Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America's Favorite Bird
Overall Ranking 3) Consider Reading
What is the book about?
Chicken is the quiet, ubiquitous engine of the modern American diet, so omnipresent that we rarely pause to consider its monumental journey. We consume billions of gallus gallus domesticus (domestic chicken) annually, yet how many of us can truly name a breed, or understand the global economics and ethical debates like the push for antibiotics that place cheap poultry on our supermarket shelves?
Historian Emelyn Rude, drawing on her sharp historical eye and restaurant-industry background, tackles this vast and often-overlooked subject. This book is a deep exploration into the complex, non-linear relationship between the bird and our culture. Rude reveals that for centuries, chicken wasn't even considered meat, making its current status as the nation's mega-meat of choice a surprisingly recent phenomenon.
Rude demonstrates how chicken's history is profoundly intertwined with our identity, touching on everything from the Jewish tradition of humane kills and the archetypal Sunday dinner to the political promise of a "chicken in every pot." Written with meticulous research spanning environmental history, zoology, global economics, and psychology, Tastes Like Chicken documents the bird's strange evolution from throwaway meat to expensive delicacy to its current commodity status, introducing us to key players like John Tyson and General Zuo Zongtang along the way.
Rude, a self-described accidental vegan, maintains a distinctive and engaging narrative voice throughout. For readers who appreciate the blend of rigorous historical investigation and accessible, witty storytelling, a style often associated with popular history writers like Mary Roach, this unconventional look at America's favorite fowl promises to be a deeply rewarding and eye-opening read.
Would I recommend reading it?
This book fundamentally shifts one's perception of food marketing. I was recently at my local butcher (shoutout to the Darien Butcher Shop!) when a plaque advertising a chicken producer caught my eye. "Fed the best sweet corn and protein-rich soy," it read. That description is clearly designed to give you a comforting, premium feeling about your purchase.
But if you've read Emelyn Rude, you immediately realize that this throwaway marketing means genuinely nothing: the corn soy combination is simply the most common and cost-effective commercial base for raising industrial chickens. It's a big part of why we get chickens as big as we do now, so pretty much everyone is feeding their chickens it. This is why you should consider reading this book. It offers a peek behind the curtain, clarifying the economic forces that govern the bird’s production and explaining precisely why these animals outnumber us almost seven to one globally.
It is important to note what this work is not. While it touches on the industry's evolution, Tastes Like Chicken is not intended as an activist exposé on the evils of industrial farming. Rather, Emelyn Rude maintains her focus on the chicken as a historical food source and how that relationship has fundamentally changed over the centuries. The book highlights the striking difference between the massive, fast-growing broiler bird found in today's supermarkets and the vastly different poultry consumed in the 1800s, revealing the surprising history that lies beneath the most modest of meals.
To give you a little peek under the hood, chicken wasn't considered a 'meat' for the majority of its existence. The descendant of tyrannosaurus rex was seen as food that shared a similar classification as fish and was only for sick or ailing people, while beef was a symbol of "strength" had to be consumed as much as possible to maintain one's health.
Due to its low status of not being considered "livestock" chickens were some of the only things enslaved African Americans they were allowed to own. Thus, cementing their association with slavery and poverty. But the eggs providing them with much needed nutrients and once they stopped laying, could be slaughtered, deep fried, and the deliciously crunchy chicken pieces could be sold alongside roads generating some enough income to buy their freedom.
Only when the chicken industry became industrialized between the 1940's and 1960's did chicken become more widely available and consumed in America. We see the effects on city lives as Americans work toward providing a 'chicken in every pot' and the drama of chicken unionizations and chicken Mafias and chicken monopolies and the effect of cheap chicken on poverty, both in America and around the world. It gets to the point where this thing once not even considered meat has Russia's Prime Minister Vladamir Putin complained to the U.S. about tariffs on chicken.
Beyond simply sustaining us, chickens have been pivotal in scientific discovery, arguably serving as the true guinea pigs of American science. They were the original beneficiaries of early vaccines, and their study led the scientific community to the crucial discovery of vitamins. Chickens have been poked, prodded, and tested, fundamentally advancing our knowledge for the betterment of human health and biology.
This poking and prodding has also led to chickens ballooning in size throughout the eras. A transformation that dramatically illustrates the power of selective breeding, nutrition advancements, and industrial farming. While earlier chickens were slender and slow-growing, the modern broiler is an unparalleled product of genetic and nutritional science, reaching market weight in a fraction of the time. The stunning pace of this growth is captured perfectly by Rude:
"If humans grew as fat as fast as a modern chicken, a 6.6 pound human baby would reach 660 pounds in just two months" (p. 183).
This remarkable, and often alarming, efficiency is the result of decades of breeding programs that prioritized breast meat and rapid maturation, fundamentally reshaping the bird's physiology to meet the demands of a mass market.
This historical focus, however, means Rude largely avoids discussing modern industrial practices. While Tastes Like Chicken doesn't dwell on the birds' current state—often described as "balloons of meat" whose organs are still sized for an animal half their mass—this omission is likely strategic. The book maintains a certain mechanical cadence, which, particularly in the chapters detailing the actual rearing of the animal, is necessary to convey the scale and nature of the industry without descending into excessive sentimentality.
"The modern chicken really is an incredible piece of technology. Give today's broiler twelve pounds of food and it will turn out six pounds of edible chicken in just over seven weeks. This is a remarkable 1.92 feed conversion ratio and its unheard of anywhere else in animal agriculture. The Chicken of Tomorrow [1948] wouldn't even have reached three pounds in the same time" (pg182)
As we progress through the evolving relationship between humanity and the chicken, Rude intersperses the narrative with sidebars containing historical recipes that are perfectly ancillary to the text and the era she is describing. They serve as a fascinating culinary window into past practices, offering a tangible link to the ways people utilized the bird centuries ago. While their modern-day practical utility might be low—you likely won't be whipping up an 18th-century "Chicken Pye" tonight—their inclusion is invaluable, enriching the book with authenticity and charm. I did however try the Tarragon and Lemon Roast Chicken recipe on pages 181-182 and it was quite good.
The ultimate goal of Tastes Like Chicken isn't to convince you to abandon your love for the food, but rather to illuminate the complex, centuries-long journey that brought the bird to your plate. Ultimately, the book provides you with facts and informed opinions about the modern industry, giving you much to ponder long after you finish the last page. Rude successfully upends the common assumption that the chicken's path from domestication to dinner has been a straightforward affair. Instead, your biggest takeaway will likely echo the sentiment she expresses early on:
"There’s no other ingredient quite like it – a food so universal that when you say, 'tastes like chicken,' almost everyone on the planet will have some idea of what you are talking about." pg 12
That being said, I do wish that Rude had written a tyche more. While the narrative is US-centered—with only occasional glimpses into international phenomena, such as the popularity of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan on Christmas—I believe it would have been beneficial to see more of the chicken's impact and history in a non-US context. Expanding the geographical scope could have offered an even richer understanding of this truly universal ingredient.
I feel like I have said too much at this point, so to close Tastes Like Chicken is a fantastic cultural, industrial, and light scientific history of chicken farming and consumption. Rude's colorful writing and assured pacing make this book fly by, and her extensive research renders this popular history surprisingly authoritative. The book is interesting, entertaining, and impressive, successfully compiling dozens of fascinating stories—from the Hen Craze of Victorian England and the Kosher Chicken War of 1920s New York to the origins of Colonel Sanders and General Tso. The sheer breadth of these topics, which could each carry their own book (along with heavier subjects like the ethics of factory farming and the horrific punishments of African American chicken thieves), demonstrates the complexity of the chicken's story. Rude's goal is to tell a multitude of stories quickly, show how they connect, and provide proof that they happened. All of which I think she accomplishes very well.
Books to Bowls OUT!
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