Humans Can't Do Without Chickens!

Hi ya! How's it going where you are? We've got some freezing rain happening here and rain for the next three days... including Christmas Day by the look of it. Glad we're taking the train and not driving 4 hours to my sister's this year! Grab a mug! Fill it with some newly perked coffee and snag a virtual muffin or doughnut at the same time, okay? Got a chicken story for you today...

For most of us, the word "chicken" spells a cold, clammy slab of plastic-wrapped white meat plucked out of the refrigerated section of our local supermarket. But in the ancient world, and in many cultures today, chickens had deep religious and social significance.

Humans can't do without chickens. Chicken is the most popular meat today. Americans eat more than 80 pounds a year, more than pork or beef. So we tend to think people must have domesticated the chicken because it was good to eat, right? Well, no. Scientists now believe chickens were not domesticated to eat in the first place.

Every chicken you see on Earth is the descendant of the red jungle fowl, (pictured above) a very shy jungle bird that lives in south Asia, all the way from Pakistan to Sumatra and Indonesia. It's a small, pheasant-like bird hunters like because it's very hard to find, so it poses a great challenge. The strange thing is that these birds are so shy that when they're captured in the wild, they can die of a heart attack because they're so terrified of humans.

Chicken soup and the flu vaccine have something in common. So Jewish mothers were right!

There have been several scientific studies in the past decade or so that show quite clearly that chicken soup contains something that helps us get over a cold. It won't cure your cold. But it will definitely help take care of some of those symptoms, like a runny nose or fever. In the ancient world, the chicken was considered a kind of two-legged pharmacy. If you had diarrhea, if you were depressed, if you had a child who was a bed wetter, you name it, there was some part of the chicken that could cure you.

When slaves were brought here from West Africa, they came with a deep knowledge of the chicken, because in West Africa the chicken was a common farm animal and also a very sacred animal. The knowledge that African-Americans brought served them very well, because white plantation owners for the most part didn't care much about chicken. In colonial times there were so many other things to eat that chicken was not high on the list.

Whites felt chickens weren't important, so they were often the only animals slaves were allowed to raise in places like Virginia and South Carolina. They would raise chickens and sell them to their owners or to other slave owners. As a result, the chicken business became dominated by African-Americans. Most cooking on the plantations was also done by African-American women.

So whites began to eat more chicken. They also began to like fried chicken. Most people agree that West Africa was a center of this cuisine, where you would fry chicken parts in palm oil. And the slaves brought that tradition to the South. Over time it became one of the most important cuisines of that region.

I’ve only taken excerpts from this article. There is a lot more in the full article so if you are keen to read more about how chickens changed civilization, go here: 

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141221-chickens-civilization-avian-flu-locavore-turkey-ngfood-booktalk/

See ya, eh!

Bob