Did you know that our planet consumes around 75 billion chickens per year. That’s 15 chickens per year per person. “In the first half of the 20th century, chicken accounted for well under 20 percent of meat consumption in the US. Today, it’s about 45 percent. Over time, chicken benefited from perceptions that it was healthier than red meat, and became cheaper to produce, thus cheaper for consumers.”
However, the origins of the humble chicken becoming our staple meat lie in an accident. Kenny Torrella informs us that: “The story begins over 100 years ago, in 1923, with homemaker and farmer Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware. Steele, like many other rural Americans in her time, kept a small flock of chickens that she raised for eggs and waited to slaughter them for meat once their productivity waned. But one day by accident, the local chick hatchery delivered 500 birds, 10 times more than the 50 Steele had ordered.
Five hundred hens was a lot — bigger farms at the time had only 300. Returns weren’t really an option in these pre-Amazon days, so she kept them anyway, feeding and watering the chicks by hand in a barn the size of a studio apartment — 256 square feet — that was heated by a coal stove. Four and a half months later, over 100 of the original 500 chicks had died, but she still made a sizable profit off the 2-pound survivors — almost $11 per pound in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation — and began to ramp up her operations.
Her husband, David “Wilmer” Steele, quit his job in the Coast Guard to help Cecile expand, and within three years, they were raising 10,000 chickens. Word of the Steele family’s success spread, and by 1928 there were hundreds of farmers in the area raising chickens primarily for their meat (before Steele, most farmers raised chickens just for their eggs).
By today’s standards, a 10,000-chicken farm is tiny — a single industrial-style chicken barn will now house upward of 40,000 birds at a time, and farmers usually own several barns apiece. But in Steele’s day, her operation was massive. And the hatchery accident occurred at a fortuitous time — it was the Roaring ’20s, a decade of immense economic growth in the US, which meant Americans had more money in their pockets to eat more meat. Simultaneous advancements in agricultural refrigeration and transportation, along with the rise of chain grocery stores and the expansion of agriculture financing, made that meat more plentiful.”
Advances in modern medicine also helped Cecile Steele and the chicken industry: “Around this time, there were also seemingly small advances around nutrition that had huge implications for mass agriculture. One was the discovery of vitamin D in 1922, according to Emelyn Rude, author of Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favorite Bird. Chickens would often die of rickets when kept indoors during cold winter months (rickets is caused by a lack of vitamin D, stemming from lack of sunlight). That helped cap the number of chickens that could be raised at any given time, especially in cooler climates. But once farmers began fortifying chicken feed with vitamin D, they could suddenly raise them in larger numbers indoors and year-round.”
And the third factor helping Cecile Steele was the spreading of the American rail & road network (which made cheap but formerly inaccessible land more accessible): “Not only was Steele’s timing lucky, but so was her location. The Delmarva Peninsula, where Steele’s farm was located, was also the perfect place for large-scale chicken farming to take off. There was cheap, abundant land a relatively short distance from the hungry consumers of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.”
Unfortunately for Mrs Steele, her story does not have a happy ending: “Steele didn’t live to see where her experiments ultimately led. With earnings from their burgeoning poultry empire, Steele and her husband — who had become a state senator in 1937 — bought a $10,000 yacht named The Lure. One October day in 1940 they took it out fishing with three guests, and while near Ocean City, Maryland, the carburetor backfired, causing the boat to explode. The others survived, but tragically, Cecile and Wilmer Steele did not.”
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