On a Stage in Delaware in 1948, America Picked the Chicken You Eat Tonight

The judging stage was decorated with dead chickens.

June 24, 1948, Georgetown, Delaware. Boxes of carcasses from every contestant were arranged around the platform, along with frozen cross-sections of the highest-scoring birds so the assembled experts could examine the meat in profile. Outside, a parade was forming. There were floats showing the stages of the Delmarva poultry industry, and a Festival Broiler Queen who would ride through town on a car, smiling and waving. The birds on that stage were the finalists of the Chicken of Tomorrow contest. Their descendants are almost certainly what is in your refrigerator right now.

Why anyone held a chicken contest

American chickens in the 1940s were not raised for meat. They were raised for eggs, and eating one was what happened at the end of her working life.

That made sense during the Depression and the war. A laying hen produces protein for years without you having to kill her, which is exactly the arithmetic you want when food is scarce. But it meant the breeds had been selected for laying, not for muscle, and the meat on a retired hen was tough and thin.

Then the war ended and rationing lifted. Beef and pork came back, people who had gone without for years wanted to indulge, and chicken looked like a poor substitute.

Howard C. Pierce saw the problem coming before it arrived. He was the poultry research director at A&P, then the largest supermarket chain in America and its largest poultry retailer, and at a poultry meeting in Canada in November 1944 he proposed something audacious: rather than wait for the industry to breed a better meat bird, put up a prize and make it a competition. https://americankitchentales.com/the-year-america-sat-down-and-decided-what-bread-should-taste-like/

He offered ten thousand dollars. A&P partnered with the USDA. Forty-four states took part in the program.

Pierce described what he wanted in terms that were about eating, not agriculture. A bird chunky enough to feed a whole family. Breast meat thick enough to carve like a steak. Drumsticks with as little bone as possible, buried under dark meat. And costing less, not more.

He was not describing a chicken that existed. He was writing a specification.

The contest was judged on eggs

This is the part I find remarkable as someone who spent years standardizing conditions so that measurements meant something.

The forty finalists, drawn from twenty-five states, did not send chickens. They sent eggs. Seven hundred and twenty each, shipped to a central hatchery in Delaware, some by train in the care of special handlers, some driven there personally by the farmers themselves.

Every egg was then hatched and raised in identical conditions on an identical diet for twelve weeks. Weight, health, and appearance were recorded throughout. Only then were the birds slaughtered and judged, on dressed carcass, skin texture, meat yield, feed conversion, uniformity, and economy of production.

It was a controlled trial. Whatever you think of what came out of it, the design was rigorous: eliminate every variable except the genetics, then measure.

The winner, and the runner-up who actually won

Charles Vantress of California took first place with a red-feathered hybrid, a cross of New Hampshire Red hens with a California strain of Cornish. He won again when the contest ran a second time three years later.

First runner-up was Henry Saglio, a teenager, the son of Italian immigrant farmers in Connecticut, who had bred his family’s line of White Plymouth Rocks into something much meatier than the breed had been.

Saglio lost. And then, over the following two decades, he won everything.

His family’s operation became Arbor Acres. By 1964 it was producing chickens faster and cheaper than anyone in the world, and Nelson Rockefeller bought the company through his International Basic Economy Corporation. Arbor Acres stock went global. As of 2013, more than half the chickens raised in China traced a genetic link back to it. The Saglio family helped found the National Chicken Council.

Modern commercial broilers, including lines like the Cobb 500, descend from the birds that competition produced. A contest judged on a decorated stage in a small Delaware town in 1948 is upstream of nearly every chicken eaten anywhere on earth today.

What it cost

I have written on this site that bone-in chicken legs are the cheapest protein in an American supermarket, and that the price gap between chicken and beef is the widest I have seen. Both of those facts start here.

Chicken became cheap because a supermarket chain, a government department, and several thousand farmers spent three years deliberately engineering it to be cheap, using the most rigorous method available to them.

That project succeeded so completely that its results are invisible. Nobody thinks of a chicken breast as a designed object.

There is a cost on the other side, and it would be dishonest to leave it out. The birds that came from this lineage grow far faster and far larger than their ancestors did, and decades of selecting for feed conversion and breast yield have produced animals with real physical problems, along with meat that is texturally different from what a chicken used to be. The contest optimized for exactly what it said it was optimizing for, and got it, and everything that was not on the scoring sheet was not measured and did not survive.

That is not a failure of the 1948 judges. It is what happens when you specify a product precisely and then run the specification for eighty years.

The bird on the stage in Georgetown was called the Chicken of Tomorrow. Tomorrow arrived, and stayed.

SOURCE

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/poultry-food-production-agriculture-mckenna