The Chicken of Tomorrow

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

00:00:11
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. So I don't really remember exactly where I stumbled over this, but it was one of those things that got an overlapping oh really what and oh yeah? That tracks in my brain like it was a simultaneous surprised, disbelief and total lack of surprise all at the same time. And a lot of the world today chickens that are raised for their meat are just a lot different from the chickens of a century ago. They are so much bigger. That's not the surprising part. The surprising part was that a big reason for this is that in the nineteen forties, the US Department of Agriculture and the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company aka A and P Supermarkets, they teamed up to hold a contest to see who could breed the mediest, most efficient, most visually appealing chicken. So this is a story that combines the history of factory farming with the history of supermarkets, and it has had just an enormous impact on farming and on food all around.

00:01:19
Speaker 1: The world.

00:01:20
Speaker 2: Also, this is just one piece of the greater history of the industrialization of agriculture. We could have pretty similar episodes about other ways that people have influenced other animals and plants to make them more productive or easier to harvest, or generally more profitable, although those other stories might not have the A and P involved. Today's episode, though, is about raising chickens as food for people, and a lot of the general patterns that we're talking about are really not unique to chickens. So if you're thinking, why aren't they talking about cows because this episode is about the chicken episode, Yeah, So we're gonna start with some background on chickens and chicken breeding. Today's chickens were first domesticated from red jungle fowl or Gallus gallas, which is a tropical bird native to Southeast Asia. Based on research we talked about in one of our Unearthed episodes last year, this probably happened in what's now central Thailand sometime between sixteen fifty and twelve fifty BCE, but other research has suggested other parts of Asia as well, and in some cases on an earlier timeline. The domestic chicken or Gallus gallus domesticus was then introduced to the rest of Asia, Europe, and Africa, reaching a lot of the eastern hemisphere by about eight hundred BCE. Chickens were also carried from the Indian subcontinent to islands in the Pacific, and from there to the Americas. Chickens were introduced into what's now Chile at least a century before Columbus's first voyage to the Americas in fourteen ninety two. Colonists and slave traders also introduced chickens from Europe and Africa into North America starting around the seventeenth century, so chickens were introduced to the Americas from both the East and the west. Europeans brought domestic chickens to New Zealand in seventeen seventy three and to Australia in seventeen eighty eight.

00:03:20
Speaker 1: In a lot of places, but certainly not everywhere, Archaeological evidence suggests that for centuries chickens were mostly associated with the wealthiest, most elite people, and in Europe, the oldest archaeological evidence of domesticated chickens suggests they were not being eaten as food. Their skeletons are intact and there are not any cut or bite marks on those bones. Eventually, though, people in Europe and in Europe's colonies in the Americas did start to eat chickens. For the most part, though the chickens were not being raised for that purpose. They were being raised for their eggs, so hens would be killed and eaten after their egg production slowed down or stopped, or maybe if they never started laying in the first place. The meat from older hens tended to be tough, so their meat was typically stewed or otherwise slow cooked in some way to make it more tender. The other major source of meat was male chickens or cockrels that would be culled out of the flock before they were old enough to start fertilizing the hens eggs, and then they would be fattened.

00:04:28
Speaker 2: Up for slaughter.

00:04:29
Speaker 1: In a lot of places, all of this was considered women's work, sometimes with the help of their children. Women raised the chickens, gathered the eggs, and slaughtered, dressed, and cooked them. They often earned money for their households by selling extra eggs or selling the chickens that were being slaughtered. Prior to the US Civil War, chickens were also often the only livestock that enslaved people were allowed to raise for themselves, so enslaved people would raise chickens for food. In some cases they were able to sell the eggs or the meat to their enslavers or to other people in the area to earn their own money. Beyond that, though, chicken just wasn't an everyday food for most people. Before the development of reliable refrigeration and freezing technology, cockrels were usually a seasonal food after they were culled from the flock in late spring. Chicken meat was also generally a lot more expensive than it is today. There were fewer chickens being sold, and the chickens themselves were a lot smaller, so to many consumers, chicken was not an everyday staple. It was for special occasions or Sunday dinners, or was maybe even a luxury that was usually out of reach.

00:05:43
Speaker 2: Over the course of the nineteenth century, people in Europe and North America started developing new breeds of domestic chicken. That's built on the work of Robert Bakewell, who lived in the eighteenth century during the British Agricultural Revolution. We talked about this period and episode on Jethro Tull and the Seed Drill, which came out in December of twenty twenty one. This was a period of massive change in virtually every aspect of British agriculture, including land use, animal husbandry, methods for preparing and using the soil for crops, and the development of new agricultural machines. Bakewell's work was specifically in livestock breeding. In a lot of ways, Bakewell was building on what was already known for millennia. People have understood that living beings can inherit various traits from their ancestors, although the start of genetics as a modern science was still decades away when Bakewell was living, and breeds of animals already existed all over the world, adapted to things like the environment they were living in, the food they had to eat, and what.

00:06:49
Speaker 1: People wanted them to do. People have also been selectively breeding animals, at least to some extent, for kind of as long as we've been domesticating them. But Well was particularly careful and methodical about what he was doing, and he established practices that became really influential.

00:07:08
Speaker 2: For example, he set specific goals for the traits that he wanted to focus on and what he wanted to achieve with those traits. He separated his herds and flocks according to the animal's sex, allowing only specifically chosen animals to breed with one another. He chose animals that had the traits that he wanted to encourage, and then he encouraged those same traits even more through inbreeding. He called this breeding in and in. He also culled animals that had undesirable traits out of his herds and flocks, and he helped popularize the practice of using male animals with particularly desirable traits for stud This not only encouraged those same traits among other farmers animals, but it also demonstrated whether Bakewell had successfully bred an animal that could pass those traits on. This carefully managed breeding had a big impact on the animals bake Well worked with. In particular, he developed or improved on breeds of cattle so that they would be well suited for work while also providing good meat, rather than primarily being working animals with meat as an afterthought. He similarly developed sheep for both their meat and their wool, rather than primarily wool production. His two biggest successes were probably in his breed improvements to Leicestershire longhorn cattle and Leicester sheep, but there were also downsides. It's possible that his use and promotion of inbreeding contributed to health problems among the animals, including making some breeds of sheep more susceptible to the prion disease known as scrapie. To return to chickens, in the nineteenth century, people in Europe and North America started using these same basic ideas to develop new breeds of rabbits and chickens and to enhances existing breeds. By the eighteen fifties, breeding animals and plants to enhance their beauty or their uniqueness was known as fancying. In addition to breeding rabbits and chickens, fanciers started establishing official standards for the various breeds, something that would later be done for pigeons, dogs, cats, and other animals.

00:09:22
Speaker 1: And now you know why magazines are called things like cat fancy.

00:09:26
Speaker 2: I always thought that it just meant fancy. Yes, I did not realize there was a thread that was about making them more distinctive and beautiful.

00:09:38
Speaker 1: This early interest in chicken fancying contributed to a more robust understanding of inheritance and breeding among chicken farmers than among farmers who worked with a lot of other animals. That's not to suggest that other farmers were clueless, just as a general rule, chicken breeding was a little bit farther along in the early twentieth century. There was also a lot of overlap among fanciers, breeders, and geneticists. It wasn't until the late nineteen teens that animal breeding and genetics started to be seen as two different but intersecting fields.

00:10:11
Speaker 2: All this together means that when a contest was proposed in the nineteen forties to see which breeder could produce the best broiler chicken, chicken farmers were really ready for it, and we will get to that after a sponsor break. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a couple of innovations really affected the way US chicken farmers could develop their flocks. The first was the decision of US Postmaster General as Burlison to allow live chicks to be sent through the mail. That decision was made in nineteen eighteen, so as chicks are hatching, they consumed the last of yoke from inside of their eggs. And that provides them with nourishment for about the first forty eight to seventy two hours of their life. That allows chicks who are being cared for by their mothers to survive for a couple of days until all of their siblings have hatched and she's able to leave the nest. It also allows chicks to survive a couple of days in the mail in a specially designed box that's made to physically protect them while also making sure they have good airflow and are at the right temperature in transit. The other development was the first electrically heated egg incubator, which debuted in nineteen twenty three. This was not the first egg incubator by any stretch. There is evidence of incubators in both Egypt and China as far back as four thousand years ago. These were buildings heated with fires, which required someone to be on hand around the clock to keep the temperature steady and to tend to the eggs. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the incubators had been developed that incorporated thermostats so a person didn't have to monitor the temperature quite so closely.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: Some of these were like small cabinets heated with hot water, and others were whole rooms or even buildings, but electric models were easier to manage as long as the person had access to a reliable electricity source.

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Speaker 2: This meant that farmers who wanted to add new chickens to their flocks could buy chicks and have those chicks sent to them through the mail rather than losing their laying hens for about three weeks while they incubated their own eggs, and people who sold the chicks could do the same. They could produce more chicks than they would be if the hens were incubating them, because the hens eventually stopped laying new eggs to sit on them until they hatch. At about the same time that all this was happening, refrigeration was also making it possible for people to ship eggs and meat over greater distances and to store them for longer in their homes. The first refrigerated cars were developed in the late nineteenth century and used ice tanks and insulation to keep their contents cool. People were also using ice boxes to keep foods cool in their homes in the nineteenth century.

00:13:11
Speaker 1: Although that required a steady supply of large blocks of ice The first mechanical refrigerator for home use in the US debuted in nineteen thirteen. The first mechanically cooled trucks were developed in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties.

00:13:27
Speaker 2: Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various people in the United States started trying to raise chickens specifically for their meat rather than for their eggs. But the first person to be really successful at it was the Seal Steel of Ocean Viewed, Delaware. This is on the del Marva Peninsula that's east of Washington, d c. And Baltimore, and the peninsula includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. That's where its name comes from. In nineteen twenty three, Steel ordered fifty chicks to supplement her flock of laying hens, and somewhere in that process, an extra zero got added to her order, and she wound up with five hundred of them. She and her husband, Wilmer, decided to make the best of this situation and built sheds to house these extra chicks in. Once they were grown, weighing about two and a half pounds apiece, she was able to sell them for sixty seven cents a pound.

00:14:27
Speaker 1: The next year, Steel ordered more chickens on purpose, this time one thousand of them. Eventually, her broiler business became so large and successful that her husband left his job at the Coast Guard to help her with it. By nineteen twenty six, they were raising ten thousand birds a year. Their business was so successful that they eventually bought a yacht, although they were killed in an explosion aboard that yacht on October seventh, nineteen forty.

00:14:54
Speaker 2: Cecil Steel's first accidental chick order is often cited as the start of the Delmarva Peninsula's poultry industry, and in nineteen seventy four, one of her original broiler houses was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Delmarva Peninsula also became a major source of chicken meat for Jewish communities and cities in the northeastern United States, particularly New York. Chicken meat was more popular among Jewish people than among many other groups because of Jewish dietary laws. At first, most of the chickens that were raised in the area were transported to New York, where they would be processed according to Jewish law. Kosher processing plants started to be built on the peninsula in the nineteen thirties. Other discoveries were being made around these same years as well. A big one involved improvements to chicken feed, especially the nutrient content of that feed. People had started figuring out that specific foods seemed to prevent or treat specific diseases in the eighteenth century, but the first vitamins weren't isolated until the early twentieth century. More nutritious feed wasn't necessarily about a better happier life for the chickens, though. Farmers had figured out that chickens grew much faster if they were confined indoors rather than being outdoors. Being indoors also helped protect them from predators. Outdoor chickens usually stop laying in the winter, but keeping them indoors with controlled heating and artificial light also meant that they could provide more consistent egg supply year round. But without exposure to natural sunlight, confined chickens developed leg weakness and other physical issues because their bodies couldn't produce enough vitamin D. Vitamin D was first discovered in the nineteen twenties, and by the nineteen thirties farmers were adding cod liver oil, which is rich in vitamin D into their feed, making it more possible to confine them indoors. Of course, being confined indoors also allowed diseases to spread through flocks very rapidly. In the early twentieth century, a major threat was best Sillery white diarrhea caused by Salmonilla polorum bacteria. People started looking for ways to prevent illnesses among chickens while still keeping them confined. For example, one of the businesses Cceal and Wilmer Steel moved into toward the end of their lives involved providing vaccines for chickens. By nineteen thirty five, the US Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Industry had launched the National Poultry Improvement Plan to try to improve sanitation and reduce disease at chicken farms, test birds for illnesses, and encourage consistency and uniformity among the flocks. Diseases continue to be an issue in the poultry industry, though, for example, other species of Salmonilla bacteria are a major source of food borne illness from both chicken and eggs. In the United States. Pick In rose in popularity during World War II as a food source because it wasn't being subject to rationing in the way most other meats were. People who had the space were also encouraged to keep backyard flocks for both eggs and meat. That was something that had been encouraged during World War One as well. Although rationing ended in the United States for everything but sugar by the end of nineteen forty five, there were still shortages of a lot of meats after the war, as the United States provided food aid to other countries. So chicken meat continued to be in high demand, and that's what ultimately led to an effort to basically redesign the chicken, moving away from birds that were bred primarily for their egg production and toured ones that grew quickly with lots of meat on their breast, legs, and thighs. It would be the chicken of tomorrow, and it would cost less per pound than red meat did. The Chicken of Tomorrow contest was a partnership, as we said earlier, between the USDA and ANP grocery stores, and it had multiple overlapping objectives. One was to provide consumers with a cheaper, more readily available source of meat. Another was to make chicken raising more productive and more profitable at every step of the process, including for A ANDP grocery stores, and for AMP it.

00:19:24
Speaker 1: Was also a pr move. As we said at the top of the show, AMP stood for Atlantic and Pacific, as in the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. As that name suggests. It had originally focused on tea and then coffee, initially by mail order. The company had started moving into the grocery business as rising tariffs made coffee and tea less profitable. The first store was a small shop with limited hours, one employee, not a lot of overhead, so they were able to sell groceries for cheap. Soon they expanded, both in terms of the number of stores and the sizes and offerings of those stores. In the early twentieth century, most grocery stores in the United States were small. They had a limited selection of mostly canned goods, dry goods, and some produce that had a long shelf life, so things like potatoes and onions. People bought milk from the dairy and beef from the butcher, and bread from the baker and so on. All of these tended to be small, locally owned businesses. But A and P started putting all these different types of foods under one roof, in other words, a supermarket. A and P also started trying to control as much of their products supply as possible, buying bakeries and canneries and meat packers and wholesalers. They cut out various middlemen and sold food at cheaper prices while still turning a profit, and they opened thousands of new locations over the nineteen twenties and thirties. Soon and PA was facing allegations that it was unfairly running mom and pop stores out of business. In the nineteen forties, New York Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, along with eleven of its subsidiaries and sixteen officers and directors, faced charges for quote, conspiracy to unreasonably restrain and monopolize interstate trade and commerce in food and food products and that violated the Sherman Anti Trust Act. All but three of the defendants were found guilty. The total fine was one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, but adjusted for inflation, that is very approximately three million dollars. That wasn't enough of a punishment for A ANDP to really change its business practices, but it was enough of a hit to the company's reputation that they were looking for ways to improve their image. Of course, this contest would not only benefit A and P being able to raise bigger chickens and do it aster would also benefit chicken farmers and others in the industry. So the Chicken of Tomorrow contest had broad industrial support. There were national organizers on board.

00:22:11
Speaker 2: In forty four of the then forty eight states, and people and organizations that were participating in some way included scientists, researchers, and land grant colleges. The USDA's Cooperative Extension Service worked with the land grant colleges to provide education and resources for farmers that wanted to move into broiler raising or to add broiler chickens to their existing farms. Each state where there seemed to be enough interest had its own Chicken of Tomorrow chairmen, who selected a Chicken of Tomorrow Committee to run state level contests in nineteen forty six. In nineteen forty seven. There were also regional contests in nineteen forty seven, and then the national finals were held at the University of Delaware's Agricultural Experiment Station in nineteen forty eight. Some states continued to hold contests after the national contest was over, and organizations like the four H Club held similar contests for young people to encourage them and their parents to start raising broilers. We'll talk about some contests specifics after a sponsor break. In describing the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, Howard C. Pierce, poultry research director at A and P, said he wanted to quote squelch that dream of two chickens in every pot by providing one bird chunky enough for the whole family, a chicken with breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead of more. That chicken in every pot is a reference to a Republican Party campaign ad that had run in nineteen twenty eight, which is widely attributed to then presidential candidate Herbert Hoover. Although this ad did end with vote for Hoover, Hoover did not actually say this or place the ad. At the state level, contestants sent either one hundred straight run chicks, meaning chicks as they had been hatched without being examined to determine their sex, or fifty cockrolls. These chicks were given wing bands to identify them, and they were raised for twelve weeks. Fifteen males from each batch were slaughtered and dressed, and the twelve best of those were judged. Regional contests followed, and then in nineteen forty eight, forty finalists and six backups submitted seven hundred and twenty eggs each for the final round. The finalists included farms and breeders from twenty five different states. The eggs were delivered in a very carefully controlled procession. They arrived in Delaware at set times so that they could be loaded into incubators without interruption. While the eggs were incubating, each set was assigned a number so that the breeders would remain anonymous during judging. Once the eggs hatched, four hundred birds from each contestant, plus ten as a backup, were taken to specially built barns and raised for twelve weeks. All of the birds were kept on the same diet, with everything about their care and environment being very tightly controlled. After twelve weeks, they were slaughtered and New York dressed, meaning their feathers were plucked, but otherwise their bodies and organs were left intact. Every sixth bird from the dressing line was collected for judging, for a total of fifty birds per contestant. These birds were judged according to two sets of criteria, economy of production and carcass characteristics. For economy of production, judges evaluated the egg production rate of the parent flock, the percent of all the eggs that were successfully hatched, the number of chicks who survived until the age of twelve weeks, their weight at the age of twelve weeks, how quickly they grew their feathers and how uniform those feathers were, and the uniformity of the size and color of all the birds in the flock. Although this contest was focused on producing birds that would have a lot of meat, egg production was still an important factor. Out of one hundred total points in economy of production, up to twenty five could come from the egg production for the parent flock. Each of the standards we just mentioned was worth fewer points, with the uniformity of the type and color of the flock earning up to five points. For carcass characteristics, the birds were judged on several factors affecting how much meat they would yield, including how well proportioned the body was, the size and shape of the breast, the shape of the keel bone, which is a breastbone that needed to be well covered with meat, straight and parallel with the back. Judges also looked at how plump and meaty the chickens thigh joints, drumsticks, and backs were.

00:27:16
Speaker 1: From there, they looked at the condition of the bird's skin and pin feathers. Their skin needed to be bright, soft, pliable, smooth and uniformly colored, and they needed to be free from unsightly pin feathers, particularly dark ones. As with the economy of production, judging these traits could earn one hundred total points, eighty for the factors affecting the bird's edible meat yield, and twenty for the condition of the skin and pin feathers. The del Marva Chicken of Tomorrow Festival was held in Georgetown, Delaware, as a finale to this whole contest, and winners were announced on June twenty fourth, nineteen forty eight. The runner up was Henry Saliot of Arbor Acres Farm and glass and Bury, Connecticut. He was the son of Italian immigrants, and he'd left school in the eighth grade, and an article that was written after his death, a relative attributed this to Salio having dyslexia. When he was still a teenager, he had started raising chickens on his parents' farm. In nineteen thirty seven, a meat processor asked if Salio could breed chickens with all white feathers, because the feathers of Plymouth rock chickens being raised caused staining during kosher processing. Salio did this, naming the breed he developed Arbor Acre's white Plymouth Rock. That was the breed he entered into the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, where those all white feathers were seen as a big plus. A lot of brief write ups about the Chicken of Tomorrow contest describe Henry Salio as a teenager. And while he did start breeding chickens as a teen and he was still in his twenties when he developed this breed, he was thirty seven when the contest took place. The overall was submitted by Charles and Kenneth Vantras of Vantras Hatchery and Marysville, California. These birds were across between red cornish chickens and New Hampshire reds, and this was fairly unusual for the time. The vast majority of the contestants submitted pure bread chickens rather than cross breeds or hybrids. The overall perception was that pure bread chickens were most likely to retain the characteristics that they had been bred for, and that crosses might not breed true or produce the expected and desired characteristics in the next generation of young But Vantras had developed a hybrid that was better at converting feed into meat and produced more meat than any of the other contestants. Most broiler chickens of the area produced about two and a half pounds of meat, but the Vantresses chickens grew to four pounds on twelve pounds of feed. After the contest, both Henry Salio and the Vantris brothers and their chickens became an enormous part of the poultry industry in the United States. Vantris's stock was eventually crossed with Salio's. Salio became a major industrial chicken supplier, and in nineteen sixty four arbor Acres was bought by Nelson Rockefeller's International Basic Economy Corporation IBEC. Which launched arbor Acres into an international brand. Today it's part of Aviagen Broiler Breeders. Salio also became a director at Purdue Farms and was a lifetime director of the National Broiler Council, which later became the National Chicken Council. In two thousand and one, he started Pureline Genetics to breed chickens without the use of antibiotics. In the nineteen fifties, it had been discovered that chickens grew bigger and faster when given antibiotics, although of course that later led to concerns about antibiotic resistant bacteria. Salio died in two thousand and three at the age of ninety two.

00:31:02
Speaker 2: Vantress Farms also became a major international broiler chicken supplier, and today Vantress Farms as cob Vantress owned by Tyson Foods, and both cob Bantriss and Viagin provide breeding stock for broiler farms all over the world. I've found varying estimates, but at least sixty percent of the broiler chickens living today all over the world come from one of these two companies, maybe even more. Most of the other contestants in the contest did not fare nearly as well. About half of them went out of business in the years after the contest as arbor Acres and Vantriss Farms started to dominate the broiler industry, and that is in spite of massive growth in the US chicken industry. The number of chickens raised in the United States increased from two hundred seventy five million in nineteen forty six to six hundred and sixteen million just four years later. One of the reasons that arbor Acres and Vantriss Farms became the source of so many of the world's broiler chickens wasn't just because of the traits of those chickens. It was because of their use of hybrid breeds. Although arbor Acres had won an honorable mention with a breed that had been developed by Henry Salliot, by nineteen fifty nine it had begun breeding hybrids as well. Because of the combinations of dominant and recessive genes that were involved in giving these birds their desired traits, their breeding had to be really carefully managed by people who knew which birds should be allowed to reproduce with each other. Farmers could not simply breed the chickens that they bought from one of these companies with each other or with their existing flocks and expect to get the same results. So farmers had to keep going back to the supplier to buy new chicks every year. Was a little bit like copy protection, except for birds.

00:33:01
Speaker 1: This also meant that, at least in terms of commercial chicken farming, the various breeds that farmers had previously worked with were soon replaced by standardized, uniform hybrids. Those other breeds haven't entirely gone away. Many still exist on small farms, and in recent years in the US there has been a surge in people raising flocks in their backyards as a hobby. In some parts of the world, these commercial hybrid chickens also haven't become quite as ubiquitous as in the United States, or they took much longer to get a foothold. But there is way less genetic diversity in the broiler industry today than there was on chicken farms one hundred years.

00:33:41
Speaker 2: Ago, and many of those same traits that make these chickens so much more profitable and efficient in terms of things like how much feed it takes to raise them, those are just not good for the chickens themselves. Today's commercial broiler chickens really could not survive and most environments outside of chicken farms. Their size and their weight makes them prone to leg, joint and heart problems, and their really fast growth rate can lead to metabolic disorders.

00:34:12
Speaker 1: That's in addition to the effects of the conditions in which many of these birds are kept. Although there has been a push in recent years for birds to be raised more humanely with adequate indoor space and access to the outdoors, that isn't the case on every farm. Illnesses continue to be a major thread at many farms, including things like salmonila that we referenced earlier and avian flu, which has led to the culling of millions and millions of chickens as well as other birds in an attempt to control the spread.

00:34:43
Speaker 2: These changes to the poultry industry that followed this contest have also contributed to it becoming a lot more vertically integrated. So rather than separate businesses breeding chickens and providing eggs to hatcheries and raising the chicks and slaughtering the grown chickens and then preparing and packaging the meat, poultry producers have started controlling that whole process ends to end as one company, and.

00:35:09
Speaker 1: Chickens have continued to get much bigger. In twenty fourteen, a team from the University of Alberta published a study comparing chickens from nineteen fifty seven, nineteen seventy eight and two thousand and five, using strains that have been maintained at the University of Alberta Poultry Research Center and at the Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario, and feeding and raising all the chickens in the same way. On average, the two thousand and five chickens were about four times heavier than the nineteen fifty seven chickens. The two thousand and five strain was also about three times more efficient at converting feed into meat.

00:35:46
Speaker 2: Although the Chicken of Tomorrow contest was hugely influential in all of this sort of starting the chicken industry on this path, we should also note that this did not happen in isolation. The USDA Extension Service heavily promoted broiler raising to farmers as a profitable business and promoted chicken to housewives as an inexpensive source of meat for their families, especially among communities that weren't already eating more chicken than average. Government nutrition standards encouraged chicken as a healthy food. Chicken producers also started selling chicken meat that was ready to be cooked and eaten, rather than selling New York dressed birds which still had their heads and feet and internal organs in place. This eventually progressed to selling specific cuts of meat together, packaged in tray packs. In more recent years, some people have turned to chicken as a source of meat based protein that has less of an environmental impact than beef does, particularly in terms of things like greenhouse gas emissions. So all of that has contributed to chicken moving to be a more ubiquitous part of a lot of people's diets, rather than just thinking of it as something for special occasions like it was one hundred years ago.

00:37:03
Speaker 1: The USDA is obviously still around, but the A and P grocery store chain closed down in twenty fifteen after filing for bankruptcy protection twice over the course of five years. So that's the Chicken of Tomorrow there.

00:37:20
Speaker 2: I saw a couple of things from more recent years as I was working on this, where the name Chicken of Tomorrow has been adopted to sort of talk about the next phase in chicken production in some cases with that being more focused on like the welfare of the animals and the environmental impact of because even like, even if you take into consideration that in general, raising chickens produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than raising beef, there's a lot of poop. There's so much poop. That poop contains a lot of ammonia. Like they're there's other things to look at as well.

00:38:03
Speaker 1: While we talk about the Chicken of tomorrow? Do you have the listener mail of today?

00:38:08
Speaker 2: I do. It is from Kay. They wrote, Hey, Racy and Holly. As I was listening to the Mary Dire episode, her name rang an increasingly loud bell. After checking my camera roll, I realized it's because there's a statue of her at my alma mater, Earlham College, home of the fighting Quakers. No one ever knows about Arlam, so it was very exciting to realize this personal connection. Just as I made the connection, you mentioned that the statue is a casting of the one outside the State House. I've attached to a photo I took on my most recent campus visit. I thought you might enjoy knowing the Arlham fight song, which is traditionally chanted fast and at loud volume. Fight fight inner Light, kill Quakers, kill, knock them dead, beat them senseless, do it till we reach consensus? In a pause for a second and say that is the best fight song I have ever heard in my life.

00:39:05
Speaker 1: It is. It also seems like the most non Quaker string of words I can ever consider I'll kill.

00:39:13
Speaker 2: The inner light part and the consensus part are very Quaker, but yeah, the fighting and knocking dead and beating him senses is like not what you would typically expect when discussing Quakers who tend to be pacifist. So anyway, to return to the email, one of the highlights of my Earlam career was the two hours of orientation my senior year that I got to dress as Big Earl the Quaker, our mascot. It was a blazingly hot and humid August day, so I was quite ready for my shift to be done, but I remember him fondly. Uh ps. By probable total coincidence. This episode published on Earlham Day. It's an annual alumni and others fundraiser that tries to help our tiny rural liberal arts schools stay afloat in increasingly expensive times. Thank you so much for this email. K. Thank you so much again for sending me the best fight song I have ever heard in my life. I was so delighted about this that I sent it to multiple people. Thank you as well for the pictures. I'm gonna see. I gotta adjust my laptop. Here is the picture Holly of K being very relieved after getting out of this mascot costume. Thank you again so much, Ka, I loved this email a lot. Before we go on to our sign off, we've gotten a number of queries lately about our mailing address, and we have said a couple of times that we were between offices. That between offices state lasted for many months, longer than I think anyone expected that it was going to. It was a very long time. We are now as a business. The iHeart Podcast studio is opening for business. We would like to very gently discourage the sending of physical gifts because while we know people want to reach out to us and want to connect, and we do love the thought genuinely, we love the thought behind all of this. In our old office space, it became something that was no longer manageable for us and for our office staff. This new space is really focused mostly on podcast recording studios. Neither of us is going to have like a permanent desk space that is ours to receive mail at. So we love you, Thank you so much. Anyone who has ever thought to send us something, We don't think we're going to be able to accept that in a way that feels workable for everyone who is involved with things like managing what's coming into and going out of the new studio space.

00:42:02
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Since I am the only one adjacent to that studio and adjacent isn't doing a lot of lifting, it's quite a drive for me. It's almost an hour drive if there's any traffic at all, because of like where I am in the city and where it is in the city.

00:42:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:42:20
Speaker 1: And I on the occasions, even when we were in the old space and we were working from home more, it was like I would go and they would just hand me several packing boxes and be like, right, here's all your stuff, and I would be like, I'm gonna cry. I can't go through all this. I do not have, yeah, with all our time. So I mean, the thing is if you're like, oh, but I really want to send it. Please know, even if you did, we either would not get it because I don't go in at all anymore except on very rare occasions. I live in another state, and if we did, it's kind of going to get lost in the shuffle or it won't get unpacked for literally possibly more than a year. So it's again I want to reiterate with Tracy. So we are so grateful and really delay in the fact that people share things with us and and want to send us things, But you should put those resources in a place that makes you happy and pretend that's a gift from us.

00:43:20
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, Your gifts to us could be a donation to your local food bank, book donated to your local library, book sale, like any anything. So again, it's one of those things that I feel guilty even even making this request. We love all of you, for sure, we just do not We do not want to have a situation where one of us walks into the office after months possibly of not being there, and uh and like then there's to the glowering office manager and our office manager is amazing not ah.

00:43:59
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Literally, my desk when I still had one, would look like a giant like shipping container. Or trash pile when I got there, because occasionally some good soul had without me, I still don't know who it was. Was like I'll start opening things for them, and then they would just get piled on top of each other, and then like presumably probably cleaning crew would move things, and like the two and from situation was getting a little yeah jumbled. So I still have things I don't know who sent them, Like.

00:44:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had gone through everything that I knew about that was addressed to me or was mine at the office before we moved out of that space. And yet when the final move out happens, I got a couple of big boxes shipped to me, and I know you got more than a couple of boxes sent to you.

00:44:51
Speaker 1: So the courier van showed up in my front yard. It just started unloading like a team of people, and I was like, uh oh.

00:45:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, So again with all possible love, virtual communications are best. And on that note, if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, Word History podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social media at Miston History. That's where you can find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. You can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else do you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.