“Further processing” is an industry term and refers to the steps that are taken to prepare products after a bird has been defeathered and dismembered. By the 1960s, rather than purchasing entire birds, many consumers started to opt for prepackaged wings, legs, and breasts. This left behind many edible components like skin, neck, back, and organ meats that had historically all been eaten in various shapes and forms, but which by this point were often discarded or sold as pet food for pennies on the dollar.

When breasts and wings were marketed and priced as premium cuts, I think consumers concluded that what remained was somehow deficient or “bad meat,” which really wasn’t true from a nutritional standpoint. The puzzle remained whether poultry companies could make productive use of these components; further processing represented a series of new methods whereby they could be repurposed for consumers in ways that were convincingly appetizing.

While further processed chicken is reliant upon new forms of technology to mechanically reclaim meat from the carcass, it draws upon a much older tradition of reuse and repurposing, albeit with the aid of modern chemistry and adapted to a more contemporary form of dining. In this sense, I think further processed chicken is more of a consequence or an outcome of postwar attitudes toward waste and disposability, one that was shaped by approaches to food and dining that were ascendant in the 1980s: a desire for the new and the novel, a move away from traditional conceptions of home dining, and a growing interest in labor-saving meals to cut back on food preparation times.

I don’t aim to recast the likes of Ray Kroc, Lonnie Pilgrim, or Don Tyson in a new and more attractive light. As individuals, I think all were greatly informed by their experiences of the Great Depression, from Kroc’s journeys as a paper cup salesman to Pilgrim’s travails in the animal feed business in East Texas — emerging as enterprising small-time business owners who are later able to expand and rather single-mindedly play a leading role in building very large companies like McDonald’s and Pilgrim’s Pride.

However, rather than simply explaining the food economy as US capitalism doing what it does, it is important to situate it within the broader context of what was really an international project to scientifically manage and rationalize nature. . . . Whether it was the US government’s investment in land grant universities and extension agents who were tasked with teaching farmers new techniques, the Green Revolution in Asia and Latin America, or collectivization in the USSR and China, at a governmental level, there was a transnational belief that small, mixed-use family landholdings were inefficient and should be consolidated into larger operations that were highly specialized in the area where they benefited from the greatest comparative advantage. The poultry business that began to take on an industrial scale in the 1940s was built upon research that the [US Department of Agriculture]  had been investing in since the 1910s.

Baker was the chair of the Department of Poultry and Avian Sciences at Cornell University, where he developed a large body of research into the uses of further processed chicken between the 1950s and ’80s. In speeches and op-eds, he often situated the emerging field of food science as both a remedy to the ravages of global famine and the widespread fears that galloping population growth would outpace agricultural production.

In the United States, growing waves of suburban expansion were taking millions of acres of agricultural land out of production; meanwhile Baker identified a wide range of inefficiencies in the food system in which nutritious sources, particularly animal proteins, were being wasted and discarded, which in turn compounded rising levels of environmental pollution. In response, he spent years developing a range of different methods by which these lost chicken parts could be transformed into family meals.

None of Baker’s prototypes were especially successful catching on, but when McDonald’s started experimenting with poultry products in 1980, they drew directly on these findings, all of which were freely available in published research papers, to develop the Chicken McNugget. Of course, McDonald’s was not motivated by the same ecological concerns as Baker and served as uncomfortable stewards of his vision.

In many ways, poultry plants closely resembled meatpacking facilities in terms of creating a fairly typical Fordist production line designed to disassemble animals, though with a workforce that was more made up of women than in pork and beef. There were always issues of poor pay and punitive measures when workers were out sick, but in some of the early union drives that I studied in North Carolina, workers’ organizing was driven as much by a sense of lack of basic respect on the shop floor. They cited foremen addressing them using bad language, male supervisors freely entering the women’s locker room, and workers who might answer back summarily fired on the grounds that they were “sassing.”

By the 1960s and ’70s, lines were starting to speed up, and there was a growing focus upon questions of worker safety and well-being that closely resemble the issues faced by contemporary poultry workers — the inability to take bathroom breaks, injuries that directly result from work on the production line, the falls that result from perpetually wet and slippery conditions, cuts from working with sharp equipment, and repetitive motion injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome.

In the 1980s, Reagan’s USDA permitted line speed increases from around fifty birds per minute to ninety, and injury rates increased again quite precipitously. Line speeds today are 140 birds per minute with 170 permissible in some locations. While mechanization was introduced wherever possible, the irregularities that exist within the size and shape of animals mean that production has remained unavoidably labor intensive.

By the late 1960s, I think it was understood that cities were really less than ideal locations [for poultry production]. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters won union elections in growing cities with a recent record of civil rights activism, like Durham and Richmond, and as companies vertically integrated their operations, they also wanted to situate plants close to a radius of contract farmers, as live birds lose weight if they’re forced to travel long distances to the plant.

Yet for poultrymen, it was a difficult balance. In remote rural locations, they could rely upon a high level of cooperation from elected officials — and in the case of a union drive, rather crucially from law enforcement, and often even from clergymen. But there still needed to be a sufficient working population that was willing and able to occupy hundreds of positions and sustain a fairly high rate of annual turnover. Some of these companies were not long for this world, but as the poultry business continued to expand during the 1980s, employers increasingly turned to often displaced workers from Latin America who created new but rarely appreciated in-flows of migration that helped to sustain rural industry.

Poultry companies do make strategic political donations, and they have a fully equipped lobbying organization in the shape of the National Chicken Council that has access to the highest levels of government in Washington. Yet in spite of the money, the poultry industry was already ascendant in the era of peak neoliberalism.

In February 1981, Reagan issued Executive Order 12291 that required federal agencies to carry out a cost-benefit-analysis approach to regulatory review procedures. When implemented by the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, the impact of mergers and acquisitions upon consumers was weighed heavily over more traditional concerns such as market competition.

Those changes represented a departure from the more traditional Progressive/New Deal–era fear of monopoly or oligopoly control. It represented more a belief in the value of economies of scale, the consequence of which was that market leaders undercut smaller companies that are either run out of business or absorbed. Absent was the fear that the market leaders would ultimately come to control the input factors (like chicken feed, in the case of the poultry industry, though they’re doing that now through vertical integration) and then gouge consumers.

Undergirding this was a belief that driving down retail costs to the lowest possible levels created at least the impression of growing prosperity even where wages may remain stagnant. There is a history of popular discontent in response to rising meat prices, and I think many politicians were very wary to take actions that businesses insisted would result in increased prices in grocery stores, and they remain so today.

This might seem all too fantastic, but I think a well-paid slaughterhouse job with a strong union contract working for a company that was fully invested in workplace safety and sustainable ergonomic practices is something that we should be able to live with.

In writing this book, I was fairly determined not to add to a century of literature that critically evaluated working-class dietary practices and depicted them as the outcomes of either ignorance or desperation. One of the things that attracted me to the Chicken McNugget as a subject of analysis was the sheer gulf between its mass popularity and the damning way in which it was assessed by food writers and academics really from its launch in 1983.

The fairly vociferous critiques of fast food that started to build in the late 1990s drove something of a middle-class exodus and the growth of new markets in local and organic, but for many, I think they were received as a form of cultural elitism. Where alternatives have achieved some measure of success, such as in the realm of plant-based meats, they have met consumers more on their own terms.