Quite a lot to crow about: Mridula Ramesh has some good news about chicken

“Chicken.” What ideas does the word bring to mind?

I doubt “saviour of Western civilization” tops the list. Yet, that’s how Jerry Adler and Andrew Lawler described the chicken, writing in Smithsonian Magazine in 2012. The story they refer to, one of history’s turning points, goes like this:

In 480 BCE, the Athenian general Themistocles was on his way to what would become known as the Battle of Salamis. Earlier that year, the Persian ruler Xerxes I had attacked Greece. At Thermopylae, King Leonidas’s Greek forces valiantly held back the vastly larger Persian army.

When they were betrayed and the Persian army began to outflank them, Leonidas sent most of his army away and remained, with a small force, to slow the Persian advance. Their heroic sacrifice inspired and united the Greek city-states.

Still, Greek morale was low ahead of the battle at Salamis. They knew they faced a stronger foe. Enroute, Themistocles and his army saw two roosters fighting. The birds were going at it — no fear, no hesitation, immersed in fierce combat. “Look at them,” Themistocles reportedly said. “They don’t fight for their country, their gods, or glory. They fight only because neither will yield to the other. When animals are so brave, what’s our excuse?”

None, apparently. The Greeks prevailed. In the decades that followed, the Greek civilisation produced giants such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, whose ideas and values laid the foundations of Western civilisation.

The rooster’s fierceness is unsurprising; after all they, like the ostrich, are the closest living relatives of the Tyrannosaurus rex. Sadly, as Adler and Lawler note, “the civilization that [they helped save] today honors those same creatures by breading, frying and dipping them into one’s choice of sauce.”

How did the human-chicken connection change over time? The modern chicken appears to have descended from the red jungle fowl native to India, South-East Asia and China. Chicken bones have been found in these regions dating back thousands of years. Researchers believe the fowl were drawn to the grains cultivated by ancient farmers, and were then domesticated. Scientists believe domestication began in Thailand, but the yellow skin of many domestic chickens, which comes from the grey jungle fowl found only in Peninsular India, complicates this theory. Fortunately, the origin debate isn’t central to our story; what matters is that hens were well-adapted to the Indian climate.

Over time, the chicken spread westward, probably as a ritual offering or for use in cockfights. They infiltrated human diets because they were easy to transport and rear, tasted delicious, and laid eggs. The evolving language around chickens reflects their transformation from fighters to food.

Around 1000 CE, chicken meat got a boost after the Catholic church banned the consumption of four-legged animals during fasts. Over the next few centuries, as chicken farming became more widespread, proverbs such as “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” and “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” entered the English language.

The term “spring chicken”, a clever nod to naivety, harks back to the days when chickens hatched only in springtime. Since humans favoured the tender meat of younger birds, “no spring chicken” meant a person was past their prime.

America’s first chicken census, in 1880, recorded 102 million of the birds. In 10 years, that number had doubled. The invention of incubators enabled year-round hatching, calming price swings. With the rise of larger farmed flocks, the term “pecking order” emerged in the 1920s, describing social power within organisations. As commercial chicken farms expanded, the demand for specialised chicken feed grew alongside.

Chickens had graduated from scavengers to consumers.

Commercial farms did not value the fighting spirit of their chickens. Indeed, a mutation that allows chickens to lay more eggs through the year also makes them less aggressive. So, today, to call someone “chicken” is to label them a coward. This usage can be traced to the 17th century.

Indians, meanwhile, have been eating chicken for a long time. Tandoori chicken, believed to have been invented by the restaurant chain Moti Mahal, may be much more ancient, with clay tandoors found at Harappan sites. Chicken finds frequent mention in Sangam-era poetry from about 2,000 years ago. And the 14th-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, in his writings, describes chicken pulao as part of a feast in Muhammad Bin Tughlaq’s court.

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Why discuss chicken?

Because it is the world’s most-produced land-based meat, according to UN Food and Agriculture Organization data. Barring Europe and China (where more pigs are farmed, by weight), the rest of the world prefers chicken overwhelmingly. That may not be a bad thing.

From a health perspective, a 100-gm roast-chicken dish offers 32 gm of protein and just 3 gm of fat. In contrast, a comparable serving of lean roast beef holds 11 gm of fat and 15% less protein. A 100-gm lean cut of pork roasted without fat has 30% less protein and twice the fat of chicken, while mutton has the worst protein-to-fat ratio. Of course, a good meal is about more than protein-to-fat ratios, but these statistics are still intriguing.

On to economics, a 500-gm portion of boneless chicken costs 30% less than a comparable portion of beef or pork, and 66% less than a comparable portion of lamb.

What about climate?

Chicken would appear to be the greenest of the popular meats. Beef uses three times as much water as chicken (per 100 gm of protein produced), emits nine times as much carbon, and takes up 23 times as much land. Lamb is almost as bad, while pork, the closest climate rival, emits 30% more carbon, uses 70% more water and requires 50% more land than chicken.

Now for a thought experiment. Consider a four-person urban Indian household that gets their 220 gm of daily protein from chicken. Switching to pork costs them ₹1 lakh more per year and exacts a higher price in terms of water, carbon and land. Switching to beef costs them ₹65,000 more per year, while raising their emissions by 36 tonnes of CO2-eq. That’s as much as the total emissions of five Indian households. The switch also costs as much water as 14 families would use a year. Switching to lamb is expensive (an additional ₹3.3 lakh a year) and almost as climate-unfriendly as beef.

The easiest way to get one’s protein component and yet save carbon and cash would be to eat dal only (without rice), which is impractical. Replacing chicken with a combination of rice and dal reduces carbon emissions and land area used (an important consideration in India), but potentially uses more water (also an important consideration).

Overall, if one prefers animal protein, chicken (and eggs) offer the best trade-off across cost, climate and land use. Industrial broiler chicken, which uses far less water than lentils and rice, is even more climate-friendly.

But here’s the trade-off: From the chicken’s perspective, this sucks. What a comedown for the descendant of the T-rex and the saviour of Western civilisation.

Chicken is cheap thanks to factory farming, but a broiler’s (or layer’s) life makes Dante’s fifth circle of hell seem tame: Hatched, tossed into a trash conveyor if less than perfect or crammed into a closed shed, dosed on antibiotics for a few short weeks before being slaughtered.

Sadly, climate impact rises with the degree of freedom.

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Can this change?

An animal’s climate impact is shaped by its food-conversion ratio (FCR), a measure of how many kg of feed it takes to add 1 kg of body weight.

Cattle have an FCR of 8, chickens an FCR of 2; pigs and sheep fall somewhere in-between. FCR suffers in higher temperatures, B Soundararajan, chairman of Suguna Foods (one of the largest poultry manufacturers in India), tells me. So, the changing climate affects FCR, which will in turn worsen the climate impact of poultry.

To lower climate impact, we can choose more-climate friendly feed, such as the insect-protein discussed in my last column (on eggs). Or, as in the past half-century, we can improve FCR through selective breeding.

Another alternative is to dispense with farms altogether and eat lab-grown meat. This is the picture Isaac Asimov paints in his 1953 novel, The Caves of Steel, where yeast strains are bred into cake or chicken to feed a global population that has crossed 8 billion.

Growing meat in a lab begins by harvesting stem cells from an animal and growing them in bioreactors. A chemical signal then causes these cells to transform into muscle, fat and other parts of meat, which are fashioned into desired cuts.

We’re getting to the point where lab-grown meat is getting positive feedback from consumers. Sensing an opportunity, more than 150 companies globally are working to expand this segment. My sense is, considering the trade-offs between cruelty, climate-impact and farmer livelihoods, lab-grown meat may work better as a substitute for beef than for chicken.

This could be the future, and it is here. Could the chicken eventually bid adieu too, leaving just its essence behind? There’s a lot to think about while tucking into that stew.

(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watershed. She can be reached on tradeoffs@climaction.net)