Basics

Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Surprisingly, while we’ve been eating eggs for thousands of years, it is only relatively recently that chicken became the widely farmed meat it is today. Descended from the aggressive red jungle fowl of Asia, chickens reached Europe in about 500 BC and scavenged quietly on farmyards and small holdings. In the nineteenth century chicken’s popularity as a meat suddenly took off in Europe and North America, but it was a special-occasion food, available only to the wealthy (or farmers) until the mass-production and battery-farming of the twentieth century.