Oiling the Chicken Machine

• Published in: New Atlantis (Washington, D.C.) D.C.), 2023-10 (74), p.3-15
• Main Author: Brown, Garth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agribusiness; Essays; Genetics; Horses; Meat industry; Poultry; Venture capital
• ISSN: 1543-1215; 1555-5569

In her community, it’s common knowledge that my mom is a soft touch when it comes to chickens. She maintains a motley flock of adoptees — backyard hens whose owners have moved, scrawny layers too old to be worth their feed, the pets of children who never much wanted them in the first place. She knows most of the people who donate the birds, or at least knows how they connect to her capacious social circle. But a few years ago, a complete stranger arrived at her door. He came bearing two bony, adolescent chicks, pink skin showing through their white feathers, their beaks and feet comically outsized. He’d bought them as an Easter present for his grandkids, and rather than petite, pretty hens, they had turned into gangly monstrosities. Mom spotted them for the woefully underfed meat birds they were, but she nevertheless took them in. One died almost immediately, whether of natural causes or at the teeth of a fox no one remembers. The other survived. It grew and grew and ate and grew some more, inflating until it weighed some twenty pounds, more than three times as much as a standard laying hen. Released from the pen for their morning constitutional, the other members of the flock would dart about after bugs and shoots. They’d take dust baths and cluck and squabble. The lone broiler would do all this too, but at half speed. While the araucana and barred rock chickens swiftly tacked about the large patch of hosta that curled around the back deck, the broiler would plod through it like a miniature white tugboat. Perhaps because of her size, she moved with uncommon deliberateness, as if taking each step only after a great deal of thought. She walked, and the leaves parted before the prow of her serene, unflighty chest. For the past century, agriculture in America has been getting more productive and more efficient. After stagnating for decades at twenty-something bushels per acre, average corn yields have risen to nearly two hundred. Horses have been replaced by horsepower. Chicken meat, once a relatively rare byproduct of the egg industry, has become the most consumed meat in the country, a shift made possible by advances in genetics and feed. Now over a billion dollars, from sources as varied as Bill Gates, venture capital funds, and agribusiness giants, have been invested in the idea that the next big thing in food is to leave farming behind, at least the livestock part of it. Instead of growing chicken meat in a chicken, why not grow it in a test tube?