0:00

Hello and welcome to this podcast

0:02

from the BBC World Service. Please

0:04

let us know what you think and tell

0:07

other people of Isis on social media. Podcasts

0:09

from the BBC World Service. are

0:12

supported by advertising. Hey,

0:17

I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint

0:19

Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies

0:22

are allowed to raise prices due to

0:24

inflation. They said yes. And then when

0:26

I asked if raising prices technically violates

0:28

those onerous to your contracts, they said,

0:30

what the f*** are you talking about,

0:32

you insane Hollywood a*****e? So to

0:34

recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a

0:36

month to just $15 a month. Give

0:38

it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. Give it a try

0:40

at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up front for three

0:43

months plus taxes and fees. Promote for new customers for a limited

0:45

time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month, slows. Full terms at

0:47

mintmobile.com. What do you do with your old tech? Throw

0:49

it in the trash? Drop it in the junk drawer?

0:52

Why not turn it into cash? With

0:54

Trade-In from Back Market, you can get

0:56

paid for your old smartphone, laptop, or

0:58

tablet. Just visit backmarket.com or download our

1:00

app. You'll get an offer in as

1:02

little as two minutes. Ship your old

1:04

device to us for free and get

1:07

your cash within five days. So

1:09

next time you need to upgrade your tech

1:11

or clean out those drawers, make some money

1:13

with Trade-In from backmarket.com. And while you're there,

1:16

save up to 70% versus

1:18

new on your next verified refurbished

1:20

device. It's

1:28

5am. I'm heading out east

1:30

out of London with my

1:32

producer Lucy to order

1:34

a sort of watery sunrise.

1:39

Past the chicken chops and foxes

1:42

rootling through rubbish. And we're

1:44

going to meet a guy

1:46

at a service

1:49

station just on the motorway. The

1:52

man has a package for

1:54

me. The package itself is

1:56

a source of some anxiety

1:58

for me. and

6:00

world domination. This is Fed,

6:03

Planet Chicken. Episode

6:11

1, The Invention of Chicken.

6:19

The Chicken is a Van Tulligan family favourite,

6:21

and that's what's really brought me to the

6:24

side of a motorway to collect my fluffy

6:26

new livestock. Because if I'm going to investigate

6:28

what happens to billions of chickens en route

6:30

to our plates, I want

6:32

to try getting them there myself, from

6:34

coop to soup. I'm

6:36

going to raise these chickens, and then I'm going

6:38

to see if my family and I can bring

6:40

ourselves to eat them. And I don't

6:43

know how I'm going to feel at the end of this. Maybe

6:45

I won't want to eat any chicken by that point. But

6:47

I do know this. Despite all this

6:50

chicken we eat in sandwiches, curries, pies, chicken

6:52

shops up and down the country, you

6:54

don't actually see that many chickens around. What

6:57

I want to do is spend some time with

6:59

the thing I'm studying to find out what I

7:01

can learn about chickens and about us.

7:08

I started keeping chickens. And I

7:11

had no experience with them, and

7:13

they blew my mind. Now,

7:15

you might be of the opinion that no

7:17

one's mind can be blown by a chicken,

7:19

but just hold that thought. I study archaeological

7:22

animals. And if my mind has

7:24

been blown, can you imagine what people in the

7:26

past who will never have seen a chicken before,

7:28

what would have happened to

7:30

their brains? Like, whoosh. We're

7:32

starting this story right at

7:34

the beginning with a respectful,

7:36

even reverent human-chicken relationship. Naomi

7:39

Sykes is a professor of archaeology at

7:41

the University of Exeter, and she's going

7:43

to help me understand how that relationship

7:46

gradually unraveled. Yeah, I would say it's

7:48

a co-creation of culture and

7:50

relationships and impact on the environment. We're

7:52

on the South Coast, and it's a

7:54

sweltering day. I've joined Naomi

7:56

and her collaborator, Gregor Larson. He's a

7:58

professor of evenness. evolutionary genomics at the

8:01

University of Oxford. We've done it, but

8:03

using domestication as a way to understand

8:05

evolution, and vice versa. And so applying

8:07

evolutionary ideas to look at the relationships

8:10

between humans and animals and how that

8:12

changed... We're going for a stroll around

8:14

the gardens of Fishbourne, Roman Palace. About

8:18

2,000 years ago, this was Northern

8:20

Europe's largest Roman villa, built just

8:22

after they invaded Britain. This is

8:24

an exceptionally elite site. This is

8:26

like the Buckingham Palace of the

8:28

Roman period. And as many of

8:30

you may remember from school trips,

8:32

it's home to some amazing ancient

8:34

mosaics. But I'm not here for the tiling. This

8:37

is where some of the first chickens

8:39

arrived on these shores. Before

8:43

we get to the Romans, we have to go back further

8:45

still. Because the chicken story starts more than

8:47

3,500 years ago in the jungles of Asia, with its

8:51

ancestor, the red jungle fowl. They've

8:57

got green tail feathers, there's bits of

8:59

red, they're iridescent, and they strut about

9:01

like nobody's business. And the noise they

9:03

make is incredible, especially the cock crawls,

9:06

right? Yeah, think about what a cock

9:08

crawl sounds like. And some of those

9:10

Asian jungle fowl have just incredibly loud

9:12

crows. Naomi and Gregor have collaborated on

9:15

this massive chicken research project. They've looked

9:17

at how their purpose and then their

9:19

anatomy changed, and what that can tell

9:21

us about ourselves. So

9:23

there's a transition that takes place, and that's part

9:25

of the domestication process, where we know

9:28

that chickens are derived from red jungle fowl, and we

9:30

now know that it was about 3,500 years

9:32

ago, the first time you start to see

9:35

chickens that were no longer red jungle fowl.

9:37

They're spending a lot more time around human

9:39

settlements, and they start moving with people across

9:41

Eurasia, headed west toward Britain. It's a slow

9:43

process. So they get into northern Europe by

9:46

about 500 BC, and that's when they make

9:48

it to Britain. Get this. At

9:50

that point, nobody was eating them.

9:53

They lived to old ages. They

9:55

are buried in their own right,

9:57

in little burial urns. crit

10:00

creatures? Absolutely, they're so linked

10:02

into religion, it's unbelievable.

10:04

So they're linked to Mithras,

10:06

to Mercury, gods,

10:09

ancient gods. It's an amazing thought

10:12

considering that today it is the most widely

10:14

eaten meat on the planet. So why weren't

10:16

we interested in eating them back then? Well

10:19

I think it goes back to some

10:21

of those religious elements but also if

10:23

you kill the animal to eat it

10:25

then you don't get its feathers anymore,

10:27

if it's laying eggs you don't get

10:29

its eggs anymore. And to be honest

10:31

there's not that much meat on a

10:34

sort of early chicken. Also I think

10:36

there is a population size that they

10:38

get to a certain number and that

10:40

kind of familiarity breeds contempt kind of

10:42

situation and then suddenly their food. Okay

10:44

that's intriguing, so there's some critical

10:46

threshold where chickens reach a level in

10:49

a population but this is not valuable

10:51

or interesting anymore and then we're like well we've got

10:53

a lot of these things, have you started eating them?

10:55

Yes but it's hard for us to get out of

10:58

our own heads with respect to what a chicken currently

11:00

looks like and we immediately place that into the past.

11:02

Chickens have tripled in size in 50 years

11:04

and the adjectives that we describe chickens with,

11:06

they're dumb, they're just kind of there and

11:09

we make fun of them but all of

11:11

the elements of chickens in our language which

11:13

are negative and which are derogatory, chicken shit,

11:15

bird-craned, you're a chicken, all these things,

11:17

those are a post-World War II phenomenon.

11:20

I'll come back to that later in the series. Right

11:23

now at Fishborne I can't help but

11:25

feel like this big shift in attitudes

11:27

says something very specifically about us. It's

11:30

as if we've tried to

11:32

distance ourselves from chickens by

11:34

reclassifying them as stupid creatures,

11:37

a state of denial that probably helps

11:39

quash any lingering guilt about killing the

11:41

things that we used to worship. And

11:43

it makes absolute sense because it mirrors

11:46

so many of our other relationships with the natural

11:48

world. are

12:00

old. Some of the chickens

12:02

that we found are five years old

12:04

so that's a good innings for a

12:06

chicken right five years. Roll

12:08

on to today if you were

12:11

a chicken that is born into

12:13

the broiler industry you've got about

12:15

35 days to make it from egg

12:19

to having your head dropped off. Broiler

12:21

chickens are birds raised specifically for meat

12:23

not for eggs. Naomi's talking about the

12:25

most intensive type of broiler production using

12:28

the fastest growing breeds. I'll just put

12:30

this into perspective like a bumblebee can

12:32

last for a hundred days and a

12:35

house fly for like 25-30 so I

12:37

think that's also the reason why we

12:39

just don't care about chickens anymore. I

12:42

mean it is pretty hard to care about

12:44

anything as common and short-lived as a house

12:46

fly. Fishborne

12:49

was excavated in the 1960s and was

12:52

one of the first digs where the

12:54

archaeologists decided to keep animal bones as

12:56

well as human remains. That decisions paid

12:58

off for Naomi and Gregor they've run

13:00

lots of tests on these bags of

13:02

bones and one of the most interesting

13:05

things they've discovered is that when you

13:07

compare a chicken from 2,000 years ago

13:09

to what we call a chicken today

13:11

it's a completely different animal. I've

13:14

got some skeletons from some broilers

13:17

and I rearticulated it I cleaned it

13:19

all up and put it kind of

13:21

as a anatomical specimen. Like a museum

13:23

piece. Yeah and it is so different

13:25

to the actual anatomical specimen that I've

13:27

got so if you look at the

13:30

broiler chicken its bones are like paper

13:32

because of course it's gone from egg

13:34

to full-grown in 35 days

13:36

so the bones haven't really had

13:38

the chance to ossify to become

13:40

bones. They're so fragile and because

13:43

the chickens take so much weight

13:45

from the meat the bones actually

13:47

start to warp and bend because

13:49

they can't support that animal itself

13:51

so there is a reason why

13:53

those chickens have to be killed

13:55

at an early age because if

13:57

they lived a few more days or weeks

14:00

then they actually can't walk that well. So

14:02

the Roman chickens that we're looking at

14:04

now would have looked very different. They're much

14:06

sturdier. They're thinner, they're smaller, they are

14:09

well formed. You can see the real

14:11

sort of architecture to the bones. With

14:13

the modern broilers, no such thing. Gregor

14:16

explains that as humans started to

14:18

breed chickens to draw out their

14:20

most important traits, we turned

14:23

chickens into specialists. They were either

14:25

layers or meat birds. We've

14:27

winnowed them down so they do one thing and one

14:29

thing well and nothing else matters and all that doesn't

14:31

matter can just be discarded, which means that things that

14:33

do matter are absolutely homogenous all the way through. Does

14:36

that pose a risk in terms of,

14:39

you know, sustainable food production? Is this like we

14:41

only eat one kind of banana? I was just

14:43

gonna say the banana, yes. Bananas are different because

14:45

they're clonal, so we haven't got to the point

14:47

yet where we are taking a chicken skin cell

14:50

and then creating a clone of a chicken over

14:52

and over and over again. They are still sexually

14:54

reproducing organisms, which means it's not just exactly the

14:56

same chicken all the way through, but absolutely. Anytime

14:58

you specialize, you're going to end up going down

15:00

a channel where you are now much

15:02

more susceptible to a disease that finds one and

15:04

then it will get everybody all at once. So

15:08

we changed chicken for our own

15:10

benefit, faster growing, meatier, more docile,

15:13

easy to farm. But

15:15

in doing all this, have we created

15:17

a monster? It's fantastic that

15:19

we can produce this much protein so quickly

15:21

with chickens. There are ethical issues

15:23

associated with that clearly, but then there's ethical

15:25

issues of having a burgeoning world population where

15:27

everybody needs to eat something and everybody would

15:29

like to eat more meat. So

15:32

how do we balance all those different things? And

15:34

I think regardless of how we do that, those

15:36

relationships have been shifting and have been dynamic over

15:38

the last several thousand years and that is never

15:40

gonna stop. So

15:43

we lived alongside chickens for centuries and they

15:45

basically stayed the same all that time. And

15:47

then suddenly there was a period of radical

15:49

change that we made happen. But

15:52

how? Midway through the 20th

15:54

century, our relationship with food

15:56

goes through this major change. The world's

15:58

evolving in the wake of... two

16:00

world wars, nations are rebuilding

16:02

and after years of restraint

16:04

and rationing there's this new

16:06

focus on productivity, efficiency and

16:09

profit. The chicken

16:11

is about to get an extreme makeover.

16:14

So there's a story that I have to tell you and

16:17

I feel like there ought to be a

16:19

sound effect behind my voice when I say

16:21

this but there was this thing in the

16:23

United States in the late 40s and early

16:25

50s called the Chicken of Tomorrow contest. Yeah

16:27

okay we can do a sound effect for

16:29

that. It'll be like

16:32

a fanfare. I'm talking to Marin McKenna,

16:34

she's a celebrated American journalist who's written

16:36

extensively about public health, food and chicken.

16:38

There was this thing in the United

16:40

States in the late 40s and early

16:43

50s called the Chicken of Tomorrow contest.

16:50

So people start to get interested

16:53

in chicken as a reliable producer

16:55

of protein but at

16:57

the time chickens had grown to

16:59

be birds that fed themselves, defended

17:02

themselves and pretty much didn't need

17:04

a lot of human interaction. However

17:07

that is not necessarily a chicken

17:09

that is going to have tasty

17:11

soft white muscle. Those muscles

17:14

are going to be very exercised so they're

17:16

going to be chewy and

17:18

the question began to arise will can

17:20

we make chicken tastier? After

17:23

all these years whether the chicken or the

17:25

egg came first is still the subject of

17:27

a lot of good-natured debate. In

17:29

steps the United States Department of

17:31

Agriculture which along with several large

17:33

supermarket chains sponsors this Chicken

17:35

of Tomorrow contest. The goal of

17:37

which is to crossbreed

17:41

a chicken that will

17:43

be docile, won't

17:45

flap around, won't have

17:47

colored feathers because they're harder to get out of the

17:49

skin and they look kind of yucky and

17:52

generally will be more like a

17:54

piece of predictable protein than it will

17:56

be like a bird with agency and

17:59

energy. Notice

18:01

how breeding has increased the amount of meat

18:03

on the breast. Look

18:06

at that drumstick. And

18:09

the two breeders who win

18:11

that contest in 1948 and

18:13

1951 go on to

18:15

be the founders

18:18

of the breeding companies that

18:20

still control most of the

18:22

chicken produced around the world. Through

18:25

selective breeding, we'd found a way to

18:27

get the most out of chickens, and

18:29

this revolution quickly spread beyond the United

18:31

States. In

18:36

the 1950s, a British businessman called Anthony

18:38

Fisher introduced the prize-winning breed of chicken

18:40

to the UK. And it

18:42

made him rich, the owner of the

18:45

biggest chicken farms in England. And that

18:47

success encouraged others to try selective breeding,

18:49

turning out tender, meaty birds that appealed

18:51

to shoppers. You see,

18:53

it's so quick. I roasted

18:55

a chicken with the mushrooms underneath, and

18:58

there they are, all beautifully

19:00

moistening the bird ready for you to

19:02

carve it. And everybody

19:04

gets a lovely fat lump in it.

19:12

For the 1970s, this drive for

19:14

the ultimate table bird had delivered

19:16

two incredibly efficient breeds, the Cobb

19:18

500 and the Ross 301,

19:20

developed by rival chicken companies.

19:23

Today, the latest versions of these Cobb and

19:26

Ross chickens account for around

19:28

90% of the world's intensively

19:30

farmed broilers. The

19:32

story might have started in the 1940s,

19:34

but today, scientists are still working to

19:37

deliver a better bird than ever before.

19:44

I've gone in search of answers about

19:46

how our relationship with chickens has changed

19:48

through history, and how the birds themselves

19:50

have physically changed too. And I've

19:53

got lots of answers, but I've got even

19:55

more questions. Because there seem

19:57

to be two competing narratives. a

20:00

food science success story. The

20:03

others a story about selective animal

20:05

breeding gone too far. So

20:08

I've decided the best way to make

20:10

up my mind is by getting some

20:12

first-hand experience of modern breeds which takes

20:14

us back to the side of the

20:16

M25 and my slightly dodgy sounding chicken

20:18

pickup. Good morning

20:20

Steve, I'm Chris.

20:22

Hello. I'm a

20:25

bit unsettled because it's early and

20:27

it's a weird location but my

20:29

supplier Steve Wigington has a reassuring

20:31

air helped by his astonishing resemblance

20:33

to the actor Jim Broadbent. Most

20:36

of our customer base are small

20:39

producers, farmers that have got farm

20:41

shops. Steve and his wife run

20:43

a business hatching chicks which they

20:45

supply mainly to free-range chicken farms

20:48

but I'm not getting your typical

20:50

backyard chickens. Most people get layers

20:52

but not me. I'm

20:54

getting broilers, meat birds

20:56

and three different types. Two

20:59

ross, two ross, two hubbard,

21:02

two hubbard and a naked

21:04

neck. Oh a naked neck. Quick spoiler

21:07

alert, the funny little naked neck which

21:09

looks as if it's had half of

21:11

its feathers pulled out will quickly become

21:14

the family favourite. The

21:16

ross is the fast growing strain that

21:18

you're probably more used to

21:20

buying in the supermarkets priced

21:22

quite low because they're

21:25

cheap to produce, very quick to

21:27

grow, where the other birds are

21:29

more designed for free-range systems, slower

21:32

growing where you're looking for quality

21:35

rather than quantity. So

21:38

that's the ross birds. They are

21:40

classic canary yellow balls of fluff,

21:42

exactly what you'd imagine chicks look

21:44

like but I'm also getting two

21:46

golden brown hubbards. The

21:48

hubbard has been designed as a

21:50

slower growing bird. So if I

21:53

buy my fancy free-range

21:55

organic chicken that's more likely

21:57

to be a hubbard? Yes.