| Between 1909 and 2012 per capita chicken consumption in the U.S. leapt from nineteen to eighty-six pounds. As the bird moved from the margins to the center of the American dinner plate, vast physical and ideological barriers emerged between production and consumption. This study draws on labor, environmental, and food history to unpack the emergence of these barriers in ways that straddle country and city and move beyond linear narratives of declension. It seeks to make work and nature central to food history. Taking a national, sub/urban view of consumption, it focuses on two major rural centers of production, Northeast Georgia and the Delmarva Peninsula, to track the making of the industrial chicken. Three human actors shape the story at the heart of this study: workers, farm families, and consumers. Rather than one-dimensional victims of agribusiness, they emerge as social agents. The roles they play and their interactions with each other are shaped by their relationship to a nonhuman actor: chicken. Birds, too, emerge as actors in this story. As much as they were incorporated into industrial production processes, chickens they remained. |
