I was born in the late 70s and remember until I was about 8 or 9 that chicken for dinner was a rare “Sunday dinner” occurrence (it was usually a whole stuffed chicken with au gratin potatoes and fancy frozen vegetables with biscuits" and usually pie
fried chicken was for special occasions like birthdays church picnics reunions ect or when someone brought KFC or pioneer home (lees famous in Indiana) because chicken was almost more expensive than steak
I know at some point chicken became so cheap that they couldn’t give it away and instead of “yay!chicken!” it became “chicken again really?” but when and why?
I was born in 1955, and I can’t remember a time when chicken was anything other than a common option for a meal. If it became more accessible and affordable at some point relative to another, I suspect it was after WWII, and the war probably had something to do with it (e.g., improved breeding and husbandry to feed the troops).
As noted elsewhere, the chicken we eat today is different (plumper, juicier, blander) from what they were eating 70+ years ago, presumably due to selective breeding. For that matter, so is turkey (and I believe pork).
I was born in 1955, and I can’t remember a time when chicken was anything other than a common option for a meal. If it became more accessible and affordable at some point relative to another, I suspect it was after WWII, and the war probably had something to do with it (e.g., improved breeding and husbandry to feed the troops).
As noted elsewhere, the chicken we eat today is different (plumper, juicier, blander) from what they were eating 70+ years ago, presumably due to selective breeding. For that matter, so are turkey and (I believe) pork.
This article indicates that it was during WWII that chicken (as a meat) became commonplace, due to both the growth of industrialized chicken farming, and red meat being prioritized for sending overseas to the troops.
It also notes that, as chicken became more common, at least one meat that declined was rabbit.
Born in 1960 (Australia) and chicken was indeed a very special meal, reserved for Xmas day and sometimes, if the family was flush, for a Sunday roast. The most common meal was lamb (chops or roast) as lamb was cheap and plentiful.
Nowadays it’s the other way around, and you virtually need to take out a second mortgage to buy a leg of lamb or even some decent loin chops, whereas chicken is cheap and more versatile.
As to WHEN it happened? I’m thinking late 1970’s, early 80’s here in Australia.
I should have mentioned that I was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, right in the heart of the North American continent. Good farming country, if not much else.
City Chicken (which is not chicken, it’s pork) was super popular here in Cleveland when my mom was growing up in the 50s and 60s but we’ve discussed it and we can’t remember her ever serving it to us in the 80s. So chicken must have been the cheaper meat by the 80s.
Not that it probably wasn’t cheaper earlier. I just like to drop midwestern ethnic goodies into threads when I can
I get the impression that many families, urban and otherwise, raised their own chickens and rabbits for food up to the WWII years. I know my dad’s raised chickens in Milwaukee in the 1920s, and my mother’s kept rabbits in rural Missouri in the 1930s.
The first time I had rabbit was on New Year’s Day, 1992, as the guest of a Czech family in a small town outside of Prague. They too raised their own rabbits and had a big hutch in their back yard.
My paternal Grandparents had chicken houses. Some for meat and some laying houses. At their house it was fried chicken everyday, morning, noon and suppertime. Sometimes Granny did a roasted hen. Or chicken and dumplings (my fave) She canned chicken for the lean months.
I guess I don’t have to tell you where all the chicken came from.
Yep. You’re right.
My mother always made chicken once a week, on Sundays, from our own chickens that were raised and butchered on the farm (until it became too much work); this was in South Dakota in the 1960’s. It was either fried, or as chicken and dumplings.
She was a child of the depression, and recalled that chicken was a rare occurrence when she was growing up. Instead, lots of their meals were eggs and cheese and sausage. You don’t kill the egg-laying chickens until they stopped being productive.
We would always buy whole chickens and cut them up at home and fry them. They were somewhat smaller back then, especially the breast parts. It wasn’t fancy or expansive food — perhaps more expensive than the ground beef that back then was called “hamburger meat” (higher fat % than today’s ground beef). Cheaper than prepackaged supermarket pork chops, not cheaper than pork if you bought a significant part of a pig and butchered it.
Between 1962 and 1968, I spent at least part of every summer at my dad’s in West Virginia. It was there that I was first exposed to Colonel Sander’s Kentucky Fried Chicken at the age of seven or eight. Really good stuff back then, much better than today’s KFC. I’ll never forget watching the scene in Goldfinger where Felix Leitner and his partner are stopped for a bite at Colonel Sander’s. I was nine years old at the time, and it immediately transported me back east.
My mom was born in '49 in the Rockies, and being poor, chickens were her primary source of meat since they raised them, and even then it was mostly eggs. Her father would go fishing every day after work to hopefully add trout to the menu. Otherwise, the only time she got anything else was from donations around holidays or when she had to eat beef liver to treat her iron deficiency.
Wish my dad was alive, he was born in '32. I think he primarily ate pork when he ate meat at all.
Growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the '50s, chicken was a special Sunday dinner with guests. “City chicken” on skewers and (canned);salmon patties were more typical meals.
By the mid-60s, after a move to Pittsburgh, dinner from KFC became common.
I grew up between 1962 and 1980 in the Chicago area. Chicken was unremarkable, but definitely not every day in my first 10 years. Tuna casseroles and other food-stretchers were much more likely. Steak (cheap cuts on the grill, basically round steak) was not unheard of, but definitely a treat. I had two siblings, and my father was a research chemist, my mother a journalist. Probably solid middle or upper-middle class.
