What came first,the chicken or the dinosaur?
Fowl Play: A History Of The Chicken From Dinosaur To Dinner Plate
Sally Coulthard Apollo €23 ★★★★★
Chicken is so popular as a meal today that there are 20billion birds currently alive on the planet – that’s three for every person. In Ireland, chicken features in 21% of all adult meals.
It’s tempting not to think much about the shrink-wrapped pink dinners we find lined up on our supermarket shelves, but Sally Coulthard’s book will change that. ‘Of all animals, they perhaps best represent the strange and often contradictory way we humans treat other species,’ she writes. They’re
also, it turns out, really interesting. At the start of this charming and illuminating book, Coulthard describes chickens as ‘the dinosaurs that didn’t die’. The humble hen is the living creature that most resembles tyrannosaurus rex – so much so that, in 2014, researchers strapped wooden tails to chickens’ bottoms to see how dinosaurs would have walked. Though they little resemble their prehistoric cousins, modern chickens retain a stump of this vestigial tail, which we know now as the ‘parson’s nose’.
It’s surprising that, for most of our history, humans didn’t eat chickens. While there is evidence of cockfighting in ancient Greece, and of ritual sacrifice in Iron Age Britain, the
chicken was both too fierce and too scrawny to make a decent meal. In medieval times, peasants were more likely to serve mutton, pork and beef.
The modern broiler industry was invented by accident, in 1923, by a poor US farmer called Cecile Steele. She had ordered 50 fertile eggs to replenish her stock of layers; the hatchery mistakenly sent 500. Instead of sending them back, Cecile built a shed, fattened them up and made a tidy profit. Coulthard keeps her tone neutral and informative as she describes the technological changes that led to modern, highdensity chicken rearing. She also retains an element of wonder, whether at gigantic Egyptian egg incubators, at the English language’s rich abundance of bawdy chicken metaphors, or at the perplexing fact that hen eggs are laid rounded end first.
The result is a fascinating history, light on moralising but rich in fancy-that details. It may put you off your capon nuggets, but it will give you a good story to share with the parson’s nose.