Chicken: A History from Farmyard to Factory
By Paul L. Josephson
Polity, 2020

Slim little books about chickens and the chicken-farming industry have a tough remit, conceptually-speaking. They’re typically installments in some ongoing series concentrating on either the details of natural history or the dimensions of contemporary industrialized food production. The crucial conceptual schism involves never too closely linking those two concentrations, because the details of the natural history make the details of the industry inescapably immoral, unspeakably incriminating. 

Chicken: A History from Farmyard to Factory is the latest in Polity’s “Environmental History” series, and its author Paul Josephson, a professor of Russian and Soviet History at Colby College, has all the latest information at his fingertips. That information is all horrifying, mainly because the numbers are staggering. Over 53 billion “broiler” chickens are killed for their meat every year in what’s termed “concentrated animal feed operations” (CAFO) - at least 53 billion every single year. 

The torture of those 53 billion birds starts soon after they’re hatched, when they’re literally shoveled away from their mothers and begin a caged existence in which they’re pumped full of drugs to increase muscle mass and guard them from the opportunistic infections that are rife in such overcrowded conditions. Since those overcrowded conditions are mentally devastating and often turn the birds into psychotic cannibals, the chickens - called “broilers” in the industry - are also mutilated, their beaks hacked off to prevent them from attacking other birds or themselves. On this as on all other aspects of his subject, Josephson takes a jaunty tone (the section is titled “Nose Job”) that belies the surreal levels of torture he’s describing: 

Beak-trimming at the contemporary factory farm is performed via more automated methods. The industrial machines - shears - used today are quick and their users claim they do not inflict pain or damage on the chickens. But, then again, researchers have never had their own beaks trimmed. A recent study indicated quite the opposite: debeaking usually involves the beak being seared off with a hot blade precisely to prevent the feather-pecking that can result from the stress of confinement. Debeaking may result in severe, chronic pain, especially since a beak is filled with nerves.

These billions of birds are not, as Josephson points out, actually chickens in any of the reflexive ways people picture that term. Instead, each of these birds is “a genetically formed meat machine, likely one of three models distributed by a bird genetics company, then produced in massive sheds by a large corporation - often, a multinational corporation.” This book swiftly and very readably outlines the century-long rise of those corporations and the re-creation of the chicken into the world’s staple food. Josephson brings the various corporate and scientific personalities of his story alive, and despite the relatively breezy tone he’s chosen to adopt, he never flinches from the ugly reality of his subject, including the concerted efforts of the CAFO world to lie about its activities, perhaps worried about revolting the very customers they’re seeking to entice:

In the United States, this attempt to put blinders on the public - no less than vision-distorting lenses on chickens - sought to hide the smells, sounds, squawks, and poisons of the increasingly violent, dangerous and environmentally risky nature of concentrated animal feed operations. Measuring every input, pushing the animals to fatten as quickly as possible, packing them tightly to keep costs down, not permitting them to move about to save space and train all energy into fattening, the designers of CAFOs have created sheds of torture hundreds of square meters in area that have spread across the earth’s surface to meet growing consumer demand for meat. As we have noted, the carcasses, offal, urine and manure are jettisoned to the side in lagoons or other permanent and temporary storage facilities prone to leakage, and without a doubt unsafe and unhealthful for people and the environment. Should the public not know about whence their meat?

As mentioned, no matter how informative or entertaining books like this are, they can’t avoid also being indictments. In this case, Josephson himself escapes lightly - a playful, chatty tone is decidedly wrong here - but two other groups are damned to Hell: the CAFOs that have created this universe of defilement and terror for hundreds of billions of living beings, and the large percentage of CAFO customers who are still willing - even eager - to buy their chicken meat even after they’ve read a book like Josephson’s. 

On even the faint chance of changing their default cruelty settings, every single one of those customers should read this book. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.