinances banning animal sacrifice. The case pitted a Santería church, Lukumi Babalu Aye, and its priest, Ernesto Pichardo, against the city of Hialeah, Florida; many mainstream religious and civil-rights groups lined up with the church, while animal-rights proponents sided with the city. “Although the practice of animal sacrifice may seem abhorrent to some,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the decision, “religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”

Chickens make wonderful pets, as breeders will tell you, especially if they think they could interest you in buying some chicks. They are as colorful as tropical fish but more affectionate, as cute as guinea pigs but better tasting, and, according to Jennifer Haughey, who raises chickens near Rhinebeck, New York, “far better mousers than our cats.”

What characteristics do chicken-owners value most? To Barbara Gardiner Whitacre, who raises five breeds of chickens in upstate New York, a leading criterion is egg color—the deep chocolate-brown eggs of her Welsummers, the jade green of the Ameraucana, the speckled olive of Ameraucana hens after a Welsummer rooster got loose and created an inadvertent cross. Also, hardiness, cuteness and a willingness to brood—to sit on a nest full of fertilized eggs until they hatch, contributing their own labor to the farm economy. The eggs don’t even have to be their own: As necessity dictates, Whitacre will substitute eggs laid by another hen, or even a duck. Unfortunately, these qualities are sometimes in conflict. She raises a breed called Silkies, with good looks to spare, bearing luxuriant feathers of an exceptional fluffiness. However, they also have blue skin and dark blue, almost black, meat and bones, which means they’re not the first thing you think of when company’s coming for dinner. Two years ago, Whitacre reluctantly sampled two Silkie roosters. “Of course, it was utterly delicious and tender, but blue-gray meat?” she recalls. “And the bones really are freakish-looking. So now if I can bring myself to use one for food, I generally use it in a dish with color: a nice coq au vin or something with tomatoes and thyme.” This is a prejudice not shared by some Asian cultures, which prize Silkies for food and medicinal purposes. Whitacre was surprised to see whole frozen Silkies, which each weigh only about a pound and a half, selling for more than $10 in her local Asian market.

Exotic and heritage breeds of chicken go for considerable sums of money—as much as $399 for a single day-old chick, as listed on the website of Greenfire Farms, where the names of the breeds are almost as beautiful as the birds themselves: the Cream Legbar, with its sky-blue eggs; the iridescent, flamboyantly tailed and wattled Sulmatler; the Jubilee Orpingtons in speckled brown and white, like a hillside on which the springtime sun has begun to melt the winter snow. The Silver Sussex, according to the website, looks “like a bird designed by Jackson Pollock during his black and silver period.” An advantage of many heritage breeds—an advantage for the chickens, that is—is that they spread their egg-laying careers over several years, unlike commercial varieties, bred for production, that are washed up in half that time.

And, for some chickens, the day comes when they are no longer wanted. That’s when the man of the house marches into the yard, puts the bird in the back seat and drives to Whitacre’s farm, leaving the chicken with her, whimpering that he just can’t bring himself to do what has to be done.

As he walks away, Whitacre sometimes says to herself, “I’m going to process eight birds today, mister. What’s wrong with you?”

Let us now praise chicken in all its extra-crispy glory! Chicken, the mascot of globalization, the universal symbol of middlebrow culinary aspiration! Chicken that has infiltrated the Caesar salad and made inroads on turkey in the club sandwich, that lurks under a blanket of pesto alongside a tangle of spaghetti and glistens with teriyaki sauce. Chicken that—marinated in yogurt and spices, grilled on a skewer and then set afloat in a mild, curry-flavored gravy—has become “a true British national dish,” on no less authority than former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. In a 2001 address that has gone down in history as “the chicken tikka masala speech,” he chose that cuisine to symbolize his nation’s commitment to multiculturalism. The most frequently served dish in British restaurants, Cook said, was “a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences. Chicken tikka is an Indian dish. The masala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy.” The great event took place in the early 1970s in an Indian restaurant in Glasgow, according to a Scottish MP who urged the European Union to grant the dish a “protected designation of origin.” This did not sit well with chefs in New Delhi, one of whom described chicken tikka masala as “an authentic Mughlai recipe prepared by our forefathers who were royal chefs in the Mughal period,” which covered roughly the 16th through 18th centuries.

If there’s an American counterpart to the tikka masala story, it might be General Tso’s chicken, which the New York Times has described as “the most famous Hunanese dish in the world.” That might come as news to chefs in Hunan, who apparently had never heard of it until the opening of China to the West in recent decades. The man generally credited with the idea of putting deep-fried chicken pieces in a hot chili sauce was the Hunan-born chef Peng Chang-kuei, who fled to Taiwan after the Communist revolution in 1949. He named the dish for a 19th-century military commander who led the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, a largely forgotten conflict that claimed upwards of 20 million lives. Peng moved to New York in 1973 to open a restaurant that became a favorite of diplomats and began cooking his signature dish. Over the years it has evolved in response to American tastes to become sweeter, and in a kind of reverse cultural migration has now been adopted as a “traditional” dish by chefs and food writers in Hunan.

But increasingly, as foreign observers have noticed, “chicken” to the Chinese, at least those who live in the cities, means what’s served at KFC. Since the first drumstick was dipped into a fryer in Beijing in 1987, the chain has opened more than 3,000 branches around the country, and is now more profitable in China than in the United States. Numerous reasons have been advanced for this success, from the cleanliness of the restrooms to the alleged resemblance of Colonel Sanders to Confucius, but it apparently does not reflect a newfound Chinese appetite for the cuisine of the American mid-South. “You can find bone-in fried chicken there,” notes Mary Shelman, a Kentucky native and the head of the agribusiness program at Harvard Business School. “But it’s always dark meat, which the Chinese prefer, and it’s one menu item out of around 30, and it’s not the most popular.” The chain has thrived by offering the Chinese customers food they were already familiar with, including (depending on the region) noodles, rice and dumplings, along with chicken wraps, chicken patties and chicken wings, which are so popular, Shelman says, that the company periodically has to deny rumors it has a farm somewhere that raises six-winged chickens.

If it did, you could be sure, chicken hobbyists would be clamoring to buy them for their flocks, fancy restaurants would add them to their menus and food bloggers would be debating whether the first, second or third pair made the best Buffalo wings. The globe-spanning chicken is an epic story of evolutionary, agricultural and culinary success, outnumbering human beings on the planet by nearly three to one. Yes, we get to eat them, but we also feed them. And they provide—along with omelets, casseroles, fricassees, McNuggets and chicken-liver pâté—an answer to the question that every 6-year-old boy, visiting a natural history museum for the first time, has asked his parents: “What did a dinosaur taste like?”

It tasted like chicken.

Jerry Adler wrote about heirloom wheat farming in the December 2011 issue. Freelance writer Andrew Lawler is an occasional contributor to Smithsonian. Photographer Timothy Archibald is based in Northern California.


Single Page 1 2 3 Next »

    Subscribe now for more of Smithsonian's coverage on history, science and nature.



 

Add New Comment


Name: (required)

Email: (required)

Comment:

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until Smithsonian.com has approved them. Smithsonian reserves the right not to post any comments that are unlawful, threatening, offensive, defamatory, invasive of a person's privacy, inappropriate, confidential or proprietary, political messages, product endorsements, or other content that might otherwise violate any laws or policies.

Comments (49)

Can you see if there is any research to see how many chicken nuggets the average american kid eats at year? It could be from McDonalds or anywhere else. I'm just looking for a number of breaded chicken products american kids eat

Posted by amad on January 27,2013 | 12:32 AM

I thought Hanako would like this and get lessons in geography, history and animal husbandry. Mom

Posted by We'dantooth on January 24,2013 | 05:47 PM

I've read a lot of magazine articles in my time, and this article has to be one of the best written articles I've ever come across. Facts and humor together? Perfection! What an entertaining and informative read!

Posted by Dave Ritchart on January 16,2013 | 01:15 AM

Great news indeed. This means that driving a fuel-efficient car is detrimental to the health of your fellow citizens. Hah! That's something I can say to those eco-fascists! My gas guzzler is an act of charity!

Posted by more details on December 1,2012 | 05:46 AM

...[final part. had to split it the post; sorry. these are all my words and I am not an activist, just someone that researched after my chickens were falling apart and am done with all these practices.] For now, unless I can raise my own heritage breeds of chickens and other animals, where they grow at a healthy pace and give some or all of them back, there are plenty of alternatives. I found that eating greens is much healthier. Those greens really need to increase their marketing budget since they contain much more healthy ingredients that what is on the nutritional facts. It is an adjustment, because I used to eat eggs and meat every day... so much for following the USDA's food chart which is a complete farce (unless I want to become obese and live with all the, unfortunately, common disease that is slowly killing us... yeh what goes around comes around and this inhumane treatment of animals is payback for their unimaginable suffering). There are tens of thousands of recipes online containing no animal products, so why bother? Each person that goes this route saves at least 31 animals from being killed every year. It is you, the consumer, that have a direct impact. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans will change the status quo. When you eat one less chicken, egg or milk raised with such breeding practices it sends a message that one less needs to be produced. To my five hens who died of no fault of their own, I am sorry. I am really, really sorry. And I miss each one of you. I can't believe it I am a straight guy in my thirties and f$%#$ickng crying!

Posted by Marty (New York, USA) on November 29,2012 | 12:07 AM

... She was one of the nicest pet you can imagine. Our chickens, even the one not handled by humans from a young age, would talk to you, follow you around, ask for treats, jump on your lap, CUDDLE by putting their head next to your neck--no kidding--and if you laid on the floor lick and wash your hair! What is the difference between them and cats, dogs and other pets? If I eat chickens, why shouldn’t I get free dogs on Craigslist and cook them? Why are cats and dogs not bred to be overweight in their first weeks of their life, or die at a young age of cancer, heart attacks and reproductive-related issues, just because people want fat dogs or those that produce more milk, 10 times more than what the puppies need (taken away, like with cows, so that all the milk goes towards human consumption)?

Posted by Marty (New York, USA) on November 29,2012 | 12:04 AM

... Such animals bred to grow and produce at such high rates suffer unimaginably just by being alive. Because animals hide pain, unless they are confined in a factory farming the average American thinks they are all happy. 99.99% of today's chickens are bred (a) as meat birds that grow twice as big, twice as fast and (b) as egg chickens, that lay three times more eggs than just a hundred years ago and in much worst conditions. Between moulting, brooding and egg laying today's layers get no rest. (Brooding is a hormonal stage where they many not always sit on eggs but drives them nuts physically and mentally.) And those breeds trickle down to the backyard flock. You can be the most compassionate farmer and end up with chickens that simply fall apart. Chickens can live to 20 years. I have had five, and not one survived to three years. From the ones tested, one died of a heart attack at age 2, one died of cancer at age 3, and one died of an ovary infection at age 3, because she laid such large eggs later in her life that they were cracking inside which created the infection that killed her. She was debeaked and had trouble eating throughout her life, but the increasing egg size made it harder on her body. It was so painful to see her try to pass those eggs, including during winter when they should be resting if not for lacking the TSHR mutation describe in the article. She died early this month, November 9th.

Posted by Marty (New York, USA) on November 29,2012 | 12:03 AM

Mr. Adler and Lawler: Do you own cats and dogs? How about I lock them up in a drawer and play around with their TBC1D1 and TSHR genes for the benefit of mass production and kill 9 billion of their offsprings every year? What is so wrong, after all they will conquer the world to become the dominant pray animal. We all know about broilers. The reason they stay next to the feed "even if chickens are given access to outdoor space" is that (a) they grow so fast that they are constantly hungry and (b) because the breast grows much faster than the rest of the body they simply do not have the energy to move around and forage. When it comes to compassionate treatment, "Natural," "Humane," "Organic," "Free Range," "Pastured," "USDA," "Kosher" and similar claims are simply a marketing ploy to make you part with your money. This applies to all meat found at fast food places, restaurants and supermarkets, including farms and stores that try to distinguish themselves as if they answer to a higher authority, for example Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s that sell meat, eggs, milk and other animal products. They all raise breeds that suffer just by being alive.

Posted by Marty (New York, USA) on November 29,2012 | 12:01 AM

Excelant

Posted by MohammadAshfaq on October 16,2012 | 09:56 AM

Great article y

Posted by on September 29,2012 | 01:37 PM

i feel like the same angry individual has commented many times under different names on this article.

Posted by sdf on August 21,2012 | 01:19 AM

Oh Dear God, I did manage to get through this article, but it was one of the most in-coherent pieces of writing I have ever read in my life! I only read it cause of my deep empathy and love for poultry and I do not mean eating it. I was referred here by the leading advocate for poultry welfare in the U.S., Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns. It is to my understanding that chickens are native to the jungles of South East Asia. That's not the point I am here to make. I am just so sick of the disrespect that chickens receive and they are all by people who have not spent just 1 kind day with them. They are beautiful, very intelligent animals. They triumph the intelligent factor of many dogs I have owned. But its an out-rage if one was to eat a dog! Not condoning the consumption of dogs, just sticking up for chickens!

Posted by Mary Lapara on July 20,2012 | 05:46 AM

I could not get through this article. It was all over the place, and oddly organized. There was not point to it -- a rambling mess. Sorry, missed the mark.

Posted by kate powell on July 10,2012 | 12:08 PM

While I agree that chickens are fascinating creatures and rich in history, variety, and well worth telling stories about, I am disappointed by the focus of this article. It is strange and horrible to praise today's genetically mutated birds as if they are a triumph rather than a horror. Chickens are intelligent individuals with the capability to learn just like dogs and horses, a complex social system, and a language all their own with actual meaning. Broiler chickens are genetic messes who reach slaughter age by six weeks. At this age, your average non-broiler is peeping and not yet fully feathered. If broilers are not slaughtered as babies, they suffer heart attacks and broken limbs from their gross obesity. Many die in the sun because they are too sluggish or in too much pain to move even short distances in order to drink. What kind of a life is that for billions of sentient creatures? Laying hens often suffer reproductive cancers as young as two or three years old. Many non-production breeds of chickens can live well past ten years old. Laying hens are regularly starved for up to ten days in order to induce molting and force them to lay more eggs. Their bones are brittle from the lack of calcium and break easily. Despite the intense confinement of egg farms, they still have the instincts to roost, forage, flap their wings, and preen. Without the ability to do these things, they become frustrated and stressed. They live short, tragic lives. For every laying hen, there was a rooster chick who was thrown into a grinder on the first day of his life. It is time that we, as a culture, move on from staggering violence for the sake of only our tastebuds. Ultimately, chickens deserve to live just as much as our beloved dogs and cats. They have similar intelligence and similar feelings, and yet our culture treats chickens as objects rather than the living beings that they are.

Posted by Kristin on July 7,2012 | 07:21 PM

“ ... no less authority than former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. In a 2001 address that has gone down in history as ‘the chicken tikka masala speech,’ he chose that cuisine to symbolize his nation’s commitment to multiculturalism.” In reality, as in the United States, it is the political and media elites of Britain who have had this fanatical no-turning-back commitment to ever-increasing “multiculturalism,” a notion that has always been greeted with great skepticism by a majority of voters here and there, but, tellingly, has never been allowed to be voted upon by us or by them. If only disconnected political officials across the Western world had half the common sense of the common clucking barnyard chicken, today both humans and chickens would be far better off.

Posted by Thomas Michael Andres on July 5,2012 | 01:18 AM

An erudite history of the chicken, but your overall tone was flippant. Reading the article was like reading about German cultural history up to, say, the 1930s, with a veil drawn over the death camps that followed which, if you referred to them at all, you would probably write off with: "The inmates had their own orchestras so were obviously happy and well looked after . . . " But there. The USA loves its death penalty, doesn't it? Even for billions of chickens. Most of the males in many, if not all, industrial farming systems are unwanted and are killed (usually brutally) soon after birth. Saving Western civilization? Please define 'civilization'.

Posted by Torvus on July 3,2012 | 04:39 PM

This article makes me decide not to renew my subscription to The Smithsonian. It may be well researched in some ways, but any article on chickens that does not record the inhumane and inexcusable treatment of chickens in factory farms now is sadly lacking in full information. This was a chance to let people really know how the history of chickens is ending for them. I know that some people do not like to make a story depressing but since the truth is often depressing, the story, again, is sadly lacking in full information.

Posted by Marcia Mueller on July 3,2012 | 10:03 AM

I was pleased to read Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler's interesting article and even more pleased that they included so much of Mr. Adler's interview with my daughter, Barbara Gardiner Whitacre. I visited Barbara about a week before the June issue came out and photographed her incubator trays full of the colored eggs mentioned in the article. Each beautiful egg is a work of art. When seen all together in a tray they form an incredible mosaic of color. Until the new chick breaks free of the shell, each egg is lovingly hand-turned by Barbara at least four times a day. It is hard work and very labor intensive but the end result of some of the most beautiful, healthy, and happy chickens I have ever seen. It's no wonder that people come from such distances to purchase her young chickens for their flocks.

Posted by Elizabeth Kay Gibson on July 3,2012 | 07:52 AM

Dear editors, I found the article "How the Chicken Conquered the World" full of interesting historical details. However, I was chagrined, astounded really, to see factory farms described as a "breakthrough". Adding to my astonishment was the uncritical and matter-of-fact judgment that "Factory farming represents the chicken's final step in its transformation into a protein--producing commodity." 'As if the chicken had anything to say about it! Some of the harsh features of this system were described, but the overall impression was "This is the way it is." Smithsonian, please call us all to something better!

Posted by Carol Fox on June 25,2012 | 01:00 PM

The chicken might have been nothing but another bird, if it hadn't been for the fishmeal (ground dried fish) that was added to the diet, enabling "farmers" to grow a five-pound chicken in six weeks, instead of three months. OR The secret to growing a five-pound chicken in six weeks instead of three months was the addition of fishmeal to their diet. Without the protein and "unknown growth factor" in species such as herring and sardines, the chicken might have been nothing but another bird. Bernard E. Skud

Posted by Bernard E. Skud on June 21,2012 | 05:25 PM

A great article guys. Definately the best I have ever read on chickens.

Posted by gracco on June 20,2012 | 07:06 AM

Lizard fat, eh? One thing that never seems to change over time is the farmer pulling the leg of the gullible city slicker.

Posted by Diz Pareunia on June 6,2012 | 11:06 PM

The authors seem to omit the principal vector of today's chicken industry, viz. the farmer's poultry flock. We have abundant evidence of domestic poultry in mediaeval Europe, but largely other species, viz. ducks, geese and doves (the latter reserved for the upper classes.) Only in later centuries did chickens come to outnumber ducks and geese in farmyards and on the table, but the authors did not ask why and how. This seems particularly unfortunate because of the possible role of colonial chicken breeders. The names (Rhode Island Red, Barred Rock, etc.) suggest that except for the Leghorn the chicken varieties most valued today were bred in America, not Europe, let alone Asia where the strain originated.

Posted by Don Phillipson on June 6,2012 | 09:14 AM

I think this is an excellent article which beautifully illustrates the role of chickens in Western society and their importance in agriculture and as icons. It's refreshing to read an article that doesn't put a consistently negative spin on everything chicken-related for a change. Yes, factory farms are bad and their suffering is unfortunate, but that doesn't diminish their cultural importance or detract from the vibrant aspects of their history. I really enjoyed reading this article. It was witty, humorous, informative, and well-written.

Posted by Kelly Quantrill on June 6,2012 | 07:47 AM

Today, factory farming is the single most relevant fact in the number of chickens raised, slaughtered, and consumed in the United States and increasingly around the world. And yet a story called "How the Chicken Conquered the World" spends only slightly more space describing the factory farming of chickens than it does examining the chicken's lack of religious significance in the Old Testament. The historical and cultural stories about chickens are truly interesting, but to so greatly privilege them over the horrors of factory farming is sentimental and ultimately misses the point.

Posted by Anne Shudy Palmer on June 4,2012 | 12:39 PM

I was born a chicken. All my relatives are chickens. As a card-carrying member of the chicken tribe, I'd like to complement the author of this piece for recognizing our role in fostering human development. Think of it: Without this relationship, we chickens might be relegated to the status of rats or pigeons -- and nobody wants that!

Posted by Big Chick on June 3,2012 | 07:20 AM

One of your worse editions, ever. Don't know what you're thinking, but please go back to what you were printing before these last 2 issues. No more "one idea" magazines. Not a thing interested me, us, in the last two. Waste of money, waste of time & waste of trees. You can & have done better! Keep it up & you'll lose 2 subscribers at least.

Posted by Shirley Nitka on June 2,2012 | 08:17 PM

Great reading. Chickens are amazing. The fowl used for cockfighting were the best treated and most carefully bred of any chickens other than small scale household pet or show chicken operations. It only makes sense since the chicken was the first domesticated animal, the first bird—and consequently, the first descendant of the dinosaurs, as noted in this article, that we should preserve the old cockfighting breeds as only they have most of the original, unaltered genes of G. gallus. Modern chickens could not live or reproduce in a survival situation. Animal rights groups have tried to exterminate these wonderful birds. If you are like me and love chickens adopt a game breed today.

Posted by Rex Bumgarner on June 1,2012 | 02:11 PM

Chickens did not fly up into the trees to "nest" at night, as the article states. They flew up to "roost" in the trees. Chickens do not normally nest in trees.

Posted by Kenneth Jones on June 1,2012 | 12:38 PM

One other thought, for John Barton. We in America waste enormous amounts of food. There is absolutely no reason that chicken farms have to operate on such slim margins to feed the world. Chickens are kept the way they are because our delivery systems for getting food to consumers are enormously flawed and subject to whims of the market. It just floors me that anyone would claim farm animals have to live in squalor and pain in order for us to feed our communities. No one is going to go hungry because someone lets their chickens live like chickens instead of like products.

Posted by eve on May 31,2012 | 01:49 AM

I honestly can't believe some of the comments here. I have chickens in the yard. I love them. I am horrified by factory farming. But not every article about chickens needs to be an in-depth expose of that horror. I found this article really fascinating. Thank you for educating me about the history of our beloved pets.

Posted by eve on May 31,2012 | 01:09 AM

What a pitiful article. No mention of the suffering, physical abuse, and mutalation of the poor chickens. How can your magazine be so ignorant of how chickens are treated? In addition to the inhumane treatment and filth the chickens are kept in there is the spread of all kinds of disease from sick chickens and the filthy way they are slaughtered to the consumer. The baby chicks never see their mother, their beaks are immediately clipped (so they cannot groom or peck other chickens) and they are doomed to be stuffed into a cage to lay eggs. The male chicks are tossed alive into a grinder. Why doesn't your magazine make an effort to do some good and educate Americans on what they are consuming? Marge LeRouax Houston, Texas

Posted by Marge LeRouax on May 31,2012 | 02:52 PM

The anti-chicken industry comments by several of your readers are, of course right on. But what solution to world hunger are they offering instead? There are so many single-issue criticisms of this sort that end up not being particularly helpful. I doubt that any of the readers, no matter how much they condemn the chicken industry, are going to volunteer to starve to death. So what should we do instead? Apparently the reduction in world population by various zpg suggestions is not an option. In spite of widespread hunger, lack of water, disease and internecine warfare in places on this globe, we humans are not heeding the obvious warnings.

Posted by John Barton on May 31,2012 | 12:56 PM

 Zoroastrianism is not an "ancient" religion, it's flourishing, albeit not so much in Iran.

Posted by Jerry K. Sweeney on May 31,2012 | 11:23 AM

This reader is so often impressed with the range and articulation on the many relevant topics the magazine covers, but as a person who considers herself humane and who has witnessed too many documentaries on the unconscionable cruelties of confinement factory farming of many animals including chickens - a fine fowl I grew to admire in my native Northern England - I decided that I would never be complicit in such repellent moral. ethical outrages and am a healthy vegetarian. I recommend this to all persons who are similarly dismayed by Mans potential and actual propensity for cruelty to animals! I am ashamed of all who have no qualms about such vile treatment! Thank you!

Posted by Elaine LiveseyFassel on May 30,2012 | 05:30 PM

The true, inside story of the chicken is not told here. That story would be told from the chicken's point of view. It is a terrible, sad story of the destruction of a vibrant tropical-forest dwelling bird. From an ethical and empathic standpoint, there is nothing to celebrate in this article or in the saga that it recounts. For the record, grains are made of protein so it is not a matter of "turning grains into protein."

Posted by Karen Davis on May 30,2012 | 07:50 AM

While Tim O'Brien's chicken illustration on the cover of Smithsonian was marvelous - imaginative, colorful, witty - something to make the viewer smile - I found the photographs of plucked, headless, disemboweled carcasses set in the story to be unimaginative, tasteless and artless. Disgusting, even. I mean, come on, why not just photograph the carcasses standing on their wet entrails in a pool of drained blood while you were at it? Live chickens come in so many colors and shapes and sizes, with all kinds of personalities; why would you resort to tying doll clothes on dead, headless animals? Who wants to read a story illustrated with dead meat? Not I.

Posted by Katharine Brainard on May 29,2012 | 11:05 PM

I meant to mention in my previous comment, which has not (yet?) been posted, that I have been rescuing and rehabilitating chickens from the chicken and egg industries since 1985, and I know these birds intimately and well. In addition, I am the author of PRISONED CHICKENS, POISONED EGGS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE MODERN POULTRY INDUSTRY (1996; expanded and updated 2009). In addition, we are located in Virginia on the Delmarva Peninsula, one of the largest chicken-producing areas of the U.S., where at any given time a half a billion chickens sit in filthy 500-foot-long buildings, sealed up in almost total darkness. I urge people who want to "get inside" to read my book. Karen Davis, PhD, President. United Poultry Concerns. www.upc-online.org. Karen Davis Bio: www.upc-online.org/karenbio.htm

Posted by on May 29,2012 | 02:04 PM

While providing some of the history of the domestication of chickens, this is a selfish and insensitive article that, while supposedly about chickens, ignores them, their vitality, social sophistication, sensitivity, and the misery of their lives in production agriculture. During their 6 weeks of life, so-called "broiler" chickens live in semi-darkness on manure-soaked wood shavings, unchanged through several flocks of 30,000 or more birds in a toxic waste environment. They go to slaughter lame and in pain. They are infected with diseases. Instead of crowing over our subjugation of these vibrant birds, we should be grieved and ashamed of ourselves. We should stop eating them and their eggs and let them live as nature intended in the trophical forests, raising their families and being benign citizens of the earth, which they are, left to themselves, and which we, lacking planetary accountability, are not. Karen Davis, PhD, President. United Poultry Concerns. Machipongo, Virginia 23405. www.upc-online.org.

Posted by Karen Davis, PhD on May 29,2012 | 12:12 PM

In a totally non-"intellectual" way I want to thank you for putting all the funny chick pics online so I could grab them. LOVED them. Very funny. Smithsonian IS the most varied and interesting magazine and I often suggest it to friends.

Posted by Marie Lyon on May 28,2012 | 09:58 AM

The opening paragraph is one of the finest and funniest I've read in quite awhile.

Posted by Jeff on May 27,2012 | 02:03 PM

Why don't you mention the suffering of chickens in factory farms?

Posted by Sarah on May 26,2012 | 02:29 AM

With typical human arrogance, the story fails to mention three things: First, with more than 9 billion slaughtered every year in the United States alone (over 60 billion worldwide), chickens are the most victimized of all living beings. Second, the battery cages in which over 95% of laying hens are imprisoned on factory farms, are the most horrific form of incarceration even devised by human beings. Third, chickens are sentient, sensitive, intelligent and affectionate creatures, who suffer horribly from our mistreatment of them and who, left to their own devices, organize complex, highly functional, and generally peaceful societies suited to their physical and emotional needs. Publishing a lengthy article about chickens without addressing any of these issues is a moral abdication that I would hardly expect from a publication with the reputation for thoughfulness enjoyed by Smithsonian. The article is nothing short of shameful, and you should,indeed, be ashamed. Having published such a biased, morally deficient piece, you should now publish an article of equal length by someone who is sensitive to the ethical and environmental issues surrounding our treatment of chickens, such as Paul Shapiro of The Humane Society of the United States or Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns. Do the right thing, Smithsonian, and give chickens a break. As much as they've suffered and died at our hands--and now at your hands, at least indirectly--an article that tells their side of the story is the least they deserve.

Posted by Norm Phelps on May 25,2012 | 10:22 PM

I find it amazing that you managed to produce a 3,000-word encyclopedic article about chickens without a single mention that they are by far the most abused sentient living beings in the world. Each year, more than 500 million chickens are raised for the egg industry in the U.S. alone. The male half are suffocated or macerated upon hatching, while fully conscious. The female half are entombed for up to 18 months in filthy, cramped battery cages that deprive them of any opportunity to peck, brood, stretch their wings, or engage in any of their natural behaviors. At the end of their laying cycle, these animals are not even fit for human consumption, so another 9 billion "broiler" chickens are raised in the U.S. for that purpose and slaughtered at the infant age of seven weeks.

Posted by Alex Hershaft, Ph.D. on May 25,2012 | 09:12 PM

Great article, although I was surprised that no mention was made of the resurgence of chicken farming, particularly amongst smaller farms and urban dwellers.

Posted by TMark on May 24,2012 | 10:03 PM

"If they won't eat, let them drink!" Quoted from I, Claudius Robert Graves.

Posted by Jim Haviland on May 23,2012 | 09:55 PM

Great article. One point not mentioned: chicken factories are the source of important emerging new infections that affect humans, such as some strains of bird flo. In this way chicken could indeed change the course of history

Posted by rbnigh on May 23,2012 | 08:10 AM

To the wonderful magazine staff of Smithsonian; Thank you for producing a fine magazine filled with wondrous treasures: More knowledge of varied subjects and great photographs. I enjoy reading Smithsonian magazine and really soaking up your photographs beautiful colors. One issue that I am specifically writing this note about to you is the October 2011 cover. I keep it around to flip through at times when I have a few moments and enjoy it's great cover featuring a beautiful jaguar in stalking pose. He is appears to be glowing in reflected golden sunset. Thanks for that. The article in the issue about the jaguars habitat and a wildlife corridor starting from Mexico and going south all the way down into South America. Thanks for the article once more. I am a big cat lover of all types but I don't do anything to really help their cause. I am going to try to find out more about the jaguars and another cat I am crazy about, the cheetahs. I will close down now. I really had to tone down my expression of admiration of the photo of this jaguar. All the best to you all, Thomas Cole, Redmond, Washington

Posted by Thomas Cole on May 22,2012 | 11:13 PM

Bravo! Indeed this is a story to crow about! Prior to the rise of chickenomics after World War II, chicken was a luxury meal in the US, and "a chicken in every pot" was Herbert Hoover's equivalent to JFK's quest for a moon landing. My mother used to tell me that chicken salad on menus of certain restaurants was suspect "because it was adulterated with chopped veal, which was cheaper",and she only ate chicken salad that she'd made for herself.

Posted by Michael Whiteman on May 22,2012 | 01:18 PM



Advertisement


Advertisement

Follow Us





First Name
Last Name
Address 1
Address 2
City
State   Zip
Email


Travel with Smithsonian




Smithsonian Store