“A chicken,” David Simon once remarked, “seems like it was brought into this world to be eaten.” Ian Frazier plucks (sorry!) fascinating morsels from the history of the chicken, “the most popular terrestrial vertebrate,” then prepares a ten-piece meal of bird trivia. A casual, tasty snack, served with a side of levity.
According to people knowledgeable about chickens, the egg came first. An animal not very much like a chicken produced an egg containing an offspring more chicken-like than its parents, and by mutation the process kept happening through the ages until an egg emerged containing something that was indisputably a chicken—ergo, the primacy of the egg. Humans domesticated some of these animals 3,000 or 3,500 years ago. The red jungle fowl, the chicken’s ancestor, still lives in the wild in Southeast Asia. After having been caught (the hard part), chickens are readily portable, and humans in their wanderings took them all over. They were in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, making the story about the rooster crowing after Peter’s third betrayal of Jesus at least not physically impossible. A pope ordered that churches put images of roosters at their highest point as a reminder of our frailty—hence the rooster weather vane.
More picks about chickens
Why Did the Rubber Chicken Cross the Road?
“At 38, I began to feel the creep of the millennial midlife crisis. So I decided to break the strangest world record I could find.”
The Incalculable Cost of Cheap Chicken—and the Hidden Industry That Shoulders It
“The exact number of COVID-19 deaths connected to poultry plants may never be known, but one thing is clear: the Latinx population in North Carolina has been hit hard by the pandemic.”
The Price of Eggs
“The chickens had arrived the previous spring, unasked for, like most of life’s obligations.”
