Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (34 page)

Though dressed simply in his chef whites, he gives off a feudal air sitting behind a massive desk in his multimillion-dollar half-­timbered complex. Across the square is a store where you can buy Georges Blanc wine, snail pâté, pheasant terrine, and tripe packed in Calvados. There is an imitation traditional dovecote in the park nearby. Our chat is more audience than interview. Blanc describes his successful effort to fight off an attempt by farmers in the 1970s to lower standards so they could sell more birds. “It was tradition versus change, and we won,” he adds, a three-star culinary general describing a hard-fought battle. He makes an incredulous face when I ask him if he ever uses fowl from factory farms. “I
never
cook an industrial chicken!” Only the finest-quality products go into his dishes, Blanc adds with a touch of Gallic indignation.

Two or three times a week, he partakes of the Bresse chicken. Despite his concerns about production, Blanc is confident that the bird will continue to hold top rank among poultry aficionados who travel from as far away as Japan to sample his famous cuisine. The regional government provides start-up funds to young farmers who want to maintain the tradition. His business, he adds, is to cater to his specialized clientele, not to worry about the future of the industrial chicken.

Blanc glances at his watch, and I excuse myself. He does not ask me to stay for dinner, nor can I afford the $122 price tag for the Bresse chicken dish listed on his restaurant menu, although, granted, that includes foie gras and Champagne. Instead I return to Bourg-en-Bresse for a leisurely meal at the restaurant Le Français in the heart of town. The old-fashioned brasserie with its belle epoque decor has a livelier and friendlier feel than the stuffy Blanc dining room. Soon after I arrive, there is not an empty seat on this chilly and damp Tuesday evening in November.

What arrives on the plate is a bit of a shock—a bare roasted leg, its nub still a purplish hue, covered in a white sauce, stark and visceral, unencumbered by vegetables or other distractions. The first taste re
minds me vaguely of turkey, but moister and denser. Unlike regular chicken, the skin is buttery, and even the tendons are tasty. Skeptical of the hype, I'm taken by surprise. This is chicken that, thankfully, really does not taste like chicken.

Bresse poultry will never feed the world, or even many individuals beyond Blanc, his wealthy clients, and a small number of people on a splurge. But other French labels requiring lots of outdoor space and time, careful feeding, and local control have captured a quarter of the national market. One U.S. businessman, frustrated by the industrial food system in his own country, is attempting to import that concept as part of an ambitious dream of transforming the way Americans buy and eat chicken. When I get back from Bresse, I look up Ron Joyce at Joyce Farms outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

He is an unlikely revolutionary. Joyce was raised on a thirty-­acre farm in western North Carolina, and his father worked for Holly Farms—an early innovator in packaging chicken parts for ­supermarkets—before starting his own business shipping chickens to fast-food businesses like Bojangles'. Now fifty-seven, Ron took over in 1981 when his father passed away. Soon Tyson muscled into the market, buying up Holly Farms, and began battling with another titan, ConAgra Foods, for control of the growing fast-food market. Joyce sold to ConAgra and began thinking about a specialty business.

Then, a decade ago, he took a trip to Paris. “It made me angry,” he says in his Carolina accent as trucks on I-40 boom past his office window. “I tasted things that I didn't know existed. The butcher shops were stacked with an astounding variety of poultry that you could buy fresh every day. I came back to the richest country in the world and we were all eating one chicken—a Cornish Cross that grows faster and faster through genetic selection and has no flavor.”

Unlike many slow-food and animal activists, Joyce blames not corporate greed but consumer apathy for the sad state of poultry in the United States. “People vote with their pocketbook. In Europe, they will pay a lot more for their food. Here, you put boneless chicken breast on sale for a dollar ninety-nine and it triples your sales.” Whether chicken or carrots, it all comes down to price for the average American, and
industry races to oblige. Profit margins for the poultry business, compared to pharmaceutical or other manufacturers, are thin and subject to larger forces like the weather and price of corn. So companies shave costs and prices to maintain an edge over competitors. “I want the consumer to take responsibility,” he says. When his kids wanted to stop recently for a thirty-nine-cent taco, Joyce shuddered. “I told them, I don't
want
a thirty-nine-cent taco. I mean, how low can it go?”

Overuse of antibiotics, adding arsenic compounds to feed to improve digestion, soaking slaughtered birds in dirty chlorinated water, and then adding chemicals to kill dangerous bacteria are the result of this relentless push to lower costs. So are birds with massive breasts and weak legs that must be euthanized because they can't stand up to get to feed and water bins. “You can't put an American chicken outside,” Joyce adds, struggling to contain his outrage. “Its immune system is not developed enough in six weeks, when it is shipped to the processing plant.” Such practices, particularly the chlorinated water procedure, explain why the European Union bans imports of all U.S. poultry. The National Chicken Council is trying desperately to overturn this embargo to gain access to large and profitable European markets like France.

As an alternative to this race to the bottom, and to find a niche unoccupied by the big corporations, Joyce set out to copy the French approach. He began by selling a free-range and organic chicken, but quickly realized that the genetics of American birds are all the same, no matter how you feed and care for them. The meat was still tasteless. Marinating was the only way to put flavor back in the bird. Then he discovered Label Rouge. It is Bresse-lite, with a price tag that many consumers could afford. I had seen it in the display cases of Bourg-en-Bresse shops for about half the price of its more famous cousin. “This chicken feeds outdoors, but with less room, and is slaughtered after ten or twelve weeks rather than sixteen,” one butcher with a shop across the street from the town's live poultry market had explained.

First, Joyce sought out aging Carolina farmers who had raised heritage birds in the days before the Chicken of Tomorrow dom
inated. Then he imported eggs from France, though his French suppliers were skeptical. “They laughed and said Americans would never pay for it.” Joyce imitated the Label Rouge approach to care, feeding, and hand processing. Enter the Poulet Rouge de Fermier du Piedmont, the red farm chicken of central North Carolina, though it does sound better in French. Joyce cultivates chefs along the East Coast, many of whom had no idea that the chickens they used were genetically identical to those sold to McDonald's. How much value can you add with sauce? By educating these influential players in the American food system, Joyce hopes to create a demand for a bird that both tastes better and is more humanely grown.

Imported eggs, smaller flocks, more grain, and nearly twice the growing time means a price at least twice that of a Tyson chicken. Joyce is betting that improved taste will be the main driver in bringing customers to his door. The animal welfare aspect to his system, however, is what impresses Leah Garces, who directs the U.S. office of Compassion in World Farming. She says that improving the lives of American chickens hinges on better living conditions and slower growth. Doubling their life span of forty-five days is key to ensuring adequate bone growth before they begin to put on weight. And with natural light, more space, and greater variety—straw bales, planks, and ladders give them something to do in their coops—the Joyce chickens are scored among the best treated in the industry. They are not a heritage variety, since they come from one of the three companies that controls 80 percent of all chicken breeding stock, but they are an older traditional breed called the red naked neck that is quite different from the ill-proportioned, fat-breasted, and thin-legged chickens in the United States.

Joyce introduces me to his son, who works in the next office, and the three of us go on a tour of the plant. Their casual and frank manner is a stark contrast to Big Poultry. Not only do they let me see what I want but they answer every question without hesitation. I'm welcome to take pictures and film. Our first stop is the hatchery across the parking lot, where two men are moving eggs out of an incubator. With a capacity of fifteen thousand eggs, it is tiny by industry stan
dards. Then we walk into the slaughtering area. That job takes place in the morning, and two employees in bright-blue smocks are mopping up the gleaming stainless steel equipment as we walk through. The birds live within a one-and-a-half-hour radius, so travel time is minimal, an important factor in welfare and meat quality. The trucks back up to the loading dock and employees take the live birds, hang them upside down, stun them electrically, and then slit their throats. A hot-water bath, though not hot enough to remove flavor, loosens the feathers. The remains are then eviscerated by hand.

If a chicken doesn't go through rigor mortis, it will be tough on the plate, and U.S. plants plunge the carcass into cold chlorinated water to cool it down. The birds can absorb the water, which adds weight—and therefore profit—but they also can absorb unwelcome bacteria in the bath. Often a chemical spray is added to kill the bugs. Joyce, as do many Europeans, uses fans to air cool the birds instead. It takes a little longer, but it is a cleaner process. In the next hall, women are deboning birds by hand. The meat is packaged, boxed, and shipped to customers. Though there is modern machinery, a good deal of hand skill goes into the process. The pace is slower and the quantities produced are minuscule compared to the massive poultry processing plants in the area. Five thousand Rouge chickens leave his plant a week. Just a couple of hours away, one of the world's largest poultry plants, owned by Mountaire Farms, produces millions of chickens per month.

Yet Joyce is creating an alternative, however small and elite, in a country with shockingly few options between the industrial chicken and vegetarianism. He's branched out to include other birds such as the guinea fowl and turkey, working with breeders to improve taste while keeping welfare in mind. A few weeks after my visit to the Winston-Salem plant, I'm surprised to see ring-tailed pheasant on a restaurant menu in my own town. This is the bird imported from China in the 1880s for the benefit of Western hunters. Yes, the waitress confirms after checking with the kitchen, it comes from Joyce Farms. Confident that the bird led a better life than any industrial chicken, and grateful to have the alternative, I order it. Tender and dense but not too gamey, it is delicious.

12.

The Intuitive Physicist

I looked at the Chicken endlessly, and I wondered. What lay behind the veil of animal secrecy?

—William Grimes,
My Fine Feathered Friend

H
ens might be skittish and roosters horny, but fowl in the ancient and medieval worlds were rarely considered unintelligent. Their role in royal menageries, religious rituals, and healing potions made them worthy of respect, emulation, and even awe. In 1847, as The Fancy took flight in Britain and America, a New York magazine published a ridiculous riddle that, however, did not ridicule the animal. “Why does a chicken cross the street?” The answer was, of course, “Because it wants to get on the other side!” In L. Frank Baum's 1907
Ozma of Oz
,
Dorothy Gale survives a shipwreck thanks to a poultry crate and a smart and savvy hen named Billina that guides the innocent Kansas girl through a strange land.

This view of the bird as a sagacious creature went all the way back to Aesop, but it began to erode in the wake of World War I and the rise of mass poultry production. As Americans left the farm, moved to cities, and bought refrigerators, live chickens began to slowly vanish from daily life, and attitudes toward the bird hardened. “Get away, yuh dumb cluck!” yells a character in Edmund Wilson's 1929 novel,
I Thought of Daisy
. The term
birdbrain
first turns up in 1936, and the insults
to chicken out
and
chickenshit
were first used during World War II.
Chicken Little
made its screen debut in 1943, with hysterical fowl standing in for Germans manipulated by Hitler. The only thing dumber than a chicken was a geek, the sideshow freak who would bite the head off a chicken, a term popularized in a 1946 novel and 1947 film noir starring Tyrone Power.

Three-quarters of a century after the creature became the butt of jokes, scientists are discovering that our species shares a surprising number of traits with the humble chicken. The Italian neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara recently demonstrated, for example, that just-born chicks are natural mathematicians. They can track little plastic balls appearing and disappearing behind screens, even when he tried to fool them by moving some balls to another screen. Humans generally fail at the task until they are four years old.

And chicks can do more than add and subtract. They can understand geometry, recognize faces, retain memories, and make logical deductions that Vallortigara insists exceed the capabilities of some of his graduate students. Other neuroscientists are finding that chickens practice self-control, alter their message to fit the receiver, and, in some instances, can feel empathy. Some of these cognitive abilities equal or surpass those of assorted primates, and it is possible that the chicken possesses a primitive self-consciousness.

Vallortigara's lab is in the cellar of a sixteenth-century convent in Rovereto, an Italian town in the foothills of the Alps. A dapper man in a light-blue shirt and silk tie, Vallortigara was born here in the decade after World War II, when Italy was poor and flocks were critical to survival. “Not to have chickens was not to have eggs,” he says, and that often meant going hungry. As a child, he grew curious about how animals perceived the world.

The idea that animals have mental abilities similar to those of humans has been controversial since the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes declared that they lack minds, reason, and a soul. Animals communicate anger, fear, or hunger with sounds, he noted, but they don't speak and therefore lack the inner voice that
is the very basis of human thought. His famous “I think therefore I am” might be better stated as “I speak therefore I am.” Animals might feel pain or pleasure—“I deny sensation to no animal,” he wrote—but they lack that human quality of greater awareness or cognition. Philosophers, scientists, religious figures, and animal activists have been arguing this point ever since.

Neuroscientists like Vallortigara gather hard data on animal perception. They have learned that chickens see the world in far greater depth and detail than we do. Mammals began as nocturnal creatures to avoid predators like day-loving dinosaurs, while birds preferred the light and therefore have far superior color vision. A red jungle fowl boasts rich reds and blues and greens in its feathers, but the bird perceives a dazzling combination of colors extending into the ultraviolet and beyond human vision. Chickens also use each eye for separate purposes, allowing them to focus on one object—such as potential food—while keeping another eye peeled for predators. This accounts for the odd and jerky head movements of a hen or rooster.

The chicken's excellent visual system was once thought to be offset by its inability to smell. Recently, a research team studied a domestic flock that did not react when presented with elephant and antelope dung, but grew alert and stopped eating when placed near the droppings of wild dogs and tigers. Like humans, chickens may rely more on their eyes than their noses, but they can catch a whiff of danger. The bird also recalls faces of humans and chickens, and can respond to that individual based on a previous experience. Seeing a favorite hen, for example, will cause a rooster's sperm production to suddenly increase.

Scientists once scoffed at the idea that fowl have a sophisticated method of communication. “Even if chickens had a grammar,” the cognitive psychologist David Premack wrote in the 1970s, “they would have nothing interesting to say.” Since then, a German linguist has concluded that all fowl have about thirty distinct sounds matched to specific behaviors. For example, the bird uses separate calls to signal whether a predator is approaching by land or by air.

Vallortigara studies chickens primarily because they are inexpensive, hardy, and easy to maintain. Most birds, like mammals, require
extensive care of their young, while chickens emerge from their eggs largely capable of fending for themselves and ready to take part in experiments before the external environment influences their behavior. In the old convent cellar, a team of seven PhDs and assorted graduate students in orange shoes and white coats bustle through the narrow and brightly lit hallways, which nevertheless have the air of a dungeon. Vallortigara takes me first to a dark, warm room filled with fertilized eggs that will soon serve as test subjects.

The experiments focus on filial imprinting, in which newly hatched birds attach themselves to the first moving object they see. The researchers show a chick a particular object such as a red cylinder, place the animal in a transparent pen, and hide the cylinder behind one of two opaque screens. The transparent pen then is covered with a screen, and after a delay of up to one minute, they let the chick go to the screen of its choice. The bird finds the imprinted object on the first try, demonstrating a well-developed memory. In another experiment, the cylinder is hidden behind a screen that covers the entire object, while the neighboring screen has a different height or width that would reveal a portion of the object. The bird invariably picks the one disguising the cylinder, a sign of what Vallortigara calls “an intuitive physics.”

Chicks also are capable of adding and subtracting. A young bird presented with an identical cylinder that disappears behind one screen and several that disappear behind the other screen will go to the screen with the larger number of cylinders. If the researchers move a cylinder from one screen to the other, so that the second screen holds more objects, the chick will go to the screen with the most objects. In another experiment, six identical containers are set up in an arc, all of which are the same distance away from the bird but only one of which has feed, and the chick is allowed to find which one has the food. Switch the food container to another position, and the chick will still choose the correct one.

Vallortigara and colleagues also recently determined that chickens have brains with distinct right and left lobes, an attribute long thought to be solely human. Our left hemisphere controls language, the tool that Descartes believed set us apart from other beings, while our right
hemisphere orients us to the people and objects around us. A developing chick's left eye is covered while the right eye faces the shell of the egg. ­Exposing the right eye of the embryo to light in its last three days in the egg weakens the bird's visual processing. Once hatched and faced with pebbles mixed with grain, the left side of the normal chicken brain judges what is pebble and what is grain and then pecks only the food, while the altered chick cannot distinguish between the two sets of objects.

Chickens make use of the different halves of their brains for specialized tasks, and, Vallortigara suggests, they can distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. In another experiment, chicks are shown random points of light as well as points of light that mimic a walking hen, cat, or other animal. Chicks invariably prefer the lights that imitate the motion of a biological creature, though not necessarily the hen-like image itself. Normal two-day-old human babies also make this distinction, but many autistic children and adolescents cannot. Vallortigara's team is exploring whether the disorder is linked to this instinctual ability to interpret biological motion. By pinpointing the genes operating in chicks during biological motion cognition, Vallortigara hopes to understand the mechanisms that might go awry in autistics, a first step in treating the disorder.

In 2012, an Australian philosopher reviewed the scientific literature and concluded “it appears likely that one familiar species, the chicken . . . exhibits primitive self-consciousness.” As a result, he added, “chickens warrant a degree of moral standing that falls short of that enjoyed by persons, but which exceeds the minimal standing of merely conscious entities.” They not only can feel sensation, as Descartes knew, but they may know that they exist and, therefore, that they suffer.

While Vallortigara studies what makes chicks tick, other scientists are probing how chickens feel about living conditions in today's industrial poultry business. Animal-rights activists and companies that sell eggs are locked in a battle over how hens are treated, and the research results could determine the fate of billions of birds for decades to come.

The father of today's egg-laying hen was animal lover, sometime vegetarian, and pacifist Henry Wallace, an Iowan who served in President Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet and as his vice president during World War II. A farmer deeply concerned with rampant rural hunger during the Depression, Wallace was convinced that making a more productive chicken could help banish poverty. He founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company in 1926, and his son began to breed commercial hybrid layers in 1936. By the middle of World War II, the business was selling laying Leghorns. Its successor, Hy-Line International, is now the world's largest single producer of egg-laying hens. White Leghorns, which produce white eggs, and Rhode Island Reds, which make brown eggs, are the world's two primary laying varieties. American hatcheries churn out 500 million egg-laying hens a year, and Wallace's home state of Iowa produces nearly twice as many eggs as any other U.S. state. The hens lay more than 75 billion eggs a year.

Nine out of ten laying hens in the United States live in wire enclosures called battery cages. Eight birds may be assigned to each cage, without the space to open their wings. Their heads can poke out far enough to peck at the feed bin that runs alongside cages stacked in several tiers, and their waste falls through the wires onto a conveyer belt below. There is no place to roost, dust bathe, or lay eggs in private, three behaviors common to all hens. Vicious pecking, avian hysteria, mysterious deaths, and even cannibalism are often the result. Birds are debeaked, without anesthesia, to limit injuries as they churn out eggs. Disturbing conditions like fatty liver and swollen head syndrome, mouth ulcers, and feet deformities are common. The noise is deafening, the air filled with ammonia, and the animals have a crazed look.

“In no way can these living conditions meet the demands of a complex nervous system designed to form a multitude of memories and make complex decisions,” concludes one poultry researcher. “A gallinaceous madhouse,” is how a shaken Texas naturalist summed up a typical laying shed. Wallace's vision of affordable eggs for U.S. consumers came true, but there is growing consumer unease with the methods used to produce the billions of eggs laid in the United States annually.

Chickens are excluded from U.S. laws regulating humane treatment of animals raised as food, and there are no international regulations. Banned in the European Union, battery cages are being phased out in a growing number of U.S. states. Costco and Walmart sell only cage-free eggs under their private brands, while Burger King and Subway, among other food purveyors, are committing to non-battery eggs as well. Yet scientists know little about the impact of various sorts of confinement on chickens. A label designating eggs produced in a cage-free environment might trigger images of happy hens tripping across a sunny meadow, but the vast majority of these birds are raised like broilers on the floor of vast, enclosed sheds or in multistory aviaries and are subject to violence, disease, and neuroses. We might feel better, but do the chickens?