May 17, 2023 • 45 mins
In the 1940s the U.S. Department of Agriculture and A&P supermarkets teamed up to hold a contest to see who could breed the meatiest, most efficient, most visually appealing chicken.
Research:
- Audio Productions inc. “The Chicken of Tomorrow.” Documentary. (1948).
- Boyd, William. “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production.” Technology and Culture , Oct., 2001, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 2001). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25147798
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Robert Bakewell". Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Jan. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Bakewell. Accessed 21 April 2023.
- Bugos, Glenn E. “Intellectual Property Protection in the American Chicken-Breeding Industry.” The Business History Review , Spring, 1992, Vol. 66, No. 1. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3117055
- Cook, Robert E. et al. “How Chicken on a Sunday Became an Anyday Treat.” USDA. 1975. https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/CAIN769013731
- Cornell University. “Backyard Revival: American Heritage Poultry.” https://exhibits.library.cornell.edu/backyard-revival-american-heritage-poultry
- Elfick, Dominic. “A Brief History of Broiler Selection: How Chicken Became a Global Food Phenomenon in 50 Years.” Aviagen. http://en.aviagen.com/assets/Sustainability/50-Years-of-Selection-Article-final.pdf
- Horowitz, Roger. “Making the Chicken of Tomorrow: Reworking Poultry as Commodities and as Creatures, 1945-1990.” From “Industrializing Organisms.” Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton, editors. Routledge. 2003.
- Killgrove, Kristina. “Ancient DNA Explains How Chickens Got To The Americas.” Forbes. 11/23/2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2017/11/23/ancient-dna-explains-how-chickens-got-to-the-americas/
- Laatsch, David R. “The ‘Chicken of Tomorrow.’” University of Wisconsin-Madison. Livestock Division of Extension. https://livestock.extension.wisc.edu/articles/the-chicken-of-tomorrow/
- Long, Tom. “Henry Saglio; his breeding knowhow changed poultry industry.” Boston.com. 12/26/2003. http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/obituaries/articles/2003/12/16/henry_saglio_his_breeding_knowhow_changed_poultry_industry/
- McKenna, Maryn. “The Surprising Origin of Chicken as a Dietary Staple.” National Geographic. 5/1/2018. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/poultry-food-production-agriculture-mckenna
- Peters, Joris et al. “The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens.” PNAS. Vol. 119, No. 24. June 2022. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2121978119
- Short, Michael. “Delmarva’s $4.8 Billion Chicken Industry Was Accidentally Hatched 100 Years Ago.” Lancaster Farming. 2/19/2023. https://www.lancasterfarming.com/farming-news/poultry/delmarva-s-4-8-billion-chicken-industry-was-accidentally-hatched-100-years-ago/article_36af9702-f119-51d1-a122-aee4b78955ce.html
- Shrader H.L. “The Chicken-of-Tomorrow Program; Its Influence on ‘Meat-Type’ Poultry Production.” Poultry Science. Volume 31, Issue 1, 1 January 1952, Pages 3-10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579119513013
- Wiehoff, Dale. “How the Chicken of Tomorrow became the Chicken of the World.” Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. 3/26/2013. https://www.iatp.org/blog/201303/how-the-chicken-of-tomorrow-became-the-chicken-of-the-world
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. So I don't really remember exactly
where I stumbled over this, but it was one of
those things that got an overlapping oh really what and
oh yeah? That tracks in my brain like it was
a simultaneous surprised, disbelief and total lack of surprise all
(00:33):
at the same time. And a lot of the world
today chickens that are raised for their meat are just
a lot different from the chickens of a century ago.
They are so much bigger. That's not the surprising part.
The surprising part was that a big reason for this
is that in the nineteen forties, the US Department of
Agriculture and the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company aka
(00:58):
A and P Supermarkets, they teamed up to hold a
contest to see who could breed the mediest, most efficient,
most visually appealing chicken. So this is a story that
combines the history of factory farming with the history of supermarkets,
and it has had just an enormous impact on farming
and on food all around.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
The world.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Also, this is just one piece of the greater history
of the industrialization of agriculture. We could have pretty similar
episodes about other ways that people have influenced other animals
and plants to make them more productive or easier to harvest,
or generally more profitable, although those other stories might not
have the A and P involved. Today's episode, though, is
(01:43):
about raising chickens as food for people, and a lot
of the general patterns that we're talking about are really
not unique to chickens. So if you're thinking, why aren't
they talking about cows because this episode is about the
chicken episode, Yeah, So we're gonna start with some background
on chickens and chicken breeding. Today's chickens were first domesticated
(02:06):
from red jungle fowl or Gallus gallas, which is a
tropical bird native to Southeast Asia. Based on research we
talked about in one of our Unearthed episodes last year,
this probably happened in what's now central Thailand sometime between
sixteen fifty and twelve fifty BCE, but other research has
suggested other parts of Asia as well, and in some
(02:28):
cases on an earlier timeline. The domestic chicken or Gallus
gallus domesticus was then introduced to the rest of Asia, Europe,
and Africa, reaching a lot of the eastern hemisphere by
about eight hundred BCE. Chickens were also carried from the
Indian subcontinent to islands in the Pacific, and from there
(02:49):
to the Americas. Chickens were introduced into what's now Chile
at least a century before Columbus's first voyage to the
Americas in fourteen ninety two. Colonists and slave traders also
introduced chickens from Europe and Africa into North America starting
around the seventeenth century, so chickens were introduced to the
(03:10):
Americas from both the East and the west. Europeans brought
domestic chickens to New Zealand in seventeen seventy three and
to Australia in seventeen eighty eight.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
In a lot of places, but certainly not everywhere, Archaeological
evidence suggests that for centuries chickens were mostly associated with
the wealthiest, most elite people, and in Europe, the oldest
archaeological evidence of domesticated chickens suggests they were not being
eaten as food. Their skeletons are intact and there are
(03:41):
not any cut or bite marks on those bones. Eventually, though,
people in Europe and in Europe's colonies in the Americas
did start to eat chickens. For the most part, though
the chickens were not being raised for that purpose. They
were being raised for their eggs, so hens would be
killed and eaten after their egg production slowed down or stopped,
(04:04):
or maybe if they never started laying in the first place.
The meat from older hens tended to be tough, so
their meat was typically stewed or otherwise slow cooked in
some way to make it more tender. The other major
source of meat was male chickens or cockrels that would
be culled out of the flock before they were old
(04:24):
enough to start fertilizing the hens eggs, and then they
would be fattened.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Up for slaughter.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
In a lot of places, all of this was considered
women's work, sometimes with the help of their children. Women
raised the chickens, gathered the eggs, and slaughtered, dressed, and
cooked them. They often earned money for their households by
selling extra eggs or selling the chickens that were being slaughtered.
Prior to the US Civil War, chickens were also often
(04:52):
the only livestock that enslaved people were allowed to raise
for themselves, so enslaved people would raise chickens for food.
In some cases they were able to sell the eggs
or the meat to their enslavers or to other people
in the area to earn their own money. Beyond that, though,
chicken just wasn't an everyday food for most people. Before
(05:13):
the development of reliable refrigeration and freezing technology, cockrels were
usually a seasonal food after they were culled from the
flock in late spring. Chicken meat was also generally a
lot more expensive than it is today. There were fewer
chickens being sold, and the chickens themselves were a lot smaller,
so to many consumers, chicken was not an everyday staple.
(05:36):
It was for special occasions or Sunday dinners, or was
maybe even a luxury that was usually out of reach.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Over the course of the nineteenth century, people in Europe
and North America started developing new breeds of domestic chicken.
That's built on the work of Robert Bakewell, who lived
in the eighteenth century during the British Agricultural Revolution. We
talked about this period and episode on Jethro Tull and
the Seed Drill, which came out in December of twenty
(06:04):
twenty one. This was a period of massive change in
virtually every aspect of British agriculture, including land use, animal husbandry,
methods for preparing and using the soil for crops, and
the development of new agricultural machines. Bakewell's work was specifically
in livestock breeding. In a lot of ways, Bakewell was
(06:28):
building on what was already known for millennia. People have
understood that living beings can inherit various traits from their ancestors,
although the start of genetics as a modern science was
still decades away when Bakewell was living, and breeds of
animals already existed all over the world, adapted to things
like the environment they were living in, the food they
(06:48):
had to eat, and what.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
People wanted them to do. People have also been selectively
breeding animals, at least to some extent, for kind of
as long as we've been domesticating them. But Well was
particularly careful and methodical about what he was doing, and
he established practices that became really influential.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
For example, he set specific goals for the traits that
he wanted to focus on and what he wanted to
achieve with those traits. He separated his herds and flocks
according to the animal's sex, allowing only specifically chosen animals
to breed with one another. He chose animals that had
the traits that he wanted to encourage, and then he
(07:30):
encouraged those same traits even more through inbreeding. He called
this breeding in and in. He also culled animals that
had undesirable traits out of his herds and flocks, and
he helped popularize the practice of using male animals with
particularly desirable traits for stud This not only encouraged those
(07:51):
same traits among other farmers animals, but it also demonstrated
whether Bakewell had successfully bred an animal that could pass
those traits on. This carefully managed breeding had a big
impact on the animals bake Well worked with. In particular,
he developed or improved on breeds of cattle so that
they would be well suited for work while also providing
(08:14):
good meat, rather than primarily being working animals with meat
as an afterthought. He similarly developed sheep for both their
meat and their wool, rather than primarily wool production. His
two biggest successes were probably in his breed improvements to
Leicestershire longhorn cattle and Leicester sheep, but there were also downsides.
(08:35):
It's possible that his use and promotion of inbreeding contributed
to health problems among the animals, including making some breeds
of sheep more susceptible to the prion disease known as scrapie.
To return to chickens, in the nineteenth century, people in
Europe and North America started using these same basic ideas
(08:56):
to develop new breeds of rabbits and chickens and to
enhances existing breeds. By the eighteen fifties, breeding animals and
plants to enhance their beauty or their uniqueness was known
as fancying. In addition to breeding rabbits and chickens, fanciers
started establishing official standards for the various breeds, something that
(09:17):
would later be done for pigeons, dogs, cats, and other animals.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And now you know why magazines are called things like
cat fancy.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
I always thought that it just meant fancy. Yes, I
did not realize there was a thread that was about
making them more distinctive and beautiful.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
This early interest in chicken fancying contributed to a more
robust understanding of inheritance and breeding among chicken farmers than
among farmers who worked with a lot of other animals.
That's not to suggest that other farmers were clueless, just
as a general rule, chicken breeding was a little bit
farther along in the early twentieth century. There was also
(09:59):
a lot of overlap among fanciers, breeders, and geneticists. It
wasn't until the late nineteen teens that animal breeding and
genetics started to be seen as two different but intersecting fields.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
All this together means that when a contest was proposed
in the nineteen forties to see which breeder could produce
the best broiler chicken, chicken farmers were really ready for it,
and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
(10:35):
In the first decades of the twentieth century, a couple
of innovations really affected the way US chicken farmers could
develop their flocks. The first was the decision of US
Postmaster General as Burlison to allow live chicks to be
sent through the mail. That decision was made in nineteen eighteen,
(10:56):
so as chicks are hatching, they consumed the last of
yoke from inside of their eggs. And that provides them
with nourishment for about the first forty eight to seventy
two hours of their life. That allows chicks who are
being cared for by their mothers to survive for a
couple of days until all of their siblings have hatched
and she's able to leave the nest. It also allows
(11:19):
chicks to survive a couple of days in the mail
in a specially designed box that's made to physically protect
them while also making sure they have good airflow and
are at the right temperature in transit. The other development
was the first electrically heated egg incubator, which debuted in
nineteen twenty three. This was not the first egg incubator
(11:41):
by any stretch. There is evidence of incubators in both
Egypt and China as far back as four thousand years ago.
These were buildings heated with fires, which required someone to
be on hand around the clock to keep the temperature
steady and to tend to the eggs. By the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, the incubators had been developed
(12:01):
that incorporated thermostats so a person didn't have to monitor
the temperature quite so closely.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Some of these were like small cabinets heated with hot water,
and others were whole rooms or even buildings, but electric
models were easier to manage as long as the person
had access to a reliable electricity source.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
This meant that farmers who wanted to add new chickens
to their flocks could buy chicks and have those chicks
sent to them through the mail rather than losing their
laying hens for about three weeks while they incubated their
own eggs, and people who sold the chicks could do
the same. They could produce more chicks than they would
be if the hens were incubating them, because the hens
(12:43):
eventually stopped laying new eggs to sit on them until
they hatch. At about the same time that all this
was happening, refrigeration was also making it possible for people
to ship eggs and meat over greater distances and to
store them for longer in their homes. The first refrigerated
cars were developed in the late nineteenth century and used
ice tanks and insulation to keep their contents cool. People
(13:07):
were also using ice boxes to keep foods cool in
their homes in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Although that required a steady supply of large blocks of
ice The first mechanical refrigerator for home use in the
US debuted in nineteen thirteen. The first mechanically cooled trucks
were developed in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various people
in the United States started trying to raise chickens specifically
for their meat rather than for their eggs. But the
first person to be really successful at it was the
Seal Steel of Ocean Viewed, Delaware. This is on the
del Marva Peninsula that's east of Washington, d c. And Baltimore,
(13:50):
and the peninsula includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.
That's where its name comes from. In nineteen twenty three,
Steel ordered fifty chicks to supplement her flock of laying hens,
and somewhere in that process, an extra zero got added
to her order, and she wound up with five hundred
of them. She and her husband, Wilmer, decided to make
(14:14):
the best of this situation and built sheds to house
these extra chicks in. Once they were grown, weighing about
two and a half pounds apiece, she was able to
sell them for sixty seven cents a pound.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
The next year, Steel ordered more chickens on purpose, this
time one thousand of them. Eventually, her broiler business became
so large and successful that her husband left his job
at the Coast Guard to help her with it. By
nineteen twenty six, they were raising ten thousand birds a year.
Their business was so successful that they eventually bought a yacht,
(14:49):
although they were killed in an explosion aboard that yacht
on October seventh, nineteen forty.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Cecil Steel's first accidental chick order is often cited as
the start of the Delmarva Peninsula's poultry industry, and in
nineteen seventy four, one of her original broiler houses was
listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Delmarva
Peninsula also became a major source of chicken meat for
(15:14):
Jewish communities and cities in the northeastern United States, particularly
New York. Chicken meat was more popular among Jewish people
than among many other groups because of Jewish dietary laws.
At first, most of the chickens that were raised in
the area were transported to New York, where they would
be processed according to Jewish law. Kosher processing plants started
(15:37):
to be built on the peninsula in the nineteen thirties.
Other discoveries were being made around these same years as well.
A big one involved improvements to chicken feed, especially the
nutrient content of that feed. People had started figuring out
that specific foods seemed to prevent or treat specific diseases
in the eighteenth century, but the first vitamins weren't isolated
(16:00):
until the early twentieth century. More nutritious feed wasn't necessarily
about a better happier life for the chickens, though. Farmers
had figured out that chickens grew much faster if they
were confined indoors rather than being outdoors. Being indoors also
helped protect them from predators. Outdoor chickens usually stop laying
(16:25):
in the winter, but keeping them indoors with controlled heating
and artificial light also meant that they could provide more
consistent egg supply year round. But without exposure to natural sunlight,
confined chickens developed leg weakness and other physical issues because
their bodies couldn't produce enough vitamin D. Vitamin D was
(16:47):
first discovered in the nineteen twenties, and by the nineteen
thirties farmers were adding cod liver oil, which is rich
in vitamin D into their feed, making it more possible
to confine them indoors. Of course, being confined indoors also
allowed diseases to spread through flocks very rapidly. In the
early twentieth century, a major threat was best Sillery white
(17:10):
diarrhea caused by Salmonilla polorum bacteria. People started looking for
ways to prevent illnesses among chickens while still keeping them confined.
For example, one of the businesses Cceal and Wilmer Steel
moved into toward the end of their lives involved providing
vaccines for chickens. By nineteen thirty five, the US Department
of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Industry had launched the National
(17:33):
Poultry Improvement Plan to try to improve sanitation and reduce
disease at chicken farms, test birds for illnesses, and encourage
consistency and uniformity among the flocks. Diseases continue to be
an issue in the poultry industry, though, for example, other
species of Salmonilla bacteria are a major source of food
(17:54):
borne illness from both chicken and eggs. In the United States.
Pick In rose in popularity during World War II as
a food source because it wasn't being subject to rationing
in the way most other meats were. People who had
the space were also encouraged to keep backyard flocks for
both eggs and meat. That was something that had been
(18:16):
encouraged during World War One as well. Although rationing ended
in the United States for everything but sugar by the
end of nineteen forty five, there were still shortages of
a lot of meats after the war, as the United
States provided food aid to other countries. So chicken meat
continued to be in high demand, and that's what ultimately
(18:38):
led to an effort to basically redesign the chicken, moving
away from birds that were bred primarily for their egg
production and toured ones that grew quickly with lots of
meat on their breast, legs, and thighs. It would be
the chicken of tomorrow, and it would cost less per
pound than red meat did. The Chicken of Tomorrow contest
(18:59):
was a partnership, as we said earlier, between the USDA
and ANP grocery stores, and it had multiple overlapping objectives.
One was to provide consumers with a cheaper, more readily
available source of meat. Another was to make chicken raising
more productive and more profitable at every step of the process,
(19:20):
including for A ANDP grocery stores, and for AMP it.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Was also a pr move. As we said at the
top of the show, AMP stood for Atlantic and Pacific,
as in the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. As
that name suggests. It had originally focused on tea and
then coffee, initially by mail order. The company had started
moving into the grocery business as rising tariffs made coffee
(19:45):
and tea less profitable. The first store was a small
shop with limited hours, one employee, not a lot of overhead,
so they were able to sell groceries for cheap. Soon
they expanded, both in terms of the number of stores
and the sizes and offerings of those stores. In the
early twentieth century, most grocery stores in the United States
(20:08):
were small. They had a limited selection of mostly canned goods,
dry goods, and some produce that had a long shelf life,
so things like potatoes and onions. People bought milk from
the dairy and beef from the butcher, and bread from
the baker and so on. All of these tended to
be small, locally owned businesses. But A and P started
(20:30):
putting all these different types of foods under one roof,
in other words, a supermarket. A and P also started
trying to control as much of their products supply as possible,
buying bakeries and canneries and meat packers and wholesalers. They
cut out various middlemen and sold food at cheaper prices
(20:51):
while still turning a profit, and they opened thousands of
new locations over the nineteen twenties and thirties. Soon and
PA was facing allegations that it was unfairly running mom
and pop stores out of business. In the nineteen forties,
New York Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, along with
eleven of its subsidiaries and sixteen officers and directors, faced
(21:14):
charges for quote, conspiracy to unreasonably restrain and monopolize interstate
trade and commerce in food and food products and that
violated the Sherman Anti Trust Act. All but three of
the defendants were found guilty. The total fine was one
hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, but adjusted for inflation,
(21:35):
that is very approximately three million dollars. That wasn't enough
of a punishment for A ANDP to really change its
business practices, but it was enough of a hit to
the company's reputation that they were looking for ways to
improve their image. Of course, this contest would not only
benefit A and P being able to raise bigger chickens
(21:59):
and do it aster would also benefit chicken farmers and
others in the industry. So the Chicken of Tomorrow contest
had broad industrial support. There were national organizers on board.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
In forty four of the then forty eight states, and
people and organizations that were participating in some way included scientists, researchers,
and land grant colleges. The USDA's Cooperative Extension Service worked
with the land grant colleges to provide education and resources
for farmers that wanted to move into broiler raising or
(22:32):
to add broiler chickens to their existing farms. Each state
where there seemed to be enough interest had its own
Chicken of Tomorrow chairmen, who selected a Chicken of Tomorrow
Committee to run state level contests in nineteen forty six.
In nineteen forty seven. There were also regional contests in
nineteen forty seven, and then the national finals were held
(22:54):
at the University of Delaware's Agricultural Experiment Station in nineteen
forty eight. Some states continued to hold contests after the
national contest was over, and organizations like the four H
Club held similar contests for young people to encourage them
and their parents to start raising broilers. We'll talk about
some contests specifics after a sponsor break. In describing the
(23:28):
Chicken of Tomorrow contest, Howard C. Pierce, poultry research director
at A and P, said he wanted to quote squelch
that dream of two chickens in every pot by providing
one bird chunky enough for the whole family, a chicken
with breast meat so thick you can carve it into
steaks with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried
(23:51):
in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead
of more. That chicken in every pot is a reference
to a Republican Party campaign ad that had run in
nineteen twenty eight, which is widely attributed to then presidential
candidate Herbert Hoover. Although this ad did end with vote
(24:12):
for Hoover, Hoover did not actually say this or place
the ad. At the state level, contestants sent either one
hundred straight run chicks, meaning chicks as they had been
hatched without being examined to determine their sex, or fifty cockrolls.
These chicks were given wing bands to identify them, and
(24:33):
they were raised for twelve weeks. Fifteen males from each
batch were slaughtered and dressed, and the twelve best of
those were judged. Regional contests followed, and then in nineteen
forty eight, forty finalists and six backups submitted seven hundred
and twenty eggs each for the final round. The finalists
(24:53):
included farms and breeders from twenty five different states. The
eggs were delivered in a very carefully controlled procession. They
arrived in Delaware at set times so that they could
be loaded into incubators without interruption. While the eggs were incubating,
each set was assigned a number so that the breeders
would remain anonymous during judging. Once the eggs hatched, four
(25:18):
hundred birds from each contestant, plus ten as a backup,
were taken to specially built barns and raised for twelve weeks.
All of the birds were kept on the same diet,
with everything about their care and environment being very tightly controlled.
After twelve weeks, they were slaughtered and New York dressed,
meaning their feathers were plucked, but otherwise their bodies and
(25:40):
organs were left intact. Every sixth bird from the dressing
line was collected for judging, for a total of fifty
birds per contestant. These birds were judged according to two
sets of criteria, economy of production and carcass characteristics. For
economy of production, judges evaluated the egg production rate of
(26:02):
the parent flock, the percent of all the eggs that
were successfully hatched, the number of chicks who survived until
the age of twelve weeks, their weight at the age
of twelve weeks, how quickly they grew their feathers and
how uniform those feathers were, and the uniformity of the
size and color of all the birds in the flock.
(26:24):
Although this contest was focused on producing birds that would
have a lot of meat, egg production was still an
important factor. Out of one hundred total points in economy
of production, up to twenty five could come from the
egg production for the parent flock. Each of the standards
we just mentioned was worth fewer points, with the uniformity
of the type and color of the flock earning up
(26:46):
to five points. For carcass characteristics, the birds were judged
on several factors affecting how much meat they would yield,
including how well proportioned the body was, the size and
shape of the breast, the shape of the keel bone,
which is a breastbone that needed to be well covered
with meat, straight and parallel with the back. Judges also
(27:10):
looked at how plump and meaty the chickens thigh joints, drumsticks,
and backs were.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
From there, they looked at the condition of the bird's
skin and pin feathers. Their skin needed to be bright, soft, pliable,
smooth and uniformly colored, and they needed to be free
from unsightly pin feathers, particularly dark ones. As with the
economy of production, judging these traits could earn one hundred
total points, eighty for the factors affecting the bird's edible
(27:39):
meat yield, and twenty for the condition of the skin
and pin feathers. The del Marva Chicken of Tomorrow Festival
was held in Georgetown, Delaware, as a finale to this
whole contest, and winners were announced on June twenty fourth,
nineteen forty eight. The runner up was Henry Saliot of
Arbor Acres Farm and glass and Bury, Connecticut. He was
(28:01):
the son of Italian immigrants, and he'd left school in
the eighth grade, and an article that was written after
his death, a relative attributed this to Salio having dyslexia.
When he was still a teenager, he had started raising
chickens on his parents' farm. In nineteen thirty seven, a
meat processor asked if Salio could breed chickens with all
(28:23):
white feathers, because the feathers of Plymouth rock chickens being
raised caused staining during kosher processing. Salio did this, naming
the breed he developed Arbor Acre's white Plymouth Rock. That
was the breed he entered into the Chicken of Tomorrow contest,
where those all white feathers were seen as a big plus.
(28:43):
A lot of brief write ups about the Chicken of
Tomorrow contest describe Henry Salio as a teenager. And while
he did start breeding chickens as a teen and he
was still in his twenties when he developed this breed,
he was thirty seven when the contest took place. The
overall was submitted by Charles and Kenneth Vantras of Vantras
Hatchery and Marysville, California. These birds were across between red
(29:08):
cornish chickens and New Hampshire reds, and this was fairly
unusual for the time. The vast majority of the contestants
submitted pure bread chickens rather than cross breeds or hybrids.
The overall perception was that pure bread chickens were most
likely to retain the characteristics that they had been bred for,
(29:29):
and that crosses might not breed true or produce the
expected and desired characteristics in the next generation of young
But Vantras had developed a hybrid that was better at
converting feed into meat and produced more meat than any
of the other contestants. Most broiler chickens of the area
(29:51):
produced about two and a half pounds of meat, but
the Vantresses chickens grew to four pounds on twelve pounds
of feed. After the contest, both Henry Salio and the
Vantris brothers and their chickens became an enormous part of
the poultry industry in the United States. Vantris's stock was
eventually crossed with Salio's. Salio became a major industrial chicken supplier,
(30:15):
and in nineteen sixty four arbor Acres was bought by
Nelson Rockefeller's International Basic Economy Corporation IBEC. Which launched arbor
Acres into an international brand. Today it's part of Aviagen
Broiler Breeders. Salio also became a director at Purdue Farms
and was a lifetime director of the National Broiler Council,
(30:38):
which later became the National Chicken Council. In two thousand
and one, he started Pureline Genetics to breed chickens without
the use of antibiotics. In the nineteen fifties, it had
been discovered that chickens grew bigger and faster when given antibiotics,
although of course that later led to concerns about antibiotic
resistant bacteria. Salio died in two thousand and three at
(31:00):
the age of ninety two.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Vantress Farms also became a major international broiler chicken supplier,
and today Vantress Farms as cob Vantress owned by Tyson Foods,
and both cob Bantriss and Viagin provide breeding stock for
broiler farms all over the world. I've found varying estimates,
but at least sixty percent of the broiler chickens living
(31:26):
today all over the world come from one of these
two companies, maybe even more. Most of the other contestants
in the contest did not fare nearly as well. About
half of them went out of business in the years
after the contest as arbor Acres and Vantriss Farms started
to dominate the broiler industry, and that is in spite
(31:47):
of massive growth in the US chicken industry. The number
of chickens raised in the United States increased from two
hundred seventy five million in nineteen forty six to six
hundred and sixteen million just four years later. One of
the reasons that arbor Acres and Vantriss Farms became the
source of so many of the world's broiler chickens wasn't
(32:11):
just because of the traits of those chickens. It was
because of their use of hybrid breeds. Although arbor Acres
had won an honorable mention with a breed that had
been developed by Henry Salliot, by nineteen fifty nine it
had begun breeding hybrids as well. Because of the combinations
of dominant and recessive genes that were involved in giving
(32:32):
these birds their desired traits, their breeding had to be
really carefully managed by people who knew which birds should
be allowed to reproduce with each other. Farmers could not
simply breed the chickens that they bought from one of
these companies with each other or with their existing flocks
and expect to get the same results. So farmers had
(32:53):
to keep going back to the supplier to buy new
chicks every year. Was a little bit like copy protection,
except for birds.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
This also meant that, at least in terms of commercial
chicken farming, the various breeds that farmers had previously worked
with were soon replaced by standardized, uniform hybrids. Those other
breeds haven't entirely gone away. Many still exist on small farms,
and in recent years in the US there has been
a surge in people raising flocks in their backyards as
(33:23):
a hobby. In some parts of the world, these commercial
hybrid chickens also haven't become quite as ubiquitous as in
the United States, or they took much longer to get
a foothold. But there is way less genetic diversity in
the broiler industry today than there was on chicken farms
one hundred years.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Ago, and many of those same traits that make these
chickens so much more profitable and efficient in terms of
things like how much feed it takes to raise them,
those are just not good for the chickens themselves. Today's
commercial broiler chickens really could not survive and most environments
outside of chicken farms. Their size and their weight makes
(34:04):
them prone to leg, joint and heart problems, and their
really fast growth rate can lead to metabolic disorders.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
That's in addition to the effects of the conditions in
which many of these birds are kept. Although there has
been a push in recent years for birds to be
raised more humanely with adequate indoor space and access to
the outdoors, that isn't the case on every farm. Illnesses
continue to be a major thread at many farms, including
things like salmonila that we referenced earlier and avian flu,
(34:35):
which has led to the culling of millions and millions
of chickens as well as other birds in an attempt
to control the spread.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
These changes to the poultry industry that followed this contest
have also contributed to it becoming a lot more vertically integrated.
So rather than separate businesses breeding chickens and providing eggs
to hatcheries and raising the chicks and slaughtering the grown
chickens and then preparing and packaging the meat, poultry producers
(35:03):
have started controlling that whole process ends to end as
one company, and.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Chickens have continued to get much bigger. In twenty fourteen,
a team from the University of Alberta published a study
comparing chickens from nineteen fifty seven, nineteen seventy eight and
two thousand and five, using strains that have been maintained
at the University of Alberta Poultry Research Center and at
the Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario, and feeding and raising
(35:30):
all the chickens in the same way. On average, the
two thousand and five chickens were about four times heavier
than the nineteen fifty seven chickens. The two thousand and
five strain was also about three times more efficient at
converting feed into meat.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Although the Chicken of Tomorrow contest was hugely influential in
all of this sort of starting the chicken industry on
this path, we should also note that this did not
happen in isolation. The USDA Extension Service heavily promoted broiler
raising to farmers as a profitable business and promoted chicken
(36:07):
to housewives as an inexpensive source of meat for their families,
especially among communities that weren't already eating more chicken than average.
Government nutrition standards encouraged chicken as a healthy food. Chicken
producers also started selling chicken meat that was ready to
be cooked and eaten, rather than selling New York dressed
(36:28):
birds which still had their heads and feet and internal
organs in place. This eventually progressed to selling specific cuts
of meat together, packaged in tray packs. In more recent years,
some people have turned to chicken as a source of
meat based protein that has less of an environmental impact
than beef does, particularly in terms of things like greenhouse
(36:49):
gas emissions. So all of that has contributed to chicken
moving to be a more ubiquitous part of a lot
of people's diets, rather than just thinking of it as
something for special occasions like it was one hundred years ago.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
The USDA is obviously still around, but the A and
P grocery store chain closed down in twenty fifteen after
filing for bankruptcy protection twice over the course of five years.
So that's the Chicken of Tomorrow there.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
I saw a couple of things from more recent years
as I was working on this, where the name Chicken
of Tomorrow has been adopted to sort of talk about
the next phase in chicken production in some cases with
that being more focused on like the welfare of the
animals and the environmental impact of because even like, even
(37:44):
if you take into consideration that in general, raising chickens
produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than raising beef, there's a
lot of poop. There's so much poop. That poop contains
a lot of ammonia. Like they're there's other things to
look at as well.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
While we talk about the Chicken of tomorrow? Do you
have the listener mail of today?
Speaker 2 (38:08):
I do. It is from Kay. They wrote, Hey, Racy
and Holly. As I was listening to the Mary Dire episode,
her name rang an increasingly loud bell. After checking my
camera roll, I realized it's because there's a statue of
her at my alma mater, Earlham College, home of the
fighting Quakers. No one ever knows about Arlam, so it
(38:31):
was very exciting to realize this personal connection. Just as
I made the connection, you mentioned that the statue is
a casting of the one outside the State House. I've
attached to a photo I took on my most recent campus visit.
I thought you might enjoy knowing the Arlham fight song,
which is traditionally chanted fast and at loud volume. Fight
(38:53):
fight inner Light, kill Quakers, kill, knock them dead, beat
them senseless, do it till we reach consensus? In a
pause for a second and say that is the best
fight song I have ever heard in my life.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
It is. It also seems like the most non Quaker
string of words I can ever consider I'll kill.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
The inner light part and the consensus part are very Quaker,
but yeah, the fighting and knocking dead and beating him
senses is like not what you would typically expect when
discussing Quakers who tend to be pacifist. So anyway, to
return to the email, one of the highlights of my
Earlam career was the two hours of orientation my senior
year that I got to dress as Big Earl the Quaker,
(39:35):
our mascot. It was a blazingly hot and humid August day,
so I was quite ready for my shift to be done,
but I remember him fondly. Uh ps. By probable total coincidence.
This episode published on Earlham Day. It's an annual alumni
and others fundraiser that tries to help our tiny rural
liberal arts schools stay afloat in increasingly expensive times. Thank
(39:59):
you so much for this email. K. Thank you so
much again for sending me the best fight song I
have ever heard in my life. I was so delighted
about this that I sent it to multiple people. Thank
you as well for the pictures. I'm gonna see. I
gotta adjust my laptop. Here is the picture Holly of
(40:20):
K being very relieved after getting out of this mascot costume.
Thank you again so much, Ka, I loved this email
a lot. Before we go on to our sign off,
we've gotten a number of queries lately about our mailing address,
(40:40):
and we have said a couple of times that we
were between offices. That between offices state lasted for many months,
longer than I think anyone expected that it was going to.
It was a very long time. We are now as
a business. The iHeart Podcast studio is opening for business.
(41:01):
We would like to very gently discourage the sending of
physical gifts because while we know people want to reach
out to us and want to connect, and we do
love the thought genuinely, we love the thought behind all
of this. In our old office space, it became something
(41:22):
that was no longer manageable for us and for our
office staff. This new space is really focused mostly on
podcast recording studios. Neither of us is going to have
like a permanent desk space that is ours to receive
mail at. So we love you, Thank you so much.
(41:42):
Anyone who has ever thought to send us something, We
don't think we're going to be able to accept that
in a way that feels workable for everyone who is
involved with things like managing what's coming into and going
out of the new studio space.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Yeah. Yeah. Since I am the only one adjacent to
that studio and adjacent isn't doing a lot of lifting,
it's quite a drive for me. It's almost an hour
drive if there's any traffic at all, because of like
where I am in the city and where it is
in the city.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
And I on the occasions, even when we were in
the old space and we were working from home more,
it was like I would go and they would just
hand me several packing boxes and be like, right, here's
all your stuff, and I would be like, I'm gonna cry.
I can't go through all this. I do not have, yeah,
with all our time. So I mean, the thing is
(42:41):
if you're like, oh, but I really want to send it.
Please know, even if you did, we either would not
get it because I don't go in at all anymore
except on very rare occasions. I live in another state,
and if we did, it's kind of going to get
lost in the shuffle or it won't get unpacked for
literally possibly more than a year. So it's again I
(43:03):
want to reiterate with Tracy. So we are so grateful
and really delay in the fact that people share things
with us and and want to send us things, But
you should put those resources in a place that makes
you happy and pretend that's a gift from us.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah yeah, Your gifts to us could be a donation
to your local food bank, book donated to your local library,
book sale, like any anything. So again, it's one of
those things that I feel guilty even even making this request.
We love all of you, for sure, we just do
(43:41):
not We do not want to have a situation where
one of us walks into the office after months possibly
of not being there, and uh and like then there's
to the glowering office manager and our office manager is
amazing not ah.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Yeah yeah, Literally, my desk when I still had one,
would look like a giant like shipping container. Or trash
pile when I got there, because occasionally some good soul
had without me, I still don't know who it was.
Was like I'll start opening things for them, and then
they would just get piled on top of each other,
(44:19):
and then like presumably probably cleaning crew would move things,
and like the two and from situation was getting a
little yeah jumbled. So I still have things I don't
know who sent them, Like.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yeah, I had gone through everything that I knew about
that was addressed to me or was mine at the
office before we moved out of that space. And yet
when the final move out happens, I got a couple
of big boxes shipped to me, and I know you
got more than a couple of boxes sent to you.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
So the courier van showed up in my front yard.
It just started unloading like a team of people, and
I was like, uh oh.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yeah, So again with all possible love, virtual communications are best.
And on that note, if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, Word History
podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social media
at Miston History. That's where you can find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. You can subscribe to our show on the
(45:23):
iHeartRadio app or wherever else do you like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. So I don't really remember exactly
where I stumbled over this, but it was one of
those things that got an overlapping oh really what and
oh yeah? That tracks in my brain like it was
a simultaneous surprised, disbelief and total lack of surprise all
(00:33):
at the same time. And a lot of the world
today chickens that are raised for their meat are just
a lot different from the chickens of a century ago.
They are so much bigger. That's not the surprising part.
The surprising part was that a big reason for this
is that in the nineteen forties, the US Department of
Agriculture and the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company aka
(00:58):
A and P Supermarkets, they teamed up to hold a
contest to see who could breed the mediest, most efficient,
most visually appealing chicken. So this is a story that
combines the history of factory farming with the history of supermarkets,
and it has had just an enormous impact on farming
and on food all around.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
The world.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Also, this is just one piece of the greater history
of the industrialization of agriculture. We could have pretty similar
episodes about other ways that people have influenced other animals
and plants to make them more productive or easier to harvest,
or generally more profitable, although those other stories might not
have the A and P involved. Today's episode, though, is
(01:43):
about raising chickens as food for people, and a lot
of the general patterns that we're talking about are really
not unique to chickens. So if you're thinking, why aren't
they talking about cows because this episode is about the
chicken episode, Yeah, So we're gonna start with some background
on chickens and chicken breeding. Today's chickens were first domesticated
(02:06):
from red jungle fowl or Gallus gallas, which is a
tropical bird native to Southeast Asia. Based on research we
talked about in one of our Unearthed episodes last year,
this probably happened in what's now central Thailand sometime between
sixteen fifty and twelve fifty BCE, but other research has
suggested other parts of Asia as well, and in some
(02:28):
cases on an earlier timeline. The domestic chicken or Gallus
gallus domesticus was then introduced to the rest of Asia, Europe,
and Africa, reaching a lot of the eastern hemisphere by
about eight hundred BCE. Chickens were also carried from the
Indian subcontinent to islands in the Pacific, and from there
(02:49):
to the Americas. Chickens were introduced into what's now Chile
at least a century before Columbus's first voyage to the
Americas in fourteen ninety two. Colonists and slave traders also
introduced chickens from Europe and Africa into North America starting
around the seventeenth century, so chickens were introduced to the
(03:10):
Americas from both the East and the west. Europeans brought
domestic chickens to New Zealand in seventeen seventy three and
to Australia in seventeen eighty eight.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
In a lot of places, but certainly not everywhere, Archaeological
evidence suggests that for centuries chickens were mostly associated with
the wealthiest, most elite people, and in Europe, the oldest
archaeological evidence of domesticated chickens suggests they were not being
eaten as food. Their skeletons are intact and there are
(03:41):
not any cut or bite marks on those bones. Eventually, though,
people in Europe and in Europe's colonies in the Americas
did start to eat chickens. For the most part, though
the chickens were not being raised for that purpose. They
were being raised for their eggs, so hens would be
killed and eaten after their egg production slowed down or stopped,
(04:04):
or maybe if they never started laying in the first place.
The meat from older hens tended to be tough, so
their meat was typically stewed or otherwise slow cooked in
some way to make it more tender. The other major
source of meat was male chickens or cockrels that would
be culled out of the flock before they were old
(04:24):
enough to start fertilizing the hens eggs, and then they
would be fattened.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Up for slaughter.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
In a lot of places, all of this was considered
women's work, sometimes with the help of their children. Women
raised the chickens, gathered the eggs, and slaughtered, dressed, and
cooked them. They often earned money for their households by
selling extra eggs or selling the chickens that were being slaughtered.
Prior to the US Civil War, chickens were also often
(04:52):
the only livestock that enslaved people were allowed to raise
for themselves, so enslaved people would raise chickens for food.
In some cases they were able to sell the eggs
or the meat to their enslavers or to other people
in the area to earn their own money. Beyond that, though,
chicken just wasn't an everyday food for most people. Before
(05:13):
the development of reliable refrigeration and freezing technology, cockrels were
usually a seasonal food after they were culled from the
flock in late spring. Chicken meat was also generally a
lot more expensive than it is today. There were fewer
chickens being sold, and the chickens themselves were a lot smaller,
so to many consumers, chicken was not an everyday staple.
(05:36):
It was for special occasions or Sunday dinners, or was
maybe even a luxury that was usually out of reach.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Over the course of the nineteenth century, people in Europe
and North America started developing new breeds of domestic chicken.
That's built on the work of Robert Bakewell, who lived
in the eighteenth century during the British Agricultural Revolution. We
talked about this period and episode on Jethro Tull and
the Seed Drill, which came out in December of twenty
(06:04):
twenty one. This was a period of massive change in
virtually every aspect of British agriculture, including land use, animal husbandry,
methods for preparing and using the soil for crops, and
the development of new agricultural machines. Bakewell's work was specifically
in livestock breeding. In a lot of ways, Bakewell was
(06:28):
building on what was already known for millennia. People have
understood that living beings can inherit various traits from their ancestors,
although the start of genetics as a modern science was
still decades away when Bakewell was living, and breeds of
animals already existed all over the world, adapted to things
like the environment they were living in, the food they
(06:48):
had to eat, and what.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
People wanted them to do. People have also been selectively
breeding animals, at least to some extent, for kind of
as long as we've been domesticating them. But Well was
particularly careful and methodical about what he was doing, and
he established practices that became really influential.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
For example, he set specific goals for the traits that
he wanted to focus on and what he wanted to
achieve with those traits. He separated his herds and flocks
according to the animal's sex, allowing only specifically chosen animals
to breed with one another. He chose animals that had
the traits that he wanted to encourage, and then he
(07:30):
encouraged those same traits even more through inbreeding. He called
this breeding in and in. He also culled animals that
had undesirable traits out of his herds and flocks, and
he helped popularize the practice of using male animals with
particularly desirable traits for stud This not only encouraged those
(07:51):
same traits among other farmers animals, but it also demonstrated
whether Bakewell had successfully bred an animal that could pass
those traits on. This carefully managed breeding had a big
impact on the animals bake Well worked with. In particular,
he developed or improved on breeds of cattle so that
they would be well suited for work while also providing
(08:14):
good meat, rather than primarily being working animals with meat
as an afterthought. He similarly developed sheep for both their
meat and their wool, rather than primarily wool production. His
two biggest successes were probably in his breed improvements to
Leicestershire longhorn cattle and Leicester sheep, but there were also downsides.
(08:35):
It's possible that his use and promotion of inbreeding contributed
to health problems among the animals, including making some breeds
of sheep more susceptible to the prion disease known as scrapie.
To return to chickens, in the nineteenth century, people in
Europe and North America started using these same basic ideas
(08:56):
to develop new breeds of rabbits and chickens and to
enhances existing breeds. By the eighteen fifties, breeding animals and
plants to enhance their beauty or their uniqueness was known
as fancying. In addition to breeding rabbits and chickens, fanciers
started establishing official standards for the various breeds, something that
(09:17):
would later be done for pigeons, dogs, cats, and other animals.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
And now you know why magazines are called things like
cat fancy.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
I always thought that it just meant fancy. Yes, I
did not realize there was a thread that was about
making them more distinctive and beautiful.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
This early interest in chicken fancying contributed to a more
robust understanding of inheritance and breeding among chicken farmers than
among farmers who worked with a lot of other animals.
That's not to suggest that other farmers were clueless, just
as a general rule, chicken breeding was a little bit
farther along in the early twentieth century. There was also
(09:59):
a lot of overlap among fanciers, breeders, and geneticists. It
wasn't until the late nineteen teens that animal breeding and
genetics started to be seen as two different but intersecting fields.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
All this together means that when a contest was proposed
in the nineteen forties to see which breeder could produce
the best broiler chicken, chicken farmers were really ready for it,
and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
(10:35):
In the first decades of the twentieth century, a couple
of innovations really affected the way US chicken farmers could
develop their flocks. The first was the decision of US
Postmaster General as Burlison to allow live chicks to be
sent through the mail. That decision was made in nineteen eighteen,
(10:56):
so as chicks are hatching, they consumed the last of
yoke from inside of their eggs. And that provides them
with nourishment for about the first forty eight to seventy
two hours of their life. That allows chicks who are
being cared for by their mothers to survive for a
couple of days until all of their siblings have hatched
and she's able to leave the nest. It also allows
(11:19):
chicks to survive a couple of days in the mail
in a specially designed box that's made to physically protect
them while also making sure they have good airflow and
are at the right temperature in transit. The other development
was the first electrically heated egg incubator, which debuted in
nineteen twenty three. This was not the first egg incubator
(11:41):
by any stretch. There is evidence of incubators in both
Egypt and China as far back as four thousand years ago.
These were buildings heated with fires, which required someone to
be on hand around the clock to keep the temperature
steady and to tend to the eggs. By the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, the incubators had been developed
(12:01):
that incorporated thermostats so a person didn't have to monitor
the temperature quite so closely.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Some of these were like small cabinets heated with hot water,
and others were whole rooms or even buildings, but electric
models were easier to manage as long as the person
had access to a reliable electricity source.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
This meant that farmers who wanted to add new chickens
to their flocks could buy chicks and have those chicks
sent to them through the mail rather than losing their
laying hens for about three weeks while they incubated their
own eggs, and people who sold the chicks could do
the same. They could produce more chicks than they would
be if the hens were incubating them, because the hens
(12:43):
eventually stopped laying new eggs to sit on them until
they hatch. At about the same time that all this
was happening, refrigeration was also making it possible for people
to ship eggs and meat over greater distances and to
store them for longer in their homes. The first refrigerated
cars were developed in the late nineteenth century and used
ice tanks and insulation to keep their contents cool. People
(13:07):
were also using ice boxes to keep foods cool in
their homes in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Although that required a steady supply of large blocks of
ice The first mechanical refrigerator for home use in the
US debuted in nineteen thirteen. The first mechanically cooled trucks
were developed in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various people
in the United States started trying to raise chickens specifically
for their meat rather than for their eggs. But the
first person to be really successful at it was the
Seal Steel of Ocean Viewed, Delaware. This is on the
del Marva Peninsula that's east of Washington, d c. And Baltimore,
(13:50):
and the peninsula includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.
That's where its name comes from. In nineteen twenty three,
Steel ordered fifty chicks to supplement her flock of laying hens,
and somewhere in that process, an extra zero got added
to her order, and she wound up with five hundred
of them. She and her husband, Wilmer, decided to make
(14:14):
the best of this situation and built sheds to house
these extra chicks in. Once they were grown, weighing about
two and a half pounds apiece, she was able to
sell them for sixty seven cents a pound.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
The next year, Steel ordered more chickens on purpose, this
time one thousand of them. Eventually, her broiler business became
so large and successful that her husband left his job
at the Coast Guard to help her with it. By
nineteen twenty six, they were raising ten thousand birds a year.
Their business was so successful that they eventually bought a yacht,
(14:49):
although they were killed in an explosion aboard that yacht
on October seventh, nineteen forty.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Cecil Steel's first accidental chick order is often cited as
the start of the Delmarva Peninsula's poultry industry, and in
nineteen seventy four, one of her original broiler houses was
listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Delmarva
Peninsula also became a major source of chicken meat for
(15:14):
Jewish communities and cities in the northeastern United States, particularly
New York. Chicken meat was more popular among Jewish people
than among many other groups because of Jewish dietary laws.
At first, most of the chickens that were raised in
the area were transported to New York, where they would
be processed according to Jewish law. Kosher processing plants started
(15:37):
to be built on the peninsula in the nineteen thirties.
Other discoveries were being made around these same years as well.
A big one involved improvements to chicken feed, especially the
nutrient content of that feed. People had started figuring out
that specific foods seemed to prevent or treat specific diseases
in the eighteenth century, but the first vitamins weren't isolated
(16:00):
until the early twentieth century. More nutritious feed wasn't necessarily
about a better happier life for the chickens, though. Farmers
had figured out that chickens grew much faster if they
were confined indoors rather than being outdoors. Being indoors also
helped protect them from predators. Outdoor chickens usually stop laying
(16:25):
in the winter, but keeping them indoors with controlled heating
and artificial light also meant that they could provide more
consistent egg supply year round. But without exposure to natural sunlight,
confined chickens developed leg weakness and other physical issues because
their bodies couldn't produce enough vitamin D. Vitamin D was
(16:47):
first discovered in the nineteen twenties, and by the nineteen
thirties farmers were adding cod liver oil, which is rich
in vitamin D into their feed, making it more possible
to confine them indoors. Of course, being confined indoors also
allowed diseases to spread through flocks very rapidly. In the
early twentieth century, a major threat was best Sillery white
(17:10):
diarrhea caused by Salmonilla polorum bacteria. People started looking for
ways to prevent illnesses among chickens while still keeping them confined.
For example, one of the businesses Cceal and Wilmer Steel
moved into toward the end of their lives involved providing
vaccines for chickens. By nineteen thirty five, the US Department
of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Industry had launched the National
(17:33):
Poultry Improvement Plan to try to improve sanitation and reduce
disease at chicken farms, test birds for illnesses, and encourage
consistency and uniformity among the flocks. Diseases continue to be
an issue in the poultry industry, though, for example, other
species of Salmonilla bacteria are a major source of food
(17:54):
borne illness from both chicken and eggs. In the United States.
Pick In rose in popularity during World War II as
a food source because it wasn't being subject to rationing
in the way most other meats were. People who had
the space were also encouraged to keep backyard flocks for
both eggs and meat. That was something that had been
(18:16):
encouraged during World War One as well. Although rationing ended
in the United States for everything but sugar by the
end of nineteen forty five, there were still shortages of
a lot of meats after the war, as the United
States provided food aid to other countries. So chicken meat
continued to be in high demand, and that's what ultimately
(18:38):
led to an effort to basically redesign the chicken, moving
away from birds that were bred primarily for their egg
production and toured ones that grew quickly with lots of
meat on their breast, legs, and thighs. It would be
the chicken of tomorrow, and it would cost less per
pound than red meat did. The Chicken of Tomorrow contest
(18:59):
was a partnership, as we said earlier, between the USDA
and ANP grocery stores, and it had multiple overlapping objectives.
One was to provide consumers with a cheaper, more readily
available source of meat. Another was to make chicken raising
more productive and more profitable at every step of the process,
(19:20):
including for A ANDP grocery stores, and for AMP it.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Was also a pr move. As we said at the
top of the show, AMP stood for Atlantic and Pacific,
as in the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. As
that name suggests. It had originally focused on tea and
then coffee, initially by mail order. The company had started
moving into the grocery business as rising tariffs made coffee
(19:45):
and tea less profitable. The first store was a small
shop with limited hours, one employee, not a lot of overhead,
so they were able to sell groceries for cheap. Soon
they expanded, both in terms of the number of stores
and the sizes and offerings of those stores. In the
early twentieth century, most grocery stores in the United States
(20:08):
were small. They had a limited selection of mostly canned goods,
dry goods, and some produce that had a long shelf life,
so things like potatoes and onions. People bought milk from
the dairy and beef from the butcher, and bread from
the baker and so on. All of these tended to
be small, locally owned businesses. But A and P started
(20:30):
putting all these different types of foods under one roof,
in other words, a supermarket. A and P also started
trying to control as much of their products supply as possible,
buying bakeries and canneries and meat packers and wholesalers. They
cut out various middlemen and sold food at cheaper prices
(20:51):
while still turning a profit, and they opened thousands of
new locations over the nineteen twenties and thirties. Soon and
PA was facing allegations that it was unfairly running mom
and pop stores out of business. In the nineteen forties,
New York Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, along with
eleven of its subsidiaries and sixteen officers and directors, faced
(21:14):
charges for quote, conspiracy to unreasonably restrain and monopolize interstate
trade and commerce in food and food products and that
violated the Sherman Anti Trust Act. All but three of
the defendants were found guilty. The total fine was one
hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, but adjusted for inflation,
(21:35):
that is very approximately three million dollars. That wasn't enough
of a punishment for A ANDP to really change its
business practices, but it was enough of a hit to
the company's reputation that they were looking for ways to
improve their image. Of course, this contest would not only
benefit A and P being able to raise bigger chickens
(21:59):
and do it aster would also benefit chicken farmers and
others in the industry. So the Chicken of Tomorrow contest
had broad industrial support. There were national organizers on board.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
In forty four of the then forty eight states, and
people and organizations that were participating in some way included scientists, researchers,
and land grant colleges. The USDA's Cooperative Extension Service worked
with the land grant colleges to provide education and resources
for farmers that wanted to move into broiler raising or
(22:32):
to add broiler chickens to their existing farms. Each state
where there seemed to be enough interest had its own
Chicken of Tomorrow chairmen, who selected a Chicken of Tomorrow
Committee to run state level contests in nineteen forty six.
In nineteen forty seven. There were also regional contests in
nineteen forty seven, and then the national finals were held
(22:54):
at the University of Delaware's Agricultural Experiment Station in nineteen
forty eight. Some states continued to hold contests after the
national contest was over, and organizations like the four H
Club held similar contests for young people to encourage them
and their parents to start raising broilers. We'll talk about
some contests specifics after a sponsor break. In describing the
(23:28):
Chicken of Tomorrow contest, Howard C. Pierce, poultry research director
at A and P, said he wanted to quote squelch
that dream of two chickens in every pot by providing
one bird chunky enough for the whole family, a chicken
with breast meat so thick you can carve it into
steaks with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried
(23:51):
in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead
of more. That chicken in every pot is a reference
to a Republican Party campaign ad that had run in
nineteen twenty eight, which is widely attributed to then presidential
candidate Herbert Hoover. Although this ad did end with vote
(24:12):
for Hoover, Hoover did not actually say this or place
the ad. At the state level, contestants sent either one
hundred straight run chicks, meaning chicks as they had been
hatched without being examined to determine their sex, or fifty cockrolls.
These chicks were given wing bands to identify them, and
(24:33):
they were raised for twelve weeks. Fifteen males from each
batch were slaughtered and dressed, and the twelve best of
those were judged. Regional contests followed, and then in nineteen
forty eight, forty finalists and six backups submitted seven hundred
and twenty eggs each for the final round. The finalists
(24:53):
included farms and breeders from twenty five different states. The
eggs were delivered in a very carefully controlled procession. They
arrived in Delaware at set times so that they could
be loaded into incubators without interruption. While the eggs were incubating,
each set was assigned a number so that the breeders
would remain anonymous during judging. Once the eggs hatched, four
(25:18):
hundred birds from each contestant, plus ten as a backup,
were taken to specially built barns and raised for twelve weeks.
All of the birds were kept on the same diet,
with everything about their care and environment being very tightly controlled.
After twelve weeks, they were slaughtered and New York dressed,
meaning their feathers were plucked, but otherwise their bodies and
(25:40):
organs were left intact. Every sixth bird from the dressing
line was collected for judging, for a total of fifty
birds per contestant. These birds were judged according to two
sets of criteria, economy of production and carcass characteristics. For
economy of production, judges evaluated the egg production rate of
(26:02):
the parent flock, the percent of all the eggs that
were successfully hatched, the number of chicks who survived until
the age of twelve weeks, their weight at the age
of twelve weeks, how quickly they grew their feathers and
how uniform those feathers were, and the uniformity of the
size and color of all the birds in the flock.
(26:24):
Although this contest was focused on producing birds that would
have a lot of meat, egg production was still an
important factor. Out of one hundred total points in economy
of production, up to twenty five could come from the
egg production for the parent flock. Each of the standards
we just mentioned was worth fewer points, with the uniformity
of the type and color of the flock earning up
(26:46):
to five points. For carcass characteristics, the birds were judged
on several factors affecting how much meat they would yield,
including how well proportioned the body was, the size and
shape of the breast, the shape of the keel bone,
which is a breastbone that needed to be well covered
with meat, straight and parallel with the back. Judges also
(27:10):
looked at how plump and meaty the chickens thigh joints, drumsticks,
and backs were.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
From there, they looked at the condition of the bird's
skin and pin feathers. Their skin needed to be bright, soft, pliable,
smooth and uniformly colored, and they needed to be free
from unsightly pin feathers, particularly dark ones. As with the
economy of production, judging these traits could earn one hundred
total points, eighty for the factors affecting the bird's edible
(27:39):
meat yield, and twenty for the condition of the skin
and pin feathers. The del Marva Chicken of Tomorrow Festival
was held in Georgetown, Delaware, as a finale to this
whole contest, and winners were announced on June twenty fourth,
nineteen forty eight. The runner up was Henry Saliot of
Arbor Acres Farm and glass and Bury, Connecticut. He was
(28:01):
the son of Italian immigrants, and he'd left school in
the eighth grade, and an article that was written after
his death, a relative attributed this to Salio having dyslexia.
When he was still a teenager, he had started raising
chickens on his parents' farm. In nineteen thirty seven, a
meat processor asked if Salio could breed chickens with all
(28:23):
white feathers, because the feathers of Plymouth rock chickens being
raised caused staining during kosher processing. Salio did this, naming
the breed he developed Arbor Acre's white Plymouth Rock. That
was the breed he entered into the Chicken of Tomorrow contest,
where those all white feathers were seen as a big plus.
(28:43):
A lot of brief write ups about the Chicken of
Tomorrow contest describe Henry Salio as a teenager. And while
he did start breeding chickens as a teen and he
was still in his twenties when he developed this breed,
he was thirty seven when the contest took place. The
overall was submitted by Charles and Kenneth Vantras of Vantras
Hatchery and Marysville, California. These birds were across between red
(29:08):
cornish chickens and New Hampshire reds, and this was fairly
unusual for the time. The vast majority of the contestants
submitted pure bread chickens rather than cross breeds or hybrids.
The overall perception was that pure bread chickens were most
likely to retain the characteristics that they had been bred for,
(29:29):
and that crosses might not breed true or produce the
expected and desired characteristics in the next generation of young
But Vantras had developed a hybrid that was better at
converting feed into meat and produced more meat than any
of the other contestants. Most broiler chickens of the area
(29:51):
produced about two and a half pounds of meat, but
the Vantresses chickens grew to four pounds on twelve pounds
of feed. After the contest, both Henry Salio and the
Vantris brothers and their chickens became an enormous part of
the poultry industry in the United States. Vantris's stock was
eventually crossed with Salio's. Salio became a major industrial chicken supplier,
(30:15):
and in nineteen sixty four arbor Acres was bought by
Nelson Rockefeller's International Basic Economy Corporation IBEC. Which launched arbor
Acres into an international brand. Today it's part of Aviagen
Broiler Breeders. Salio also became a director at Purdue Farms
and was a lifetime director of the National Broiler Council,
(30:38):
which later became the National Chicken Council. In two thousand
and one, he started Pureline Genetics to breed chickens without
the use of antibiotics. In the nineteen fifties, it had
been discovered that chickens grew bigger and faster when given antibiotics,
although of course that later led to concerns about antibiotic
resistant bacteria. Salio died in two thousand and three at
(31:00):
the age of ninety two.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Vantress Farms also became a major international broiler chicken supplier,
and today Vantress Farms as cob Vantress owned by Tyson Foods,
and both cob Bantriss and Viagin provide breeding stock for
broiler farms all over the world. I've found varying estimates,
but at least sixty percent of the broiler chickens living
(31:26):
today all over the world come from one of these
two companies, maybe even more. Most of the other contestants
in the contest did not fare nearly as well. About
half of them went out of business in the years
after the contest as arbor Acres and Vantriss Farms started
to dominate the broiler industry, and that is in spite
(31:47):
of massive growth in the US chicken industry. The number
of chickens raised in the United States increased from two
hundred seventy five million in nineteen forty six to six
hundred and sixteen million just four years later. One of
the reasons that arbor Acres and Vantriss Farms became the
source of so many of the world's broiler chickens wasn't
(32:11):
just because of the traits of those chickens. It was
because of their use of hybrid breeds. Although arbor Acres
had won an honorable mention with a breed that had
been developed by Henry Salliot, by nineteen fifty nine it
had begun breeding hybrids as well. Because of the combinations
of dominant and recessive genes that were involved in giving
(32:32):
these birds their desired traits, their breeding had to be
really carefully managed by people who knew which birds should
be allowed to reproduce with each other. Farmers could not
simply breed the chickens that they bought from one of
these companies with each other or with their existing flocks
and expect to get the same results. So farmers had
(32:53):
to keep going back to the supplier to buy new
chicks every year. Was a little bit like copy protection,
except for birds.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
This also meant that, at least in terms of commercial
chicken farming, the various breeds that farmers had previously worked
with were soon replaced by standardized, uniform hybrids. Those other
breeds haven't entirely gone away. Many still exist on small farms,
and in recent years in the US there has been
a surge in people raising flocks in their backyards as
(33:23):
a hobby. In some parts of the world, these commercial
hybrid chickens also haven't become quite as ubiquitous as in
the United States, or they took much longer to get
a foothold. But there is way less genetic diversity in
the broiler industry today than there was on chicken farms
one hundred years.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Ago, and many of those same traits that make these
chickens so much more profitable and efficient in terms of
things like how much feed it takes to raise them,
those are just not good for the chickens themselves. Today's
commercial broiler chickens really could not survive and most environments
outside of chicken farms. Their size and their weight makes
(34:04):
them prone to leg, joint and heart problems, and their
really fast growth rate can lead to metabolic disorders.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
That's in addition to the effects of the conditions in
which many of these birds are kept. Although there has
been a push in recent years for birds to be
raised more humanely with adequate indoor space and access to
the outdoors, that isn't the case on every farm. Illnesses
continue to be a major thread at many farms, including
things like salmonila that we referenced earlier and avian flu,
(34:35):
which has led to the culling of millions and millions
of chickens as well as other birds in an attempt
to control the spread.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
These changes to the poultry industry that followed this contest
have also contributed to it becoming a lot more vertically integrated.
So rather than separate businesses breeding chickens and providing eggs
to hatcheries and raising the chicks and slaughtering the grown
chickens and then preparing and packaging the meat, poultry producers
(35:03):
have started controlling that whole process ends to end as
one company, and.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Chickens have continued to get much bigger. In twenty fourteen,
a team from the University of Alberta published a study
comparing chickens from nineteen fifty seven, nineteen seventy eight and
two thousand and five, using strains that have been maintained
at the University of Alberta Poultry Research Center and at
the Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario, and feeding and raising
(35:30):
all the chickens in the same way. On average, the
two thousand and five chickens were about four times heavier
than the nineteen fifty seven chickens. The two thousand and
five strain was also about three times more efficient at
converting feed into meat.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Although the Chicken of Tomorrow contest was hugely influential in
all of this sort of starting the chicken industry on
this path, we should also note that this did not
happen in isolation. The USDA Extension Service heavily promoted broiler
raising to farmers as a profitable business and promoted chicken
(36:07):
to housewives as an inexpensive source of meat for their families,
especially among communities that weren't already eating more chicken than average.
Government nutrition standards encouraged chicken as a healthy food. Chicken
producers also started selling chicken meat that was ready to
be cooked and eaten, rather than selling New York dressed
(36:28):
birds which still had their heads and feet and internal
organs in place. This eventually progressed to selling specific cuts
of meat together, packaged in tray packs. In more recent years,
some people have turned to chicken as a source of
meat based protein that has less of an environmental impact
than beef does, particularly in terms of things like greenhouse
(36:49):
gas emissions. So all of that has contributed to chicken
moving to be a more ubiquitous part of a lot
of people's diets, rather than just thinking of it as
something for special occasions like it was one hundred years ago.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
The USDA is obviously still around, but the A and
P grocery store chain closed down in twenty fifteen after
filing for bankruptcy protection twice over the course of five years.
So that's the Chicken of Tomorrow there.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
I saw a couple of things from more recent years
as I was working on this, where the name Chicken
of Tomorrow has been adopted to sort of talk about
the next phase in chicken production in some cases with
that being more focused on like the welfare of the
animals and the environmental impact of because even like, even
(37:44):
if you take into consideration that in general, raising chickens
produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than raising beef, there's a
lot of poop. There's so much poop. That poop contains
a lot of ammonia. Like they're there's other things to
look at as well.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
While we talk about the Chicken of tomorrow? Do you
have the listener mail of today?
Speaker 2 (38:08):
I do. It is from Kay. They wrote, Hey, Racy
and Holly. As I was listening to the Mary Dire episode,
her name rang an increasingly loud bell. After checking my
camera roll, I realized it's because there's a statue of
her at my alma mater, Earlham College, home of the
fighting Quakers. No one ever knows about Arlam, so it
(38:31):
was very exciting to realize this personal connection. Just as
I made the connection, you mentioned that the statue is
a casting of the one outside the State House. I've
attached to a photo I took on my most recent campus visit.
I thought you might enjoy knowing the Arlham fight song,
which is traditionally chanted fast and at loud volume. Fight
(38:53):
fight inner Light, kill Quakers, kill, knock them dead, beat
them senseless, do it till we reach consensus? In a
pause for a second and say that is the best
fight song I have ever heard in my life.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
It is. It also seems like the most non Quaker
string of words I can ever consider I'll kill.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
The inner light part and the consensus part are very Quaker,
but yeah, the fighting and knocking dead and beating him
senses is like not what you would typically expect when
discussing Quakers who tend to be pacifist. So anyway, to
return to the email, one of the highlights of my
Earlam career was the two hours of orientation my senior
year that I got to dress as Big Earl the Quaker,
(39:35):
our mascot. It was a blazingly hot and humid August day,
so I was quite ready for my shift to be done,
but I remember him fondly. Uh ps. By probable total coincidence.
This episode published on Earlham Day. It's an annual alumni
and others fundraiser that tries to help our tiny rural
liberal arts schools stay afloat in increasingly expensive times. Thank
(39:59):
you so much for this email. K. Thank you so
much again for sending me the best fight song I
have ever heard in my life. I was so delighted
about this that I sent it to multiple people. Thank
you as well for the pictures. I'm gonna see. I
gotta adjust my laptop. Here is the picture Holly of
(40:20):
K being very relieved after getting out of this mascot costume.
Thank you again so much, Ka, I loved this email
a lot. Before we go on to our sign off,
we've gotten a number of queries lately about our mailing address,
(40:40):
and we have said a couple of times that we
were between offices. That between offices state lasted for many months,
longer than I think anyone expected that it was going to.
It was a very long time. We are now as
a business. The iHeart Podcast studio is opening for business.
(41:01):
We would like to very gently discourage the sending of
physical gifts because while we know people want to reach
out to us and want to connect, and we do
love the thought genuinely, we love the thought behind all
of this. In our old office space, it became something
(41:22):
that was no longer manageable for us and for our
office staff. This new space is really focused mostly on
podcast recording studios. Neither of us is going to have
like a permanent desk space that is ours to receive
mail at. So we love you, Thank you so much.
(41:42):
Anyone who has ever thought to send us something, We
don't think we're going to be able to accept that
in a way that feels workable for everyone who is
involved with things like managing what's coming into and going
out of the new studio space.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Yeah. Yeah. Since I am the only one adjacent to
that studio and adjacent isn't doing a lot of lifting,
it's quite a drive for me. It's almost an hour
drive if there's any traffic at all, because of like
where I am in the city and where it is
in the city.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
And I on the occasions, even when we were in
the old space and we were working from home more,
it was like I would go and they would just
hand me several packing boxes and be like, right, here's
all your stuff, and I would be like, I'm gonna cry.
I can't go through all this. I do not have, yeah,
with all our time. So I mean, the thing is
(42:41):
if you're like, oh, but I really want to send it.
Please know, even if you did, we either would not
get it because I don't go in at all anymore
except on very rare occasions. I live in another state,
and if we did, it's kind of going to get
lost in the shuffle or it won't get unpacked for
literally possibly more than a year. So it's again I
(43:03):
want to reiterate with Tracy. So we are so grateful
and really delay in the fact that people share things
with us and and want to send us things, But
you should put those resources in a place that makes
you happy and pretend that's a gift from us.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah yeah, Your gifts to us could be a donation
to your local food bank, book donated to your local library,
book sale, like any anything. So again, it's one of
those things that I feel guilty even even making this request.
We love all of you, for sure, we just do
(43:41):
not We do not want to have a situation where
one of us walks into the office after months possibly
of not being there, and uh and like then there's
to the glowering office manager and our office manager is
amazing not ah.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Yeah yeah, Literally, my desk when I still had one,
would look like a giant like shipping container. Or trash
pile when I got there, because occasionally some good soul
had without me, I still don't know who it was.
Was like I'll start opening things for them, and then
they would just get piled on top of each other,
(44:19):
and then like presumably probably cleaning crew would move things,
and like the two and from situation was getting a
little yeah jumbled. So I still have things I don't
know who sent them, Like.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yeah, I had gone through everything that I knew about
that was addressed to me or was mine at the
office before we moved out of that space. And yet
when the final move out happens, I got a couple
of big boxes shipped to me, and I know you
got more than a couple of boxes sent to you.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
So the courier van showed up in my front yard.
It just started unloading like a team of people, and
I was like, uh oh.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yeah, So again with all possible love, virtual communications are best.
And on that note, if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, Word History
podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social media
at Miston History. That's where you can find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. You can subscribe to our show on the
(45:23):
iHeartRadio app or wherever else do you like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com