Dude, who even knows.
Post with 380 notes
A funny thing about free-range chickens is that they get taken as part of this retro-rustic thing - chickens wandering around outside in a bucolic setting, that’s the traditional way to raise your meat.
And that is ridiculous. The traditional way to raise meat chickens is on large-scale factory farms, because raising meat chickens wasn’t a tradition at all until the mid-20th century, with roots in the 1930s.
Now chickens had been raised for food, and been eaten, before then, but that’s to say that they were raised for eggs, and chicken meat was essentially a waste product of the egg industry.
There were historically two types of chicken that were eaten. One was “stew hens” - egg-layers who had aged out of productivity, so named because the aged meat (layers being bred for durability, not tenderness) was tough and thus favored tenderization through slow-cooking.
The other were “spring chickens” - surplus male chickens that were killed at a young age, after their sex (and thus uselessness as layers) became obvious.
(Chick sexing can separate males from females at hatching, but to do it reliably requires enough training and experience that chicken sexer is a skilled job in its own right, something modern large-scale farms find useful to hire but not worth the expense to barnyard farmers.)
Spring chickens, obviously, were preferred for their tenderness, but this raised their price, and the young age decreased the amount of meat on their bones. And both types coming from lines bred for laying, neither had all that much to begin with. So chicken was something of a luxury meat. (As historically were most skeletal muscle meats - the poor ate organ meats, trimmings, tendons, bone marrow, fat, and blood, to the extent they ate meat at all.)
Which makes sense - if you assume that all stew hens lay about 200 eggs a year in 2 years of production, AND that there’s no chick sexing so that there’s one spring chicken per hen, AND treat the two types as equivalent AND completely ignore unsaleable losses to disease or predators that still means only one chicken breast is produced per 17 dozens of eggs.
So knowing that you realize Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign slogan of “a chicken in every pot” wasn’t just offering the promise of no one going hungry, but further of widespread access to petty luxury.