Tastes
Like Chicken: A History of America's Favorite Bird
by Emelyn Rude, author
Hardcover, 272 pages
Published August 2nd 2016 by
Pegasus Books (first published August 1st 2016)
From the domestication of the
bird nearly ten thousand years ago to its current status as our go-to meat, the
history of this seemingly commonplace bird is anything but ordinary.
How did chicken achieve the
culinary ubiquity it enjoys today? It’s hard to imagine, but there was a point
in history, not terribly long ago, that individual people each consumed less
than ten pounds of chicken per year. Today, those numbers are strikingly
different: we consumer nearly twenty-five times as much chicken as our
great-grandparents did.
Collectively, Americans devour 73.1 million pounds of chicken in a day, close to 8.6 billion birds per year. ... In the spirit of Mark Kurlansky's
Cod and Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork, Tastes Like Chicken is a fascinating, clever, and surprising
discourse on one of America's favorite
foods.
