It wasn’t Henri IV’s Sunday poule au pot or Herbert Hoover’s less sexy-sounding chicken in every pot, but even in the mid-20th century chicken was a rare treat, not a cheap meal. What has happened to transform the noble Gallus gallus domesticus into what Paul R. Josephson startlingly calls ‘a genetically formed meat machine’? Chicken is a serious subject, even when it’s not the chlorine-washed kind the US President wants to foist on us.
I can remember buying a distressingly uneviscerated chicken in a Co-op in Cornwall in the late 1960s; and even ordinary supermarket fowl then came with neck and giblets neatly packaged inside them. You can still buy tubs of chicken livers, but what has become of all those gizzards? Mind you, we know where the feet go — the Chinese love them.
Some of you will have noticed that chicken (apart from the expensive poulet de Bresse) doesn’t taste as it used to, and is less firm in texture than before. That’s because not even 1 per cent are now ‘free range’ (spending at least half their life uncaged in the open air). The demand for KFC (as opposed to the genuine fried chicken that was the family staple of my own Kentucky childhood) is now so great that France, according to Josephson, is ‘the fourth largest producer and consumer of chicken in the world’, and Saudis, South Africans, Spaniards and Brits are net importers, while ‘Americans consumed in one day 1.3 billion chicken wings during the broadcast of the 2018 Superbowl alone’.
What has happened is that this feathered relative of the dinosaurs has undergone a kind of forced evolution into the ‘broiler chicken’, engineered to be the cheapest meat of all, and ready for slaughter at four to seven weeks.
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