Winner, winner, winner, accidental chicken for dinner: How a minor error started America's large-scale poultry industry

Ike Long, a farmer; Cecile Steele’s children, and Cecile Steele.
(Photo from National Archives and Records Administration)

The Popsicle, chocolate-chip cookies and raising chickens for meat all started with accidents. In the case of chicken, a shipping error launched a 30-billion dollar industry, writes Kenny Torrella for Vox. "The story begins in 1923, with homemaker and farmer Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware. Steele kept a small flock of chickens that she raised for eggs and waited to slaughter them for meat once their productivity waned. . . . But one day by accident the local chick hatchery delivered 500 birds. . . . Returns weren’t really an option, so she kept them anyway in a barn the size of a studio apartment — 256 square feet — that was heated by a coal stove.  . . . She still made a sizable profit off the 2-pound survivors — almost $11 per pound in today’s dollars — and began to ramp up her operations."

Steele's success allowed "her husband to quit his job to help Cecile expand, and within three years, they were raising 10,000 chickens. Word of the Steele family’s success spread, and by 1928 there were hundreds of farmers in the area raising chickens primarily for their meat," Torrella writes. "And the hatchery accident occurred during the Roaring ’20s, a decade of immense economic growth in the United States. . . . The Delmarva Peninsula, where Steele’s farm was located, was also the perfect place for large-scale chicken farming to take off. There was cheap, abundant land a relatively short distance from the hungry consumers of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City."

Torrella continues: "Steele’s accident set off the chicken revolution as we know it. In the first half of the 20th century, chicken accounted for well under 20 percent of meat consumption in the U.S. Today, it’s about 44 percent. . . . Today grocery stores charge $4 to $10 a pound for beef and pork, while chicken can cost as little as $1.80 a pound. Bacon and steak may take center stage for meat lovers, but when it comes to what’s for dinner, the answer is more often poultry."

The industry's beginnings were a serendipitous "mix of coincidence and ambition. Steele set off a race to put chicken at the center of the American plate, changing the face of agriculture forever," Torrella writes. But for all its popularity, not all the results have been positive. Torella adds, "In the process, we bent the chicken to our will, pushing the species to its biological limits, polluting waterways and our lungs along the way, all to supply a growing population with cheap protein."