Steele didn’t live to see where her experiments ultimately led. Bacon and steak may take center stage for meat lovers, but when it comes to what’s for dinner, the answer is more often poultry. Today grocery stores charge $4 to $10 a pound for beef and pork, while chicken can cost as little as $1.80 a pound. Over time, chicken benefited from perceptions that it was healthier than red meat, and became cheaper to produce, thus cheaper for consumers. In the first half of the 20th century, chicken accounted for well under 20 percent of meat consumption in the US. Steele’s accident set off the chicken revolution as we know it. Delaware Public Archives/Delaware Agricultural Museum A freight train filled with chickens in Delaware. There was cheap, abundant land a relatively short distance from the hungry consumers of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. The Delmarva Peninsula, where Steele’s farm was located, was also the perfect place for large-scale chicken farming to take off. Not only was Steele’s timing lucky, but so was her location. But once farmers began fortifying chicken feed with vitamin D, they could suddenly raise them in larger numbers indoors and year-round. That helped cap the number of chickens that could be raised at any given time, especially in cooler climates. Chickens would often die of rickets when kept indoors during cold winter months (rickets is caused by a lack of vitamin D, stemming from lack of sunlight). One was the discovery of vitamin D in 1922, according to Emelyn Rude, author of Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favorite Bird. Simultaneous advancements in agricultural refrigeration and transportation, along with the rise of chain grocery stores and the expansion of agriculture financing, made that meat more plentiful.Īround this time there were also seemingly small advances around nutrition that had huge implications for mass agriculture. And the hatchery accident occurred at a fortuitous time - it was the Roaring ’20s, a decade of immense economic growth in the US, which meant Americans had more money in their pockets to eat more meat. But in Steele’s day, her operation was massive. National Archives and Records Administrationīy today’s standards, a 10,000-chicken farm is tiny - a single industrial-style chicken barn will now house upward of 40,000 birds at a time, and farmers usually own several barns apiece. Ike Long, a farmer, Cecile Steele’s children, and Cecile Steele. Word of the Steele family’s success spread, and by 1928 there were hundreds of farmers in the area raising chickens primarily for their meat (before Steele, most farmers raised chickens just for their eggs). Her husband, David “Wilmer” Steele, quit his job in the Coast Guard to help Cecile expand, and within three years, they were raising 10,000 chickens. Four and a half months later, over 100 of the original 500 chicks had died, but she still made a sizable profit off the 2-pound survivors - almost $11 per pound in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation - and began to ramp up her operations. Returns weren’t really an option in these pre-Amazon days, so she kept them anyway, feeding and watering the chicks by hand in a barn the size of a studio apartment - 256 square feet - that was heated by a coal stove. But one day by accident the local chick hatchery delivered 500 birds, 10 times more than the 50 Steele had ordered.įive hundred hens was a lot - bigger farms at the time had only 300. Steele, like many other rural Americans in her time, kept a small flock of chickens that she raised for eggs and waited to slaughter them for meat once their productivity waned. The story begins 100 years ago in 1923, with homemaker and farmer Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware. Want to eat less meat but don’t know where to start? Sign up for Vox’s five-day newsletter full of practical tips - and food for thought - to incorporate more plant-based food into your diet. Sign up for the Meat/Less newsletter course
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