in raising consumer and producer awareness of the cruelty and immorality of farms in some places – for example, Vietnam and Korea, which have promised to close them by 2020. Yet China remains wedded to them and is unwilling to entertain closing them at the highest levels of government, among consumers and, of course, the producers.17 Bear farming in Laos has begun to shrink, but the growth of facilities in the northern part of the country under private, mostly Chinese, ownership counters that trend.18 A European Parliament resolution of 2006 calling to end bear bile farming in China fell on deaf ears as China rejected this interference in a domestic issue,19 while tiger farming in Laos also supports primarily Chinese interests, tastes and consumers in the sale of parts, teeth, claws, paws, and meat.20 But our focus is the broiler factory farm. Suffice it to say that broiler meat, too, is traded internationally, with birds kept in miserable conditions, although not in violation of CITES – because, with billions of the fowl, they are hardly an endangered species.
Conveyor-Belt Chickens
This book draws on a number of fields and approaches to write a history of the rise of the broiler in an international context in the twentieth century, although it is largely political history, environmental history and history of technology. In their explorations of the relationship between technology, humans and nature, several scholars and journalists have focused on the economic, political and technological factors that have a significant role in the transformation of farming – generally, and in specific animal husbandry sectors – into an industrial project. They write about animals and domestication, farming and industrialization, animals and research, animals and globalization, and so on, each with a unique and important perspective in such genres as women’s history, labor history, business history, history of science, anthropology, history of technology and environmental history. They ask: what role do natural objects play in society and when do natural objects become technologies?
William Boyd argues that the “subordination of the meat broiler to the dictates of industrial production” indicates how technological change in agriculture further blurs the distinction between nature and technology.21 Focusing on broilers, he considers how they were incorporated in the technology and political-economic system. Boyd writes, “tethered to innovations in environmental control, genetics, nutrition, and disease management, the industrial broiler emerged as a vehicle for transforming feed grains into higher-value meat products.” Like other such products, the broiler not only transformed food production – and diet – but “facilitated a profound restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology.”22
Deborah Fitzgerald has demonstrated how biological organisms have been remade into agricultural commodities, with the production of scientific knowledge and the transformation of that knowledge into commercial practice. In this process, practice has become increasingly industrial, large-scale, profit-oriented and intensive in production. In Every Farm a Factory, she describes how businessmen, government officials, rural lenders, farm management specialists, engineers and extension agents imparted an “industrial logic or ideal” to agriculture after World War I to tie farmers into an increasingly integrated national system of production and consumption. They were pushed by market forces and by the industrial logic of rationalization and standardization. If farmers did not embrace the ideal of industrial logic, then their use of industrial methods made them part of the system. They bought into tractors, then worked with bankers who encouraged them to buy more machines, and then found themselves pushing the land to pay for the machines, and turned to specialization to produce cash crops. Factory farming continued and has expanded to this day, and broilers enable us to follow its continuing transformation.23
In another work, Fitzgerald argues that factory farms received impetus from science at land grant universities, and from companies that sold science – in the form of seeds – to the farmers.24 Ultimately, it appears that government-sponsored agricultural research and its dissemination from extension services, both of which were paid for by taxpayers, helped not so much individual farmers, but large companies that came to dominate agriculture in a variety of fields – soy, corn and now animals.
Several studies – and there are many, many more than I mention here, including outstanding investigations of CAFOs – pointed the way for this book, and to my understanding of the chicken. In the readable and informative The Chicken Book (1975), Page Smith and Charles Daniel offered a biological, zoological and cultural history of the domestic chicken from domestication. They criticized chicken factory farming – in particular, the battery-cage system of egg production.25 In a book about several different meat industries in historical perspective, Roger Horowitz discusses how manufacturers in the twentieth century managed to standardize animals from the field to the consumer in the mechanization of meat production; he includes a superb chapter on the chicken. Horowitz urges us not to succumb to the belief that the victory over nature has been complete, but to recognize a series of problems of race, gender, safety and public health that persist to this day.26 In Big Chicken, Maryn McKenna discusses how the modern chicken industry is both founded on antibiotics to accelerate weight gain and reduce losses from infectious diseases, and needs them to deal with the conditions it created, which enabled the spread of such foodborne illnesses as Salmonella, and superbugs such as E. coli with the MCR-1 gene, that are difficult, if not impossible, to treat.27
Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964) criticized nascent factory farming, revealing the suffering of animals at the hands of handlers and their machines – for example, calves in veal crates and birds in battery cages. Harrison helped shape public opinion about factory farming and the need for animal welfare, triggering a series of legal reforms. Harrison’s book is no less important in the twenty-first century, since these farms have spread all over the globe. In some ways, Animal Machines is to animal welfare what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), written at roughly the same time, has become for the environment, and continues to be important in urging humans to consider the lives of now billions of factory-farmed meat animals.28 Karen Davis, of United Poultry Concerns, has also documented in great and disturbing detail the need for “compassionate and respectful treatment” of chickens in a series of book and other publications.29
Annie Potts focuses precisely on the chicken in a cultural and social history of the bird, and includes a chapter on chickens as meat machines in a readable and informative study.30 In a handsomely illustrated natural history of the chicken, Joseph Barber provides chapter and verse on the chicken historically, but mostly from a sociobiological and behaviorist perspective.31 These books reflect the growing concern about how chickens became meat machines, and how – tracing the cultural history of the bird – we might recover some of our humanity in recognizing its place in our global world over the centuries and millennia.
My book also engages environmental history. How can it be otherwise with such a topic? In a series of important studies, the Pew Charitable Trusts researchers note how factory farms have changed the discourse on environmental risk, changing what had largely been sustainable agricultural practices in significant ways, even taking into account growth in population and consumption. The new farms focus “on growing animals as units of protein production.” They import feed, they add medicine, all to get animals to market weight as quickly as possible. They overlook the “natural productivity of the land.”32 The question is how to sustain fertility of the soil through conservation, not driving it to the ground, and to ensure local food security; how to produce healthy, non-toxic food; how to ensure good salaries with social support in rural regions; and how to respect the goodness of animals and the environment. A variety of other foundations and organizations have highlighted growing concerns with CAFOs.33
In the opus of her work, Harriet Ritvo reminds us of the importance of the subject of animals in environmental history. She points out that environmental historians closely examine the history of livestock and domesticated animals, not only for the impact of human–animal relations on the environment, but because animals are connected with various institutions, including
