"How the Chicken of Tomorrow became the Chicken of the World"
How the Chicken of Tomorrow became the Chicken of the World
by Dale Wiehoff, originally published by Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy | Mar 29, 2013
From The Chicken of Tomorrow, 1948.
Rotisserie chicken, chicken nuggets, Kung pao chicken, chicken livers, Buffalo wings, chicken Kiev, lemon chicken, chicken soup, barbecue chicken, chicken salad, fried chicken—there is no denying that the U.S. loves chicken. According to the USDA, poultry production exceeds $20 billion annually, with over 43 billion pounds of meat produced. The National Chicken Council estimates per capita consumption of chicken in the U.S. at over 80 pounds a year. What’s surprising is that it hasn’t always been this way. This is the story of how an Italian immigrant farmer and his son helped launch the industrial production of chicken.
Prior to World War II, chicken was reserved for special occasions. If you lived on a farm back then, the arrival of visiting relatives meant roast chicken for dinner. Sunday dinner with the family was often graced with chicken and peas. Farm flocks were generally the domain of women and children to earn some cash selling eggs. Back then, chickens for eating were a by-product of egg production (that is, chickens would be butchered only when their laying days were done), with the modern broiler industry only starting to take shape in the 1920s and 30s in places like the Delmarva Peninsula on the Atlantic coast.
Flock sizes grew from a rooster and few hens to some flocks with 10,000 or more chickens, but it wasn’t until the 1950s and 60s when vertical integration of the broiler industry occurred and chicken factories with hundreds of thousands of birds appeared. Before that, flocks were an assortment of breeds, with names like Jersey Giant, California Gray, Wyandotte and Rhode Island Red. The turning point for industrial chicken came when the Atlantic and Pacific supermarket chain held a national contest for the “Chicken of Tomorrow.”
A&P, Arbor Acres and the Chicken of Tomorrow
In 1945, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (or the A&P as it was universally known), the country’s largest poultry retailer, sponsored a national contest in partnership with USDA to produce a breed of chicken that would grow bigger, faster and put on weight in all the right places. The idea that a supermarket and the USDA would partner to develop a breed of chicken seems odd today, but the A&P was no ordinary supermarket chain.
In the age of Wal-Mart and Target, A&P looks almost quaint, but in the history of food retailing, A&P was the dominant force for many decades, having created the model of high-volume, low-cost food marketing. Marc Levinson’s The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America tells the story of how a small tea-importing and animal hides company grew starting in the 1860s into the largest retailer in the world, reaching annual sales of $1 billion and owning over 16,000 stores nationwide by the end of the 1920s.
(Much More of "Good Intentions Gone Wrong...and How the "Factory Farmed Chickens" we eat today EVERYWHERE...came about at...
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-03-29/how-the-chicken-of-tomorrow-became-the-chicken-of-the-world
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