Emelyn Rude is a food writer and the author of the recently published book Tastes Like Chicken: a History of America's Favorite Bird. 

The modern American chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, has come a long way from the jungles of Southeast Asia from which its ancestors originated some eight- to ten-thousand years ago. Carried west over the centuries by Harappan merchants, Persian caravans, and Roman armies, the chicken finally arrived in the New World in 1493 as a passenger on Christopher Columbus’ second voyage to the Americas.

Today's fried-chicken boom would have you think that the bird made an immediate splash on our home turf, but its arrival across the Atlantic was not initially met with the wild fanfare now reserved for cult-classics like Chick-fil-A. Although a godsend to hungry explorers trapped on ships, once back on land, the early American chicken quickly resumed its traditional European role as a side-business for farmers and side-dish for eaters; meanwhile, colonial dinner tables were overloaded with huge quantities of beef and pork. This culinary status quo remained true for centuries, with the chicken always playing second fiddle to red meats at the center of the American dinner plate.

In light of these preferences, the fact that Americans are now consuming an average of over 90 pounds of chicken per year is incredible feat in culinary history. Over the course of the past century, science, agriculture, and consumer preferences have managed to transform a bird that was once widely considered overly difficult to cook, expensive to buy, and even "unhealthy" into the most popular and cheapest animal protein in the country. The question to be asked then is simple: How did the chicken manage to conquer the American dinner plate? From its evolution into a nugget, to a watershed breeding competition, we look at the forces that shaped our appreciation of the chicken. 

Under the laws of much of the American South during the colonial era, slaves were forbidden to own pigs, cows, and other large livestock. The “dunghill fowl,” however, was an exception. Slaves kept flocks of chickens for their own sustenance, and many began trading the bird’s feathers, eggs, and meat with their masters. Those with an even greater entrepreneurial spirit took to roads in town and country alike to sell chicken and other foods. These individuals quickly become known as "the general chicken merchants" of the South. 

Many visitors to the region conceded that the food these vendors were selling was some of the best to be had—most famously in a Virginia railway town named Gordonsville, where a group of African-American women served trays of fresh, golden-fried chicken to passengers in locomotives. The town would later be heralded as "the Fried Chicken Capital of the World," and people would drive miles out of their way just for a chance to eat there. The ambition of these women and other African-American chicken merchants of the South demonstrated that there was money to be made from the otherwise neglected bird. It would just take a few centuries for everyone else to catch on and figure out how. 

By the end of the 19th century, trains, steel, and industry had replaced plows, fields, and cotton as the engines of the American economy. The nation was rapidly urbanizing, and more and more workers were drawn to American cities by the prospect of industrial jobs. The distance between most people and the farm-raised chickens they ate grew exponentially at this time. Supply dropped and prices skyrocketed. A food only largely available during the spring, the exorbitant costs of a chickens for sale in city markets elevated the food from pedestrian Sunday Supper into something, as the ladies' magazine Good Housekeeping remarked in 1885, “sought by the rich because [it is] so costly as to be an uncommon dish.” 

During this time, the American upper classes demanded their serving staff mince and mash the bird into chicken salad, which would be served as the plate du jour at many a ball, gala, and convention. The lower rungs of society, unable to afford chicken since it was now priced at four times the cost of a sirloin steak, instead prepared "veal birds": veal wound around a stick, then browned and simmered in an attempt to make a baby cow taste like the prestige of a chicken drumstick. In a complete reversal of modern price schemes, veal was one of the cheapest meats in the marketplace the end of the 19th century, ushering in a new era of chicken prestige. 

Well up until the end of the 19th century, the possibility of a chicken industry was slim due to lack of supply; increasing the size of a chicken flock the natural way is often a long and arduous process for farmers. A good hen will lay an egg every other day, but it takes a up to eight weeks for that same hen to lay enough eggs for her to start brooding and her eggs to start hatching. From there it takes another six to ten weeks for those chicks to be raised into mature chickens, during which time the hen doesn't lay any more eggs.

Farmers have long known that the best way to get a chicken to keep laying is to immediately take away the eggs. The problem, however, was finding a reliable way to incubate these eggs until they hatched into chickens. Over the centuries, the Western world tried and failed to make a variety of incubators—everything from steam engines to alcohol to natural hot springs, but all these failed. 

It was not until the fateful year of 1879 that a Canadian named Lyman Byce made his way to California and managed to produce the first ever commercially viable artificial incubator. This invention singlehandedly changed the future of chicken consumption. Farmers and their families could now easily hatch hundreds of chicks at once, quickly increasing their flocks and subsequently growing the number of eggs the country could eat. Within the decade, the first industrial egg industry began in Byce’s new hometown of Petaluma. By the 1920s, the city became known as the “Egg Basket of the World” and supplied one of every five egg available to the American people. A plethora of omelets, poached eggs, soufflés, and ice cream sundaes could now be had morning, noon, and night thanks to Lyman Byce’s invention.

As is the case with many breakthrough moments, one of the most important turning points in chicken history came about by accident. In 1923, as poultry legend has it, Celia Steele of the Delmarva Peninsula (that little combination of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia that juts into the Chesapeake Bay) was sent 500 chicks instead of the 50 she typically received each year. Unable to return these mail-order birds, Mrs. Steele instead built them a bigger chicken house and sold them off as meat a few weeks before everyone else. Her profits from this transaction were mind-blowing—some $8.60 per pound in today’s currency—and the next year she doubled her hatchery man’s mistake by ordering 1,000 chicks. Within two years she was up to ten thousand. By the end of the decade, she was raising over 25,000 birds on her property and making profits to match. Seeing Celia Steele’s good fortune, her neighbors, who were largely struggling subsistence produce farmers eager for better work, soon copied her, and quickly the modern “broiler industry” as we know it was born. 

Before the 1920s, chickens in such quantity would have inevitably caught a nasty disease and quickly perished. What’s more, chicken nutritionists didn’t previously know the power of vitamin D in allowing farmers to grow birds in the winter. But Celia Steele's mistake came about at the perfect moment in the advancement of chicken science, and thanks to the efforts of Delmarva’s farmers, chicken became a food available year round.

After the red-meat rationing of World War II came to a close, the supply of chicken coming out of chicken farms remained steady while demand sharply declined. Prices dipped proportionally, and the newly fledged broiler industry was worried. Looking to improve the lot of the American chicken, in 1948 the U.S. government announced its “Chicken of Tomorrow” competition aimed at breeding a bird with bigger breasts, plumper thighs, and layers of white meat that would grow fatter, faster. Hearing word there was a $5,000 cash prize for such a bird, farmers throughout the country submitted their plumpest and most efficient-growing chickens for judging. 

The results this competition had on American dinner plates were immediate and profound. Not only did the "Chicken of Tomorrow" winners grow bigger in less time on less feed as the contest's originators desired, but also the texture and size of its wondrously huge breasts delighted the American eater, who was used to seeing a chicken as scrawny. Utilizing the bird’s newfound feed efficiency, within a decade, the big, vertically integrated chicken companies like Tyson and Perdue were fully established and churning out record amounts of cheap chicken. Almost overnight, what was once one of the most expensive meats in the grocery store became the cheapest.

Cheap meat, however, didn’t necessarily mean desirable meat. Even with its gigantic breasts and affordable price point, not enough Americans were eating chickens regularly, placing an immense burden on farmers. To cut process, and cook a whole chicken was perceived as labor intensive, not something convenient for everyday eating. 

The solution to this conundrum would come—piping hot and golden—out of the food science laboratories of Cornell. There, one Dr. Robert Baker made it his life’s work to develop chicken innovations that would increase consumption and improve the incomes of chicken farmers. Over the course of his career, Dr. Baker would invent over fifty value-added, processed chicken products, including chicken burgers, chicken hot dogs, chicken loaf, chicken bologna, and, yes, the legendary chicken nugget. Chicken consumption was on the rise throughout the 1970s thanks to these new, tasty, and convenient chicken products, and in 1983, when McDonald's debuted its own Chicken McNugget to a newly chicken-hungry populace, the product broke all of the company's existing sales records. Thanks to the McNugget, this hamburger chain instantly became the second biggest user of chicken on planet earth, trailing only behind the fried-chicken powerhouse, KFC.

At the same time people were buying into the chicken-nugget gospel, they were also growing increasingly scared for the health of their arteries. By the 1970s, the number of medical studies linking heart disease to high cholesterol and saturated fats continued to mount, and with them grew public concern. In 1977, the U.S. Government stepped in and published their first-ever dietary guidelines for the nation. As these studies linked beef and pork directly to the ills of the American people, the government explicitly called for its citizens to “decrease consumption of meat and increase consumption of poultry and fish.” Hearing the news, the chicken industry rejoiced. They had made the bird cheap, abundant, convenient, and available year round. Now, long at last, people had incentive to eat chicken every day. By 1985, chicken was more popular than pork; by 1992, the bird was more popular than beef. After centuries of neglect at the dinner table, the chicken still reigns to this day as the nation’s most popular meat.