The Chicken: Built In A Cowshed And Sold By A Grocer

In 1953 a Sussex farmer came home from America with 24 fertilised eggs in his hand luggage. Bringing hatching eggs into the country was banned, so he had wrapped them in silver paper and passed them off as Easter eggs.

They were White Rocks, an American strain, and he had plans for them that barely existed in Britain yet: chickens grown for their meat, thousands at a time, under one roof.

His name was Antony Fisher. Foot and mouth had reached his farm the summer before and his herd of Friesian cows had been destroyed. He ran his first experiments in a disused cowshed.

In 1950 poultry made up about 1% of the meat Britain ate. In 2024 the UK slaughtered 1.14 billion broiler chickens, and chicken is now the meat the country eats more of than any other.

Nobody in Britain went looking for that bird. It was designed and sold to the country inside about ten years, by people whose names are on the record, and what it is made of has been settled ever since by whoever fills the feeder.

The chicken used to be the end of a hen

Before the broiler, a British chicken dinner was usually the last thing a laying hen did.

Table birds were a by-product of the egg trade. The egg trade sold its worn-out layers as boiling fowl and the surplus young cockerels as small roasters. At home it was simpler still. A hen laid for as long as she laid, and when she stopped she went in the pot.

That made chicken scarce and dear. In October 1954, when Unilever’s animal feed company asked British households about it, well over a third said they never bought chicken at all. Another quarter bought one a year, at Christmas. Even the households that bought it more often treated it, in the words of two business historians, as “a very occasional, expensive Sunday treat”.

As meat it counted for so little that poultry was never even put on the wartime meat ration.

The hen lived on what the household didn’t want. Scavenging was the traditional way of keeping chickens, as the agricultural historian Paul Brassley puts it: scraps from the kitchen, waste from the garden, and whatever she could find for herself in the yard.

The war filled the back gardens with hens

Before the war, four-fifths of what Britain’s poultry ate came in by ship. Once the shipping was needed for the war, imported feed was cut to almost nothing, and between 1939 and 1943 the national poultry flock almost halved.

So the government sent the hen home.

In September 1940 the Ministry of Agriculture set up a Domestic Poultry Keepers’ Council for people keeping a few birds behind the house. It had 791,000 members in its first year and 1,369,000 by 1945. One wartime poultry committee advised six birds to a back garden, and “in no case more than twelve”.

Domestic flocks doubled, from just over 5 million hens before the war to more than 10 million by the end of it. By 1944 the birds in Britain’s back gardens and allotments were laying a quarter of the country’s eggs, and by the last year of the war two fifths.

The law was rewritten to let them in. A wartime defence regulation made it lawful, whatever a lease or a tenancy said, to keep pigs, hens or rabbits. It said hens and it meant hens. The word was chosen on purpose to keep cockerels out, and anyone who has lived next door to one will follow the reasoning.

The Ministry of Food even let you swap your eggs for chicken feed. From July 1942 anyone keeping no more than 25 birds could hand in the household’s shell egg counterfoils and draw a ration of balancer meal instead.

The meal was only meant to balance. The rest came out of the kitchen and the garden. In 1943 Lillian Konig, who organised the domestic keepers for the south east, told a meeting in Sussex that stinging nettles, carrot tops, dried grass and kale were excellent additions to the ration.

One memory of the time has the neighbours putting their chickens into the Anderson shelter at night.

In September 1944 the government’s Wartime Social Survey went round and counted. One household in ten in England and Wales kept laying hens, seven of them on average. The survey added a line that reads very differently now: “None of those keeping hens kept them on the battery system.”

Those hens were the household’s leftovers on legs: peelings, scraps, nettles, a scoop of meal and the run of the garden. When one stopped laying she became dinner, and it was an occasion.

The scraps went out of fashion in the 1950s

The regulation that let tenants keep hens was revoked on 1 July 1951. Egg control ended on 26 March 1953, and the last restrictions on feed went that August. The official reasons for keeping six hens and a bucket of peelings went with them.

For anyone hoping to sell chickens, raising flocks “on farmyard scraps using mostly family labor was no longer feasible”, as the historians put it.

In April 1965 a civil servant at the Ministry of Agriculture drafted a letter to George Brown, the first chairman of the National Council for Domestic Food Production. The activities the council existed to promote, it said, “must be regarded as social and recreational” from now on. The back garden hen had been demoted to a hobby.

Her commercial sisters went indoors. In 1951, 80% of British eggs were free range. By 1980 the figure was 1%, and by 1984 more than 95% of the country’s laying hens lived in battery cages.

The meat bird went further still. It stopped being a hen at all.

A five pound chicken for ten shillings

Antony Fisher was a former RAF pilot with a 400-acre mixed farm near Framfield, and the farm was losing £2,000 a year. Once the cows had gone, he went looking for something that would make the farm pay, and he found it in poultry. Geoffrey Sykes, whom Sainsbury’s own records call “a pioneer in introducing new farming techniques to the UK”, opened one of Britain’s first broiler farms, near Salisbury, in 1953.

Fisher had gone to America to lecture on the evils of state economic planning. At a broiler farm at Cornell University he found 15,000 birds in a single building. He liked chickens for another reason too, as a magazine profile reported in 1959: poultry was one of the few branches of British farming the government didn’t subsidise. “Subsidies are humiliating and create more evils than they cure,” he said.

The bird the new trade wanted was designed backwards from a price.

In 1953 Harold Temperton, director of the National Institute of Poultry Husbandry at Harper Adams, declared that the future of the British table poultry industry depended on producing “a 5lb dressed chicken at 10s retail”. Ten shillings became the price the new trade aimed at. In October 1953 ten shillings was about a nineteenth of the average weekly pay of a man working in industry.

Getting there was a sum, and the sum was feed. The number that mattered was how many pounds of feed it took to make a pound of meat, and the breed, the shed and the ration were all bent towards making it smaller. Sykes reported that in America the use of antibiotics at low levels in broiler rations was universal.

The feed trade had been watching. The 1954 survey of who bought chicken was BOCM’s, the Unilever company that made animal feed, and Spillers was turning out specialist poultry feeds.

BOCM stood for British Oil and Cake Mills, and the name described the business. The oil came out of the seed, and the cake left behind was sold to feed animals. Its parent company made margarine.

Fisher’s own numbers ran away with him. He had 2,500 birds by May 1953 and 24,000 by August. Late that year he and a partner, Tony Pendry, launched the Buxted Chicken Company with a staff of 12, £1,000 in cash and a £5,000 bank loan.

By 1959 his plant was processing more than 20,000 birds a day, and the profile called it probably the largest of its kind in Europe.

The grocer lent the bird its good name

A cheap new chicken from a shed still had to be sold to a country that thought chicken was for Christmas. The firm that did more of the selling than anyone was J. Sainsbury.

By the middle of the 1950s Sainsbury’s was reckoned to be selling about a million birds a year, twice as many as its nearest rival. The man behind it was Max Justice, manager of the meat and poultry department, who by one supplier’s account had brought the idea back from a trip to America.

Justice summoned the processors to head office at Blackfriars: Fisher’s Buxted, Padley, Marshall, Western Chicken and Lloyd Maunder. “We’re going to organise the country into sectors,” he told them, and each firm was handed a region of its own to supply.

The conditions came with the territory. Sainsbury’s set standards well above anything the law required, and it wouldn’t let its suppliers use penicillin or any other antibiotic when they chilled the birds. John Maunder remembered the warning that went with it: “If you mess up on this, it isn’t just you that goes down.”

That was what the grocer brought. A shopper who had never bought a cheap chicken in her life trusted Sainsbury’s, and Sainsbury’s put its reputation on every bird.

On 6 February 1958 Alan Sainsbury sat down to dinner with Geoffrey Sykes to launch a campaign to sell more roasting chickens. That year the firm made its first ever television adverts, selling frozen chicken as an affordable meal, and told the shoppers in its windows that chicken was now cheap.

Justice wrote it up for the staff magazine that March under the headline “Chickens Cheep”. Sainsbury’s sold almost 5 million birds in 1958, almost 12 million in 1959 and 13.5 million in 1960.

The price did what Temperton had asked of it. Between 1956 and 1963 chicken fell by about a third while red meat kept going up. A Briton who ate less than a pound of chicken a year in 1953 was eating almost ten pounds of it by 1960.

By 1964 chicken was a tenth of all the meat the country ate. By 1980 poultry was a quarter of the meat market, and it had pushed aside what the historians list as the old favourites: “beef, mutton and bacon”.

The chicken money helped pay for a think tank

The chickens were never the whole of Fisher’s ambition.

After the war he had gone to see Friedrich Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom, for advice. Fisher was thinking of going into politics. Hayek told him not to waste his time on a political career and to found a scholarly research organisation instead.

By the autumn of 1954 the chickens were going well enough for Fisher to start planning one. In November 1955 he and Oliver Smedley set up the Institute of Economic Affairs, in a room at Smedley’s firm that cost £3 a week. Its budget for its first five years was £5,000 a year, and Fisher put in £1,000 a year of it.

John Blundell, who later ran the institute, wrote: “It was the early profits from the chicken factories that encouraged him.” Ralph Harris took over the running of it in 1957, and it spent the next two decades making the case for free markets in a country that had mostly stopped believing in them.

When Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979 she wrote to Fisher that the institute had “created the climate of opinion which made our victory possible”. At its thirtieth anniversary dinner she said of its founders: “They were the few, but they were right and they saved Britain.”

She also told the men making speeches that night, “while the cocks may crow it’s the hen that lays the egg”. The money in this case had been laid by the broiler.

Buxted was floated on the stock market in 1962 at £7m, with 2,000 staff, and by 1964 it was handling 500,000 birds a week. Fisher sold out in 1968 and came away with around £2m.

Within two years Buxted’s parent company, Allied Farm Foods, belonged to the Imperial Tobacco group, which had bought Ross, the other giant of British chicken, the year before. A good share of the bird that replaced the Sunday joint now came from a cigarette company.

His wife Dorian later said he “did more to put a chicken in every man’s pot than any king or politician ever did”. He then tried the same trick on the green turtle, with a farm in the Cayman Islands that went into receivership in 1975 and cost him more than $600,000.

Ruth Harrison went inside the sheds

In March 1964 The Observer ran two articles from a book about to come out. The first was headed “Inside the animal factories”. The second was headed “Fed to Death”.

The book was Animal Machines, by Ruth Harrison, and it took the public inside the broiler houses, the battery sheds and the veal pens it had been eating from for ten years without looking. She described broilers spending “nine to ten weeks in these dim, enclosed houses”, and summed it up: “This then is the broiler industry, vast and struggling.”

Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring had come out two years earlier, wrote the foreword. She described farm units “kept going only by the continuous administration of antibiotics”.

The government moved quickly. On 20 April 1964 the Minister of Agriculture, Christopher Soames, announced a committee, and by the end of May it had a chairman, Professor Rogers Brambell, a zoologist at Bangor. It visited 54 livestock farms in England, Wales and Scotland, went to see more in Denmark, Holland and Northern Ireland, and reported in December 1965.

Its most famous sentence asked very little: “An animal should at least have sufficient freedom of movement to be able without difficulty, to turn round, groom itself, get up, lie down and stretch its limbs.”

What followed was the Agriculture (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1968, which made it an offence to cause livestock unnecessary pain or distress, and a set of codes of practice to go with it. Breaking a code was not itself an offence.

The sheds stayed. There are more birds in them now than at any point in the 1960s.

The state recommended what the feeder made

By the 1980s the bird was built, cheap and everywhere. Then the government’s nutrition advisers recommended it.

In 1984 the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy published Diet and Cardiovascular Disease, the work of a panel chaired by the Oxford biochemist Philip Randle. It told Britain to cut saturated fat to 15% of its food energy and total fat to 35%. In the chapter on how, it said saturated fat “could be decreased now by substituting, for example, some non-fatty fish”, or “poultry e.g. chicken”.

The Balance of Good Health, the plate model the government put out in 1994, was still listing “poultry without the skin” among its lower fat choices in its 2001 edition, next to “meat with the fat cut off”.

In 2016 the Eatwell Guide told the country to “Eat less red and processed meat”. The NHS today tells people to “go for turkey and chicken without the skin as these are lower in fat”, and suggests “leaner cuts, such as chicken breast”. Anyone eating more than 90g of red or processed meat a day is asked to cut down to 70g. There is no such figure for chicken.

The shops had got there first. In 1983, one of the first three chilled ready meals Sainsbury’s ever sold was Chicken Chasseur.

Part of the low saturated fat the 1984 committee credited to chicken came from a lean bird. The rest belonged to its feed.

Chicken fat is less saturated than beef fat because a chicken has no rumen. The cow’s microbes take the unsaturated fat in her feed and saturate it before it reaches her meat, as the ruminant guide sets out. A chicken, like the pig, lays down a great deal of what it eats much as it ate it. When the committee picked chicken, part of what it was picking was the contents of a feed bag.

The later advice to take off the skin finished the job. Skinned as instructed, the breast has barely any fat left in it, from the feed bag or anywhere else, which leaves Britain’s favourite health food with nothing much in it but protein and a recipe card. The fat the feeder built sits in the skin, the thighs and the wings, the parts the advice steered people away from.

What goes in the feeder now

A British broiler eats mostly wheat and soya. One standard ration, built from industry figures for a 2013 study, gives a finishing bird 66% wheat, 18% soya meal, 10% rapeseed and just over 3% vegetable oil. A young chick gets a third of its ration as soya meal.

Britain grows almost no soya. In 2022 the UK’s soya imports came to about 3.5 million tonnes, counted as beans, and nearly nine tenths came from Argentina, Brazil, the United States and Paraguay.

The Soil Association puts the soya brought in to feed British broilers at about a million tonnes a year. WWF reckons British chicken feed needs around 1.6 million hectares of land overseas, which is more than the whole of Northern Ireland.

Soya meal is what is left of the bean once the oil has been crushed out of it, and it is four fifths of the bean and most of what the crop is worth. The oil goes into the frying pan and the spread. The meal goes into the chicken. BOCM’s old name still describes the arrangement perfectly.

The bird turns all of it into chicken, and turns its fat into chicken fat without changing it much on the way.

A team led by Michael Crawford at London Metropolitan University analysed British chickens bought between 2004 and 2008 from supermarkets, farm shops and, for reasons of its own, Chelsea Football Club.

In a whole carcass the energy coming from fat was now two to three times the energy coming from protein. The ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats in their birds ran as high as 9 to 1. DHA, the omega-3 fat the brain is built from, was down to about a fifth of what chickens carried in the 1970s.

Set against chicken analysed as far back as the 1870s, their conclusion fitted in one sentence: “While chicken was at one time a lean, low-fat food, it is no longer.” The breeders had made the breast lean. Counted by energy, the whole bird was not. The title of the paper made a point of including the organic birds.

Paying extra for an open door changes less than the label suggests. Researchers at the University of Reading compared free-range and indoor chickens from British shops and found no evidence that the free-range meat had a healthier fatty acid profile. In a Portuguese trial, the pasture came to under 5% of what free-range broilers actually ate.

The field is scenery. The feeder is the bird.

Whether any of it belongs on a carnivore plate is a separate question, and one this site has already answered. The American side of the story is told in the history of the egg.

The cowshed

The hen in the 1944 back garden was made out of the household. She ate the peelings, the nettles and the carrot tops, she laid for as long as she could, and she came to the table once, as an occasion.

The bird on the table now was given its target price in 1953 by a man at Harper Adams, sold in 1958 by a grocer at Blackfriars and recommended in 1984 by a committee in Whitehall. Its fat is mixed at a feed mill from wheat, rapeseed, soya and vegetable oil, and most of the soya is grown in South America.

Fisher started it all in a cowshed with no cows in it. The animal that used to live there could take a bucket of grain and soya and rebuild its fat into something firm and stable and entirely its own. The bird that moved in keeps whatever it is given.

Britain made the swap inside thirty years, and its favourite meat has been the feed bag with feathers on ever since.