Believe it or not, chicken is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday, which is a posting I’ve been looking forward to since I first saw this stamp in my late father’s albums. A 3-cent stamp, issued on September 9, 1948, it commemorates 100 years of the poultry industry. (I have no idea how they concluded that there was no poultry industry before 1848). The stamp, which pictures a Brahma male rooster, the oldest breed in America, was the first U.S. stamp to picture an egg. (The “3¢” on the stamp appears inside of an egg.)
The stamp was first suggested in 1947 by Paul Ives, editor of “Cackle and Crow,” a magazine for chicken farmers in Connecticut. At the time, poultry was Connecticut’s largest agricultural industry and Ives said, he couldn’t see any reason to not honor the $3.5 billion industry. At the stamp’s first day ceremony, Congressman Antoni N. Sadlak said, “So seldom do we count our blessings that we readily fall into the habit of minimizing the importance of certain segments of our food producing sources. The Poultry Industry is a good example. The issuance of this stamp is a means of paying tribute to American Genius, which has built this vast business.”
In fact, the stamp was issued at a time when the poultry industry was facing a crisis. While World War II had increased demand for chicken needed to feed soldiers, demand fell after the war because homemakers weren’t interested in cooking the bird. The problem was that at the time, chickens were usually sold whole, but the typical bird was too small to feed an average-sized family and too large for a single-person meal. As a result, chicken prices began to fall.
One of the solutions to this problem came with the invention of the chicken nugget by Robert C. Baker, a food science professor at Cornell University, who has been called the “George Washington Carver of chicken” because in addition to the chicken nugget, he developed more than 40 poultry-related innovations, including co-inventing a machine for deboning chicken and developing chicken and turkey hot dogs. For the nugget, Baker and his colleagues had to develop a way to keep ground chicken meat together without skin, along with batter that wouldn’t shrink when frozen or expand when fried. Baker, who called the invention a “Chicken Crispie,” did so grinding the meat and mixing it with vinegar, salt, grains, and milk powder to make it hold together and then using an egg and grain based batter to create a bite-sized nugget that could be deep-fried (and also frozen before it was cooked).
The new creation was an instant success in upstate New York. In keeping with the long tradition of land grant universities doing agricultural-related work, Baker did not patent the invention. Instead, he made it readily available to farmers and companies interested in making use of the technique. These efforts got a significant boost in the late 1970s when growing concern about heart disease and other health issues led many doctors and then the federal government to urge people to reduce their consumption of red meat and instead eat more chicken and fish.
Chicken received an even greater boost in early 1980s, when McDonald’s introduced (and patented) the McNugget, which quickly became a best-selling item. McDonald’s was soon selling about 2,500 pounds of chicken every two minutes. Over the years, there have been controversies about what exactly is in a McNugget, particularly what additives are included to preserve them as they move from factory to store to table. Over the years, a variety of other fast-food and gourmet restaurants have developed their take on the “Chicken Crispie” and a host of companies now sell frozen chicken nuggets as well.
As a result, over a million and a half people are both directly and indirectly employed in the production or sale of chicken. In 2017, over 41 billion pounds of ready-to-cook chicken was produced; over 1.2 billion bushels of corn was used to feed the 9 billion broiler chickens in the U.S; and over $95 billion in consumer expenditures for chicken was recorded.
In addition, chicken nuggets generally, and Baker specifically, have often been featured in popular culture. been There’s Cooties, a 2014 horror-comedy movie about chicken nuggets infected with a virus that turns pre-pubescent children into zombies. Comedic singers Paul and Storm have a song titled “Nugget Man,” which explores Baker’s career. In the Netflix series “Bill Nye Saves the World,” Baker is portrayed by actor Michael Ian Black in the angry scientist section of season 3 episode 4. And in “The Wire,” three of the drug dealers wonder who invented the chicken nugget and whether he got rich from it. D’Angelo Barksdale, who controls much of the drug trade in the neighborhood, points out that any such person would have been unlikely to have received any great reward but rather the heads of McDonald’s were more likely to have been the main beneficiaries.
Be well, stay safe, eat healthy, fight for justice and work for peace.