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Chapter 5 The Chicken, the Factory Farm, and the Supermarket: The Emergence of the Modern Poultry Industry in Britain Andrew C. Godley and Bridget Williams “Rationing and price control of feeding stuffs ends on August 1st,” declared the lead article of the British trade journal Poultry Farmer on March 14, 1953. A revolution in modern British agriculture was to follow, with the poultry industry utterly transformed through intensive rearing and factory farming. The resulting cheap chicken meat led to a revolution in the British diet. In 1950 British households consumed only around 1 million chickens. But by the mid1960s , like many other things in the country, meat-eating habits were transformed . Over 150 million chickens were sold for consumption in 1965, and over 200 million by 1967. If the postwar decades of the 1950s and 1960s saw a transformation in British society, its revolutionaries sustained themselves with mouthfuls of roast chicken. This chapter describes how the modern poultry industry emerged in Britain principally through initiatives from food retailers. It is this that distinguishes the British case from parallel developments in the United States, where there was also a great expansion in poultry production and consumption. As in the United States, entrepreneurial poultry farmers collaborated with pharmaceutical and animal-feeds companies and with food retailers and refrigeration-unit manufacturers, and together they conducted a wholly novel experiment in the organization of agriculture. However, at the forefront of the emergence of modern poultry farming in the United States was the active and interventionist hand of government through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In Britain the role of innovator and coordinator fell to a small group of entrepreneurial poultry farmers and a handful of highly innovative food retailers, with one, J. Sainsbury, leading the way. The American Origins of the Broiler Chicken Industry Chicken meat had long been eaten throughout most of the world, but never as a staple. In the 1920s chicken was code for an enticing luxury in America, with Herbert Hoover’s 1928 electoral slogan “A chicken in every pot” victoriously aimed at aspirational voters at the end of the Roaring Twenties. It was there that the transition from occasional luxury to everyday staple occurred first. Initially only one section of America’s heterogeneous population saw chicken as a staple, America’s Jews. New York City, with almost three-quarters of America’s first- and second-generation immigrant Jews, was the largest Jewish city in the world. It represented the largest and most concentrated urban demand for chicken meat anywhere in the early twentieth century.1 Kashruth restrictions on slaughtering methods meant that Jewish demand was for live chickens, and from the mid-1920s these were increasingly reared in the Delmarva peninsula, between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.2 While chicken production there in the 1930s grew, the industry remained small overall. It was not until Jewish demand could be met with preslaughtered chickens that the scale of chicken production was transformed, with the first processing stations opening in Delmarva in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Production capacity then mushroomed, so prices fell and producers began targeting the Gentile market. The long-standing preference for the American method of dry frying, or broiling, gave the emerging industry its name.3 A massive increase in demand followed, first during the war and then especially afterward. Per capita consumption of chicken in the United States increased from five pounds in 1945 to over twenty-eight pounds in 1961. The American broiler-chicken industry emerged as the first modern agribusiness.4 Despite its parochial ethnic origins in serving the specialist needs of the Jewish community, the industry’s transformation was no accident. In the 1920s chemists at the University of Wisconsin realized that supplementing chicken feed with synthetic vitamin D enabled poultry flocks to be better managed and the laying season to be extended.5 This coincided with a USDA initiative (in conjunction with its Cooperative Extension Service, attached to the land-grant colleges) to encourage those farmers badly hit by disease in the 1920s to switch to broilers.6 Research at the land-grant colleges further focused on mineral and vitamin feed supplements to boost growth, although the next chemical breakthroughs came from the leading pharmaceutical companies such as Merck.7 By the early 1950s U.S. feedstuffs producers were supplementing their maize, soybean, and feather meal high-energy feed with a melee of vitamins, coccidiostats , and antibiotics, with the result that poultry growth rates jumped.8...

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