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This book will follow the chicken historically from its farmyard frenzy into its bondage as a broiler. Chapter 1 celebrates the multicultural manifestations of the chicken as a glorious bird, its commonalities with humans (love of life, happiness in brooding and its manifestation as one of god’s creatures in a variety of ways) and its celebration in literature, art and music, from religious sacrifice and cockfighting to a plaything of the wealthy, and always as a hunting and pecking farmyard friend, even if destined for consumption, from domestication to the eve of the twentieth century.

Chapter 2 explores the ecology of chickens and how ideas and understandings of chicken behavior, health and habitat have significantly changed – perhaps it is more accurate to say “have been changed” – since the turn of the last century. Like others who have studied modern-day agriculture, I suggest that an agro-industrial imperative pushed these concepts from a natural to a technological foundation. In the setting of the factory farm, the question is whether the broiler is even a bird any longer. The manufacturers want to have it sautéed both ways – as a chicken to feed us, but also as an industrial object to be regulated like an automobile, put together from various parts, and yet without what they see as onerous regulations, because this is only a bird.

The rapid industrial transformation of the chicken from an animal well adapted to its natural worlds – from Southeast Asia to the Savannah of Africa, from the backyard farms of the plains states to the peasant farms of nineteenth-century Europe and Asia – to an industrial object to serve entirely as meat or egg layer is the focus of chapter 3, where, drawing on an eighteenth-century French doctor and philosophe, I call the broiler a “machine” and identify its many parts, and the increasing use of a variety of genetic, chemical, electrical and other inputs that, being employed more and more from the second half of the twentieth century, completed the transformation of the chicken from a barnyard animal to a factory farmyard animal. In this chapter, we also examine the growing use of antibiotics and other such chemicals, the role of regulation and inspection in avian-industrial safety, and the growing scourge of foodborne illnesses and pandemics.

Chapter 4 explores thematically the kinds of environmental problems that arise with factory farming – in this case, with broiler production. There’s a lot of shit to be tabulated and estimated and weighed, and a lot of other pollution as well: methane, run-off, heavy metals, antibiotics, land use and the like. Rather than provide that tabulation, however, I offer discussion of how factory farms have evolved to be such environmentally unsound facilities, the weakness of the regulatory impetus, and the externalized costs that consumers pay and will pay for remediation. Greater and greater awareness of these costs and problems dates to the middle of the twentieth century.

Moralists, economists, citizen groups, regulators and many others are pushing back against the human, animal and environmental costs of factory farms. Some of them recognize the public health costs are already so great that the world’s meat eaters must act today in order to have their chicken and eat it, too. In chapter 5, we explore historically the rising protest against these farms. I define protest broadly to include government intervention in the production processes through inspection and regulation dating from the late nineteenth century. Protest involves a variety of NGOs and other organizations concerned with environmental questions and animal welfare. One might argue that, in order to continue as meat eaters, we must first of all consider animal welfare, lest we cheapen ourselves by permitting wholly industrial processes to overwhelm our morals, sensibilities and taste buds. We should hear the sounds of nature – and make our own sounds of protest – even while smacking our lips.

If chickens left the forests of Southeast Asia millennia ago to enter the human world of domestication, then they have taken flight again as products of multinational corporations. Chickens – dressed, processed, cut-up, wrapped, frozen and so on – are an international commodity. One in five bits (or pieces, or kilograms) of chicken is exported somewhere, often thousands of kilometers away. Global sales of fresh chicken shipments reached $6.6 billion in 2018, and frozen-chicken international sales were $16.1 billion. In chapter 6, we examine international trade and several of the major countries’ industries and producers. Trade is based as always on domestic production and policies, and on international rivalries and demands. Russia and the US are having a fowl war. They are not alone in battles over tariffs and imports. And international trade also involves great risks of introducing or reintroducing highly pathogenic Avian Influenza A (H5N1) to uninfected countries. Whence are your chicken nuggets and wings?

A brief epilogue intends to make sense of this analysis of the panopticon of production, and offers a section on many of the chicken metaphors, sayings and puns I have been able to find – or, in the case of the puns, to generate – in order to avoid sprinkling them too liberally on other parts of the book, with only pieces and nuggets of them coming beforehand. Advocates of factory farming will argue that broiler food is inexpensive, wholesome and environmentally sound. This book may demonstrate otherwise. And, on a final note: I am an omnivore. I like my chicken. But this is food not to be eaten lightly. The chicken is a domesticated animal, a cultural and religious artifact, now turned into a Frankenstein fowl whose future life is unsustainable. The following chapters explore chicken–human interactions, from the first domestications and cultural manifestations that have persisted to this day in art and music – including in cock fights and beauty contests – to regularized farmyard activities, and finally to systematic exploitation of the broilers’ extensive benefits to humans as a source of protein, which have been increasingly facilitated through industrial production and international trade. The chicken that originated as a domesticated bird in Southeast Asia has returned, chilled and chopped-up, as a commodity for those very Chinese, Japanese and other farmers and consumers.