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Playing Chicken: Technologies ofDomestication, Food, and SelfWyatt Galusky aa Morrisville State College, USA

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To cite this article: Wyatt Galusky (2010): Playing Chicken: Technologies of Domestication, Food,and Self, Science as Culture, 19:1, 15-35

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Playing Chicken: Technologiesof Domestication, Food, and Self

WYATT GALUSKY

Morrisville State College, USA

ABSTRACT To engage the mediating and enabling aspects of food technology, I reflect in

this essay on my (rueful) attempts at raising chickens. As an incompetent chicken-raising

hobbyist and an STS-trained scholar, I came to view my chickens as technologies

themselves—results of human interactions with nature, through the overarching frame

of domestication. Viewing the chicken–human relationship as a technological one has

allowed me to foreground several elements at once. First, the chicken and the systems

that sustain it put in stark relief the process of defining nature very specifically. Certain

aspects are coveted and augmented while others are disregarded or overcome. Thus,

technology does not strictly demarcate artificial from natural, but rather restricts or

accommodates fuller forms of nature. Second, these definitions of nature (the chicken in

this case) stabilize and enable other technological forms that take the initial stability

for granted (e.g. human social and geographic organizations premised on industrialized

agriculture). Third, these systems of stabilities, premised on necessarily partial versions

of nature, complicate normative decisions on proper human–chicken relationships. In

creating a uniform animal, and a relatively cheap and stable source of protein, we have

empowered identities that can think about food less as necessity, and more as choice.

As a result, we as consumers become increasingly dependent on the systems of

domesticated nature that make such choice possible. And when the chicken itself

becomes a product of that lifestyle choice (expressed as an element of consumer

behavior), its very skeletal structure becomes optional.

KEY WORDS: Food, agricultural, technological systems, STS, domestication, chickens,

in vitro meat, identity

Science as Culture

Vol. 19, No. 1, 15–35, March 2010

Correspondence Address: Wyatt Galusky, Morrisville State College, PO Box 901, Morrisville, NY 13408, USA.

Email: galuskwj@morrisville.edu

0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/10/010015-21 # 2010 Process PressDOI: 10.1080/09505430903557874

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Introduction

In modern, Western, industrialized countries such as the United States, food for

many has become a primary battleground for articulating values of all types—

cultural, epicureal, nutritional (see, for example, Pollan, 2006; Kingsolver, 2007).

In this metaphorical battle, consumers do not just purchase food—they proclaim

allegiances and endorse or scorn particular worldviews. The contestations over

food remain prominent in part because eating is something everyone does every

day. We all eat, and as Wendell Berry famously wrote, ‘eating is an agricultural

act’ (1990, p. 145). Our food choices, then, say something about the animals and

plants we choose to value in particular ways, about the types of agricultural

production we support, and about the kinds of people we want to be.

I confronted the question of food several years ago when I decided to raise

chickens, to practice a kind of animal husbandry and shorten the agricultural pro-

duction networks I depended upon but found at least partly problematic. Though

a Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar, I approached my chicken

raising not to study it per se, but to engage in a kind of practice. Despite these

desires, I managed to do more learning than engaging. Namely, I learned I

wasn’t very good at raising chickens (in fact, the chickens themselves were

much better in spite of my efforts). And it was because of this failure that I

ended up engaging my own identity, as an STS scholar and as a human being

within natural systems.

It all starts with an encounter I did not schedule, but which I did make possible.

One morning, I went outside to see my wife off to work very early in the morning.

Earlier than the sun. And in the semi-darkness, I was actually struck in the head by

a falling object. What fell out of the sky was not an apple, or even the sky itself. It

was a chicken. I wasn’t surprised to find a chicken in my yard; I raised them. I was,

however, shocked it got there via my head. How did it get there? Perhaps more

importantly, why?

This falling chicken narrative shares with the other essays in this issue a reflec-

tion on what it means to embody STS, on the complexities that arise from being

situated within those technological networks I attempt to study and understand. As

such, it focuses on the ambiguities of understanding (human) nature and on the

seductive elements of attempting to exert control on that nature through techno-

logical intervention. It also deals with being connected to networks that both com-

promise and complement critique. Mostly, this essay is about chickens—about

how raising chickens as an escape from industrialized technologies became poss-

ible for me only because of industrialized technologies; about how the very

biology of domesticated chickens reflects human relationships to the wider

world—what we know, what we want, what we miss; about how being an STS

scholar provides me with tools to map out the technological relationships I have

with the animals that help provide my food, while at the same time troubles any

easy notions about how to arrange or value those relationships. In this sense,

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the essay uses the domesticated chicken and the various ways in which humans

relate to it as a meditation on what technology is and what technology does

(which includes often deluding ourselves into thinking we control the nature

within those technologies). More specifically, I argue that what we help to turn

chickens into, through our technological engagement with all facets of their exist-

ence (what they eat, where they live, what they do, what their bodies become),

says a lot about what we as humans think about ourselves and what we come to

value in (human) nature—uniformity and control.

Domestication

The Very Idea

I want to start by reflecting on the idea of domestication, which will prove illustra-

tive of the larger argument. The concept’s meaning with regard to human relation-

ships with non-humans, while often used as a simple foil for the idea of

wilderness, is varied and complex (see Cassidy & Mullin, 2007). But an original

and more basic definition that preceded its application to non-humans is more

appropriate, that ‘of or belonging to the home, house, or household’ (Oxford

English Dictionary, 1989, p. 944; see also Bulliet, 2005). This definition of

domestic allows us to focus on a set of relations that enables certain identities

to be possible, as one becomes accustomed to a particular way of living. The

chickens that I attempted to raise speak to this idea in two ways—by being

physically predisposed to provide me with certain outputs based upon minimal

inputs; by being possible and even desirable for someone like me, with no experi-

ence and (apparently) no skill, because of the other technologies there to catch me

when I failed—and did I fail (more on this later).

One can find a better example of relatively successful domestication technol-

ogies, however, from the 2001 Robert Altman film, Gosford Park. The film is a

murder mystery set in England, circa 1932, on the occasion of a shooting party.

Importantly, the drama depicts two interdependent worlds. On the one hand, the

audience is introduced to those to the manor born, as they participate in the week-

end’s activities and in the petty intrigues that keep them occupied and preoccupied

with each other: dalliances, infidelities, attire, seating arrangements, etiquette. On

the other hand, one gets to see what makes such preoccupation possible. As the

movie meticulously and plainly lays out, this gathering and this focus would

not happen without the multitudes of the serving class pressing clothes, shining

shoes, mending clothes, cooking dinner, setting tables, washing dishes. The atten-

tions, consternations, and very identities of the leisure classes in this case are

founded upon the labor and organization of those people who make such identities

possible—scullery maids, butlers, valets, cooks, chauffeurs, etc. This system of

servitude is an enabling technology, a technology that enables a kind of identity.

And it functions well when it is least visible—below stairs.

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A slightly different example can be found in Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit

short film, A Close Shave (Sallis et al., 1996). One must move from live action to

plasticine, but despite what appear to be vast differences between the two films,

one can find a very similar technological enabling. In this case, all of the

people from Gosford Park working below stairs are replaced by machines.

Rube Goldberg contraptions do certain tasks so that Wallace, in particular, can

put his attentions on other things. Cheese, usually. Human activity has been trans-

formed and translated into machine design and infrastructure, gaining certain

advantages (e.g. the reduction of the number of people in one’s immediate

employ) and certain disadvantages (like the need to remove porridge from the

wall and one’s clothes when the machine malfunctions). Importantly, the

support systems in Gosford Park are not de facto less technological—in fact,

for the smooth working of upper-class identities, the roles become more crucial

than the actors. Ideally, from the perspective of those for whom the structure is

organized, the preparations themselves are prioritized over those who make them.

Both films demonstrate how a household can be created through routinized

patterns of behavior, through roles themselves that take on the specific aura

of domestication—domestic servants, machines for domestic tasks, even compa-

nion species. This is domestication in the sense of tamed, of familiar, of accus-

tomed; and, somewhat broadly, as related to a household or the possibility of a

household. This sense of stability, of assumed presence mediated by a set of

relationships made manifest through people or things, becomes the premise for

a certain set of realities—of who one is. If those relationships prove ethically or

socially problematic—if questions of inequality plague servitude, if the sources

and various costs of electricity undermine the value of machines—then the necess-

ary changes can be profound. One often sets about challenging these relationships

situated within them. At least, I was. And I did it through a decision to raise chick-

ens, and through a need to understand more fully how that decision made promi-

nent my connection to food, to technological systems, and to myself. As Donna

Haraway has noted, ‘[f]ollow the chicken and find the world’ (2008, p. 274).

Technologies of Domestication as Possibility and Peril

These examples of domestication culled from popular culture suggest how one

builds a household through interrelated systems of humans and things, which

may seem a far cry from ideas of domesticating animals and in particular chickens.

In fact, there is a rich literature in various disciplines on the specific processes of

domestication in plants and animals.1 However, in my own life, and in my edu-

cation and work in environmental ethics and STS, as an educator and a scholar,

I have come to see my relationships to technological systems, and to food

systems and raising chickens in particular, as connections to the natural world

in very specific and non-necessary ways. That is, my engagement with technologi-

cal systems mediates between myself and what comes to count as the world.2

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This mediation works both ways. In terms of the world, technology can be

understood to create a filter that enables a more or less stable simplification of

that vast plasma, or metaplasm, or noumena.3 That is, all the ‘stuff’ out here,

prior to human attempts to understand it—parsing signal from noise, figure

from ground, the differences that make a difference. As Theodor Adorno notes,

technology is what allows humans to speak their own language, to say something

about the world (see Morris, 2001). Importantly, this understanding of nature as

mediated disrupts and troubles any simple recourse to some definite, inescapable

nature that dictates truth or value. Put more forcefully, ‘[Nature] may “rec-

ommend” certain types of action, and it will always have its say in determining

the effects of what we do, but it does not enforce a politics’ (Soper, 1996,

p. 142). This understanding of nature as present but not strictly deterministic is

one I try to represent in my writing, communicate in my teaching, and engage

in my living.

But technology, understood in this way, does not just implicate the world—it also

implicates me. As noted in the domestication examples above, certain definitions of

self and certain ways of seeing myself in the world are made possible through the

intervening power of those specific technological systems. Verbeek (2005)

parses these changes in terms of action and interpretation, emphasizing what one

can do in the world and how one sees that world. In part, he follows Heidegger,

who discussed how tools disclose particular worlds through the actions made poss-

ible when a person interacted with the world through a tool. When functioning well,

tools hide in the work they do. Heidegger (1962) called this ‘ready-to-hand’. The

self in the world becomes different because what one can do has changed.

The same can be said for interpretations of the world and the self, in that how

one sees the world (if one is holding a hammer, for example, as a series of nails)

and how the world sees you (as a dangerous wielder of a hammer) changes by

virtue of the mediating power of that tool (see Ihde, 2002; Latour, 1999; Feenberg,

2003). These technologies do not determine what the world will look like, or how

we will see it. Rather, they can influence what we see as possible, as necessary, and

even as desirable in a world that is both present and malleable.

Of course, understanding how technological systems shape the world and the

self only goes so far in helping to decide how the world and the self should be

shaped and who should do the shaping. That distinction between what is possible

and what is right forms the crux of many contemporary problems and choices

people make about how they want to live (like, for example, growing their own

food). This is especially so since the choice is not between technology and no

technology but between types of technology that have their own respective

problems. Bruno Latour (2002) elucidated that dual nature of technology in his

essay, ‘Morality and Technology: the End of the Means’. He there distinguishes

two modes of existence, the moral mode and the technological mode. They are

modes of existence because they are each directly related to the proliferation of

things in the world. They bring things into existence.

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Whereas the technological mode brings forth novel entities by making new net-

works of associations possible, though, the moral mode brings forth hidden ones

by exposing the necessary components of existing networks. The Gosford Park

example above proves helpful here. In the technological mode, domestic service

is viewed only in terms of what it allows, namely preoccupations with etiquette

and the time to worry about social standing. In the moral mode, one would

need to think of at least part of the people, the class divisions, the marshalling

of resources, etc., that enable dinner to be served. Importantly, we must continue

to live in this world even while trying both to understand it and make it better. This

leaves the basic questions unanswered: how does one attempt to live in this world?

How can one attempt to account for relationships while still being dependent upon

them? These questions lead me to turn back to the chickens.

A Life with Chickens, or Making and Being

So there I was with the one chicken left from what had been eight. Foxes, or opos-

sums, or raccoons had whittled the number down. Foxes seem much more roman-

tic, somehow, so let’s say it was foxes. What’s more important is not what killed

the seven chickens but why I still had one. How, then, did this one lone chicken

survive? And why did the other ones die so easily?

The previous occupants of my rented rural home had already established

chicken accommodations—a spacious, multi-chicken dwelling, with modern con-

veniences like dirt floors, nesting boxes with sloped roofs, roosts with a cool little

ramp, and a small door to the outside. I couldn’t wait to use it. Some local preda-

tors couldn’t wait for me to use it either. The chickens probably could have waited.

Unfortunately for them, the building contained many subtle entrances for

unwanted guests. I was quite distressed by the loss of the first chicken. I had

had them for about two months when suddenly the undulating mass of chicken

appeared less bulky. I lost two more a few nights later, followed, in turn, by all

but a single chicken. The amount of chicken feathers no longer on chickens

was rivaled only by the amount of denial I exhibited. Maybe the chickens were

molting? And then out touring the neighborhood?

At some point I had to give up on the notion that the vacation my chickens were

on was something more than just metaphoric. The scatterings of feathers and

reduced flock amounted to evidence too compelling to ignore. The missing chick-

ens were gone. Eaten. Not by me. Attempting to be stoic about the dwindling

numbers, I sought solace in thoughts about the naturalness of their passing, how

they were to die anyway, and what more romantic way for them to die than as

nature intended. Gruesomely, perhaps, but nature could tend toward the

dramatic—especially when shot for television.

My visions of The Discovery Channel not withstanding, such thoughts brought

little comfort. The notion that I had helped orchestrate some grand ‘one with

nature’ episode was quickly undermined by a feeling of complicity in their

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demise. Nature may have been active in their deaths, but not so much in their lives.

Through extension, I arranged their existence, constructed the architecture that

conditioned their days and nights. Their very physiology—so conducive to

being eaten—was designed for the benefit of my survival, not theirs. The chickens

are, at least in part, human creations.4 Artifacts. Technologies. After all, they have

been ‘designed’ (bred, genetically altered, and honed) to provide food for human

populations. They have not been specifically designed to fight for their lives. They

provide us with eggs and flesh; we feed and shelter them so they can do that. I

failed to do my part adequately. I even ended up aiding the other predators by

keeping the hens penned up. I could not escape my responsibility.

And I did feel responsible, just as I had felt proud seeing the flock, my flock,

rooting through the yard eating bugs and grass, taking dirt baths and chasing

each other around. The first egg was a revelation. It was relatively small

(though they would get much bigger) but with a rich, deep yellow yolk that

made store-bought eggs literally pale in comparison. Pretty soon there were

more eggs than the two of us could eat. I went from consumer of eggs to provider

of eggs. I had shortened part of my food-producing network by bearing primary

responsibility for it. I was up at dawn and home by dusk opening and closing

the door of their house; providing a supply of fresh water and supplemental

feed; cleaning out the house regularly; keeping unsanctioned predators at bay

(ideally). In fact, raising chickens imposed upon me a much more routinized sche-

dule than I had typically kept as an academic (I also came to rue the much earlier

sunrise of summer). And so I got to witness how one failure—my failure—

exposed the vulnerability of even such a small network. I also came to realize

how truly dependent I was on those vaster food networks I found so problematic.

I had access to immense human–nature networks to keep me fed and to keep me

safe. My chickens primarily had me.

The one chicken that made it had to take it upon herself to find a safe haven.

Eschewing her human-made confines, she flew into the trees. It was from this

roost that she surprised me that morning. I had no idea she could get that high,

and I even felt a little hurt. My role as a chicken protector—ludicrously

inadequate—was being usurped by a strong-willed chicken. In confronting

this unaccounted for behavior, and in particular my own reaction to it, I began

to question the role and responsibilities I had in her life. Here I finally began to

question what was best for her. In seeking refuge in the trees, was she obeying

some evolutionary imperative, was she doing what was natural, was she trying

all means just to stay alive? If so, why did it feel so wrong? Or was that behavior

the result of my interference in her life, with my attempts to keep her penned up,

cultivating an animal for the express purpose of being yummy? Should I seek to

control that behavior or leave her to the whims of wind and rain?

Whatever the answer, my chicken was ill-suited to defend herself from unsanc-

tioned predators, but well-suited for the purposes of a sanctioned one—me. Bred

to be consumed, my modern chicken is indeed a technological marvel. She is also,

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at the same time, a natural marvel. These two classifications are not mutually

exclusive, though their relationship often appears at odds. And the domesticated

chicken body that was shaped by design and situated within larger systems

helps to reveal the complex interplay of nature and technology that humans

help to orchestrate.

The Nature of this Technology

The history of the domesticated chicken shadows that of humans. The origins

of the modern, domesticated chicken (Gallus domesticus) goes back tens of

thousands of years, with some uncertainty about its direct lineage.

Whatever its heritage, the chicken has occupied the place in human society

primarily of food provider. They are yummy and tend to stick around. They

(can be coerced to) lay eggs at a prodigious and maladaptive rate. In fact, the

modern egg layer, a variant of the Leghorn, became the favored industrial breed

in part because she could be easily dissuaded from her urge to brood, and thus

could be kept in her production cycle—laying eggs productively instead of just

sitting on them (see Smith & Daniel, 1975, p. 239). Having a reliable and regen-

erative food supply allows us to live in one place, to build communities, to erect

identities based upon those practices. The relative dependability of the chicken,

as with other domesticated animals, enables civilization.

The chicken also operated as vessel of cultural meaning; particularly sexual

meaning. Like many animals, the chicken has had to bear the brunt of human pro-

jections regarding gender roles and sexuality. The cock has long been a symbol of

male virility, of which my own delicacies prohibit the saying of much more. Hens

and eggs, on the other hand, carried more mixed meanings—both the sacred and

the profane. In many societies, women have been prohibited from both eating hens

which were seen to ‘lay here and there in different places’ and eggs more gener-

ally, for the same reason—promoting promiscuity (see Smith & Daniel, 1975).

The logic of such associations involves the idea that eating eggs increases

sexual appetite which in turn increases the likelihood of seeking sexual satisfac-

tion wherever it presents itself—‘laying here and there’. This line of thought

works in concert with the belief that hens have their eggs fertilized by the wind.

Chickens also played roles in religious ceremony and divination, allowing

insight into the wisdom of the spirit world. The two most common visions

obtained from these sacrificial birds: ‘Beware sharp objects near throats’ and

‘Enjoy a stiff breeze now and then’.

In modern Western mythology, the chicken occupies a much less sacred pos-

ition. The butt of that most confoundingly unfunny joke form about perambulation

(why did the frog cross the road? It was stapled to the chicken), it also has the igno-

miny of being associated with all manner of cowardice—as Bob Dylan once sung,

‘The sun is not yellow, it’s chicken’. Having now spent time with chickens, I can

vouch for their tendency to run. If I were designed to be eaten, however, I would

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probably flee, too. Surprise a hen quickly enough when escape seems futile, and

she will hunch down, wings slightly out, and stamp her feet. She performs this

action to protect herself. That’s it. About to get eaten? Stand still, throw a

tantrum. Running may be the better option. This instinct carries on even in

death. Scientists will tell you that the chicken’s body responds to the firings of

the autonomic nervous system. I think the chicken is just frightened by the sharp-

ness of its own beak.

While the chicken garners little association with the sacred, this animal

occupies a large and important, if often under-appreciated, place in our food

supply. Humans had already begun keeping these birds in large numbers several

thousand years ago. The ancient Egyptians are reported to have kept chickens,

incubating eggs in heated rooms—at some estimates, between 10,000 and

15,000 eggs at a time (see Smith & Daniel, 1975, p. 14). Since that time, the

chicken has gone through many iterations and been modified to service huge

urban populations, occupying a vital place in human organization, while they

themselves have occupied less and less space (and, it turns out, time). In the

United States today, a lone chicken in industry can produce close to two dozen

eggs a month—industry-wide that number is seven billion [see US Egg &

Poultry Association (2008) for up-to-date numbers]. For the 1.2 billion eggs

that are hatched, those chicks will grow large and fat enough to slaughter in

just over a month (and hopes remain high that the time will be reduced by half

in the near future).5 In fact, most commercial producers never see their chickens

mature into adulthood, harvesting them while still juveniles (see Roberts, 2008).

The process of producing the large, fleshy bird we buy now emerged in part

from a contest in the middle of the last century sponsored by the A&P food

store called the ‘Chicken of Tomorrow’ (Horowitz, 2004; see also Boyd, 2001).

This contest pitted chicken producers against an ideal archetype of chicken,

where entrants were judged in terms of meat yield and body proportionality,

among other variables. The goal was to create a ‘better’ meat-type chicken that

would be more efficient to produce and yield a larger quantity of meat. In a

film about that contest produced in 1948, the viewer is presented with a side-

by-side comparison of the current chicken carcass and the ideal model molded

wax—a model, I should note, that looks a lot like the chickens one finds in the

supermarket today.6

Importantly, this transformation has been aided through the use of antibiotics

and hormones, enabling chicken bodies to spend less time fighting illness and

more time growing muscle—so much muscle, in fact, that the chickens’ circulatory

and skeletal systems struggle to support them (Roberts, 2008; see also Langston,

2008). Judged by consumer standards, however, this process of chicken develop-

ment has been successful, if by success we consider the reality that the US

poultry industry, in a month, brings three billion more pounds of chicken flesh to

the mouths of Americans in one form or another. That’s a lot of Egg McMuffins

and Kentucky Fried Chicken (‘KFC’) Value Buckets. These chickens are efficient

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protein producing cogs in our industrialized food machine. Left to themselves,

of course, chickens would likely not be so ‘productive’. They probably wouldn’t

live in cages either. But would leaving them alone be enough to consider them

natural?

This modern industrialized food production system is precisely what positioned

me to desire raising chickens in the first place, even while making it materially

possible. The modern food industry can produce more food than people need

while isolating us from those production processes and the lives that are sacrificed

for that bounty. This system swallows up animals and humans: the flesh plays the

part of the raw material while workers represent the cogs that produce and process

that material.

As Striffler (2005) points out, the industrial food system that grew around the

chicken is a particular case in point. What had been a way for rural homesteads

to produce supplemental protein and income in the early part of the twentieth

century in the US, chicken raising became a largely consolidated, vertically inte-

grated system controlling all parts of the chicken lifecycle by the late 1980s. And

these aspects of the lifecycle, as Striffler attests, made uniform not just the chicken

body, but the actions and activities of the humans who interacted with them in

growing, hauling, and processing the birds. For example, growers would contract

with companies who promised to buy chickens, but only if those birds were

purchased from particular hatcheries, fed particular feed on particular schedules,

grown to particular specifications and harvested at particular times. Meanwhile,

consumers came to know chicken less as a whole bird, and more as a value-

added, processed component of tenders, nuggets, and patties (see also Horowitz,

2006). As the farm became the factory, we were lifted from the tyranny of

necessity and shoved into the alienation from that which we eat.

Compared to the producers ‘employed’ in factories, one might say that my

chicken lived a much more humble and natural life. Barring the stock pot, she

will live for between four and six years. She scratches for bugs, eats grass, rolls

in the dirt, and pecks at my feet. She is less prone to the diseases prevalent in

mass habitation, but more prone to being eaten by foxes. I had originally presumed

this naturalness, motivating me to raise chickens in the first place. Because of

modern food production practices, and my isolation from them, I had taken to

practicing a kind of vegetarianism. I was not against the consumption of flesh. I

just thought that we shouldn’t kill animals twice—taking their life along with

their living. I would eat animals if I knew where they came from and how they

lived. Generally. Questions persist for me as to how strongly and meaningfully

the distinction holds, but it’s where I found myself. I wanted chickens precisely

so they would live the life they wanted, and I could watch them do it. When I

ate their eggs, and later them, I could at least have had the experience of caring

for, and killing, that which fed me. My living conditions and my lifestyle—my

material self—placed me in a position to do just that. So I found myself with

chickens.

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The naturalness of these specific chickens, however, is not self-evident. In order

to get them, I went to a local farm where they sold chickens in manageable

numbers (one can order them online, but in clutches no smaller than 25). I was

interested in getting hens, primarily (though not exclusively) for the eggs.

Beyond the hen issue, however, modern chickens are not typically designated

as both edible and useful for egg production. One can choose either a layer (for

eggs) or a broiler (for meat)—the chicken’s name and fate all rolled into one.

Emphasizing eggs, I chose the layers.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to know for certain that I was picking hens instead

of roosters. It is difficult to tell if a chick will be a rooster or a hen with just a casual

glance. Having one or more ‘unproductive’ roosters would be an annoyance for

me, as well as for chicken-raisers within city limits forbidding animals that

crow. For commercial growers tending flocks in the thousands with carefully cali-

brated feed schedules, egg quotas, and slim profit margins, the prospect of not

knowing which birds were male or female could be catastrophic. There are two

common methods of determining sex: venting and feathering. Venting involves

peering carefully at the sex organs of the chick inside the body—a delicate pro-

cedure that requires a great deal of skill and concentration.7 A quicker, biological

solution was found through selective breeding, a form of feathering which

involves identifying external characteristics, like feather color, specific to sex.

My chickens were Red Star Sex-linked. All the hens were red.

Thus, in making my choice of chicken type and in specifically acquiring these

birds, I exposed another one of the ironies in my contemporary chicken raising.

That is, I sought to raise chickens to avoid chicken products generated through

birds bred, grown, and processed through industrialized systems. Yet my own

knowledge and acquisition of the small flock were enabled by a physiology engin-

eered to service the divisions of labor and goals of efficiency required by those

self-same systems—egg layers easily identified through the color of their feathers.

In a very real way, I hadn’t circumvented the system, present as it was in the very

body of the chicken. Instead, I had become an adjunct to that system, simply

taking over a more immediate responsibility. But I was responsible, nonetheless,

to a being whose nature has been shaped to fit within certain technological con-

straints. A nature that is shaped through technology, however, is not a nature

that is controlled by technology.

Control and Responsibility

With regard to our responsibility to non-human animals generally, the notion of

stewardship has been well established through time. From less bellicose interpret-

ations of Genesis, to St. Francis of Assisi, to Aldo Leopold, humans have been

making efforts to articulate a form of benevolent caretaking with the natural

world. Whether because God would have it so, or because it is a form of enlightened

self-interest, these views suggest that care of the natural world is a good thing.

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But what happens when we shape non-human nature to suit us, rather than suit

itself? It’s possible that early humans treated early domesticated animals with

care, empathy, and even reverence. Regardless of the intent, however, we have

modified them to fit, even to enable, certain forms of human civilization. These

animals live in an ecology, but a highly managed, industrialized one. We’ve

altered all chickens, regardless of where they reside—their breed selected over

generations to increase egg production, their lifestyle and physiology conducive

to easy pickins. By us, by everything. We have simplified the chicken so that it

does one thing well—produce protein—at the expense of all other things, such

as being reduced ‘more completely to an element in egg [and meat] production’

(Smith & Daniel, 1975, p. 296). In this sense, we have created this technology

to fit our needs, and thus we owe particular diligence to protect our creation.

Thus, the chicken’s death in this case, and the chicken itself, is not natural, but

a human construct demanding human oversight. This is so at least in terms of

the chicken-producing system, of which the individual animal is simply a part.

Even if my chicken is a technology, she is still also an animal. A machinimal, if

you like, an animal altered both within a technological system and as a technologi-

cal system. While some might wish to claim that the most profound change has

been from natural to technological, from animal to machine, we must not forget

the nature that resides within the chicken. Nor must we take the stance that

nature altered by design no longer counts as nature. Too often arguments about

environmental stewardship and duty (which tend to leave out domesticated

animals) operate from a position of purity. Natural is good; artifice is bad. Thus

domesticated chickens, especially chickens in factories, deserve less consideration

than truly natural, wild animals. But this stance imposes a troubling dichotomy. To

say that we can either leave nature alone or despoil it results in treating nature as a

collectible. Much of the nature we encounter and rely upon every day merely finds

expression in a simplified state; nature perseveres even within our most elaborate

contrivances. We should not be asking the question whether the chicken is natural

or artificial. No, the real question we should ask, with domesticated chickens as

with all of technology, is what definition of nature remains.

‘Fixing’ the Problems of Technology with More Technology

At some point, my chicken (I actually called her ‘chicken’) decided that she did

not want to sleep in the structure built for that purpose. Perhaps she got

spooked by some less subtle predator, perhaps she just realized that it wasn’t

safe in that place. For whatever reason, she sought alternate accommodations.

Chickens, famously, don’t fly. Their wings cannot generally support their bulk.

But a more svelte, free-range chicken can manage a pretty high wing-assisted

jump. My chicken had to clear six and a half feet. From a still position, she

jumps, flaps, and squawks her way up onto the lower branch of the tree in the

front yard. She then finds a suitable point to jump onto the next limb, up and

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up, until she finds the perch on which she feels the most comfortable. She would

spend the night there. And she would descend to the earth from there, at least once

by way of my scalp.

My domesticated chicken, for all her characteristics that have been changed and

ordered, still had other natural qualities that I had not accounted for. Her techno-

logical status had deluded me into thinking her actions were predictable and con-

trollable. I was wrong. She would sleep in the ‘wrong’ place, lay eggs in the

‘wrong’ place (she was one of those promiscuous chickens), do things that I

never expected. Human intervention with her make-up made the chicken some-

what predictable, but never totally so. In this sense, technologies (here in the

guise of the chicken body) simply represent and incorporate nature in specific

ways. Each technological system we produce and use and discard contains

within it a definition of nature. These definitions assume nature to be a certain

way, and not others. All other aspects may be ignored or forgotten. But they do

not go away. When these features do make themselves manifest, they return as

strangers—as aberrations, as surprises, as threats. Things that need to be overcome

to ensure the smooth functioning of the system—the flawed assumption being that

the solution to technology (not incorporating enough nature) is technology (incor-

porating more nature). The tighter we try to exert control, however, the more

things tend to slip away.

Here the tale of coccidiosis as told by Smith and Daniel (1975) is illustrative in

chicken terms. Coccidiosis is a naturally occurring intestinal parasite that can

cause what intestinal parasites are known to cause in all manner of animals. For

chicken producers looking for maximal and consistent yield, sick birds are disrup-

tions to the stability of that system. The solution to this so-labeled problem

involved wire floors that limited the birds’ exposure to the parasite found in

fecal matter. Prior to this innovation, a chick might get sick and then develop

an immunity to coccidiosis early on. Paradoxically, birds became more prone to

this illness as adults due to reduced early exposure, which in turn required

increased use of antibiotics, which in turn weakened the birds’ overall immune

systems, leading to greater constraints on outside workers for fear that they

would bring in external pathogens. These hybridized, isolated birds became

more susceptible to disease, to the extent that what used to be home (the world

outside the factory) had become a threat.

A more current example can be found in the case of avian flu. Instead of focus-

ing on the disease, I want to focus on how the threat is incorporated by the existing

poultry production structure, which is happening in two rather telling ways. On the

one hand, large poultry producers exclaim the existence of this flu virus as vindi-

cation for the current practice. A spokesperson for Tyson Foods Inc., recently

touted the relative safety of enclosed spaces as opposed to more ‘free-range’

growing methods (see Tyson Foods, 2005). On the other hand, the problem of

avian flu has been reinterpreted as a weakness of the chicken—something that

can be genetically engineered out of the population (see Henderson, 2005).

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Thus isolating the problem in the ‘nature’ of the chicken, and not in the technology

that mediates it. In both cases, the status quo of the system’s organization remains

untouched, ensuring that chickens will be produced and available as expected.8

To work as intended, technologies depend upon a set of givens, a set of con-

stants, a stable natural world. This stability, or at least presumption of stability,

restricts how nature can find sanctioned expression; at the same time it promotes

other technological interventions, like the use of antibiotics and growth hormone,

that regulate the health and growth of an animal within a particularized environ-

ment. This idea of a stable and limited nature is built into our technologies. In

turn, technologies enforce that definition back on nature. As noted earlier, each

technology anticipates a set of relations, a user, a setting.

In the case of the chicken, both producers and consumers have sought out

particular natural qualities—egg laying ability, relative docility, and fleshiness,

for example—and coveted them, isolated them, magnified them for particular pur-

poses. In so doing, we modified this animal into something that is easily preyed

upon by all manner of creatures and more susceptible to disease. Because of

this quality, other predators and organisms reemerge in this system—this technol-

ogy of domesticated chicken production—not as agents of ecological balance or

robustness, but as threats to economic investment and stable functioning. These

natural characters must be excised for the system to function in its current

form. The system itself does not become unnatural. Instead, the nature within

the chicken just becomes less robust, more one-dimensional. These animals

become simply ‘a protein machine with flaws’, to quote Michael Pollan (2006,

p. 219). Other natural qualities, like desires for space, for pecking orders, which

have been ignored in the breeding process but which remain (the animal part of

the machinimal), must also be accounted for—through cauterizing beaks,

through forced molting—to maximize the stability of the system. Thus, in this

relationship, humans augment and seek to stabilize some aspects of nature,

while ignoring or attacking others which threaten that particular definition of

stability. And we do so within the technocratic logic of the system itself, offering

technological patches to the social and ethical problems of technological design

(see Rosner, 2004).

Chickens form a part of a presumed, stable food production system that enables

us to go about doing other things, to make other aspects of life meaningful, without

having to think about whether food will be available. As Gene Kahn, the founder

of Cascadian Farm, told Michael Pollan (2006), ‘“This is just lunch for most

people. Just lunch. We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but

it’s just lunch”’ (p. 153). Therein lies the rub. Talk of removing chickens from

the processes which deny certain natural characteristics is itself a threat to

many things that take those processes as given, as stable—economies, lifestyles,

identities. If our protein supply was to become less cheap, less abundant, or less

reliable then aspects of our own lives would have to adapt. The slow food move-

ment merits mention here, as it ties together an awareness of food production and

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locality with a sense of identity and an articulation of values (Petrini, 2006). For

those who see food as a necessary means for other aspects of life, however, or for

those who, to quote Marge Simpson, ‘can’t afford to shop at a store that has a

philosophy’ (Groening et al., 2005), the disruption of the current agricultural

system would be seen as a burden rather than a possibility. Thus, as our lives

become more entwined with technological systems and as we become more

machinimal-like, the more nature will be required to be one way and not others,

the more it will become impossible for chickens to live as mine does, and the

more surprises will come to be seen exclusively as threats. As Hannah Arendt

(1958) once wrote in another context, the problem is not that it’s false, but that

it’s becoming true.

My original choice to raise chickens was motivated by a desire to escape, or at

least mitigate, the ethical problems I associated with industrialized food pro-

duction systems. But my own actions were not simply better by default, and

were not simply closer to nature. Instead, they opened up new ethical questions

and responsibilities about how nature should find expression within the body of

the chicken and the systems that attempt to keep that body safe—at least long

enough to eat. With regard to technological systems, the ethical questions that

emerge, then, do not revolve around deciding whether one wants nature or tech-

nology, but rather how much of nature, and how variable a nature, our technol-

ogies should accommodate or allow expression. My chicken is not more

natural, but rather her natural elements are allowed more expression in the

system that surrounds her life, both happy and sad. Understanding the nature in

technology does not dismiss ethical questions under the guise of technological

sin, but rather makes the questions that much more relevant. The choice is not

between technology and nature, but in the best way to have both.

Playing Chicken, or a Solution that Doesn’t Really Solve Anything

On one of the kitchen cabinets, there’s a picture I drew of a chicken behind bars,

bearing the caption ‘Free the chicken!’ (see Figure 1). It was meant as a subtle

reminder to my wife to let the chicken out in the morning. I had finally taken

the hint (one live chicken living in a tree, seven dead ones not) and built a

smaller, more secure house to protect the chicken from predators, wind, and

rain. The chicken was now safer, but less free; she depended upon one of us to

lock her in at night and let her out in the morning. Since she gets up at sunrise,

that’s awfully early. On weekdays, I don’t have to do it. My wife’s up anyway.

I sleep in. On weekends, I have to set the alarm.

Would that it were that easy all around. Free all chickens and get more sleep.

Unfortunately, the prospect of loosing billions of chickens worldwide to live

like my chicken doesn’t seem plausible. Visions of roving bands of cocks and

hens, taking over parks, leaving eggs everywhere, and promoting promiscuity

do not bring me pause. No, part of the issue revolves around survivability. The

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reason I’m not that preoccupied with my chickens’ wanderings (or deaths) results

from my lack of need for them. Not having to buy eggs from a store is a conven-

ience, even a luxury, not a necessity. My rhetorical positioning is made possible by

a firm material foundation itself made possible in part and ironically by the very

industrial practices I decry. Thus, there is a very real difference between contem-

plating my relationship with a chicken because I am hungry versus because I am

full. If I required those eggs to survive (as my primary source of protein, as my

primary source of income) I would be much more conscious, and restrictive, of

where my chicken goes, what she eats, what threatens her. I have a friend

whose ability to earn a living is contingent on the function of his car. As such,

he knows a lot more about how well his car functions at any given time than I

do. The chicken is not an automobile. But in our society, it has a similar function.

We don’t ride in it, but we depend upon this restricted chicken, and food pro-

duction practices more generally, to live the way we do.

As I look at chickens, then, I see that complex interplay of nature and technol-

ogy humans help to orchestrate. I see a being that reflects the nature of technology

inscribed in a body that is also part of a larger system—overseen by large, verti-

cally integrated companies, or by me. Either way, nature is not absent. Nature is

Figure 1. A reminder to let the chicken out. Credit: Wyatt Galusky.

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understood through boundaries—inside and outside, right and wrong. And as I live

with chickens, I see myself. I am embedded within those self-same systems, strug-

gling to understand nature beyond utility, but knowing that I require nature to be

particular ways, so that I myself can be secure enough to seek out that understand-

ing and try to share it with others. This essay acknowledges that embodiment in a

way that does not sacrifice our normative urges on the altar of complexity and

complicity.

Understanding the embeddedness of chickens, of technologies, within our

society and within ourselves, we can begin to face the questions that will

mediate between the nature that is possible and the nature that is (technologically)

necessary. Can we re-envision threats as possibilities, can we make room for more

of nature in our technology? What would we be willing to give up? It will have to

be something. It’s not a question of asserting control or no control, of simplifying

nature or not simplifying nature, but rather doing justice to all elements of the

mediated relationship. The task of re-visioning the relationship between technol-

ogy and nature must be one of both/and rather than either/or. In thinking through

the interconnectedness of the two, we might be able to articulate systems that

permit a more dynamic nature, or which might indulge more of nature’s charac-

teristics. We would have to allow for, and perhaps even cherish, surprise.

Donna Haraway (2008) puts it this way:

Once again we are in a know of species co-shaping one another in layers of

reciprocating complexity all the way down. Response and respect are poss-

ible only in these knots with actual animals and people looking back at each

other, sticky with all their muddled histories. Appreciation of complexity is,

of course, invited. But more is required too. Figuring out what that more

might be is the work of situated companion species. It is a question of

cosmopolitics, of learning to be ‘polite’ in responsible relation to always

asymmetrical living and dying and nurturing and killing (p. 42).

In the meantime, however, outside of a strong push toward greater politeness

and more complicated engagement with the animals that make our lives possible,

what does this trend toward greater simplification bode for humans? What does the

story of the chicken say about the human experiment, besides an increasing sys-

temic aversion to surprises? Humans, according to Hacking (1999) are interactive

kinds, prone to adapting to and modifying the concepts and categories meant to

define us. But such interactivity does not make humans immune to the technol-

ogies we use on other forms of nature. After all, we, materially at least, are

natural too and subject to the same kind of evolutionary and domestication press-

ures (see Russell, 2003).

In fact, the life cycle and developmental history of the chicken—from a more

robust but tenuous relationship between specific farmer and specific chicken and

specific environment, through to the sterile creation of embryonic protein—can

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also be read as an allegory of modern human life. The requirements of the labora-

tory—control, purity—continue their encroachments into the basic life of the

chicken—creating a uniformity in living conditions, breed, feedstock, genotype,

through a dialogue between the natural inclinations of the physical chicken and

the social demands of (certain) humans. The animal’s natural inclinations are

honed, simplified, and amplified to express an increasingly narrow phenotype.

This train of development has already made its next logical step: forgoing the

animal altogether to produce meat muscle protein itself, in vitro (see Edelman

et al., 2004). Controls of diet, environment, and activity notwithstanding, new

techniques seek to isolate desirable protein/fat/nutrient combinations based

upon current human dietary ideals.

As a consequence of deliberating about my night job (raising chickens) based

on the thinking and teaching I do during my day job (on the philosophy of tech-

nology and the environment), the question I want to ask is, what kind of human is

anticipated by this technology? Perhaps a human more accustomed to increasingly

controlled environments, increasingly engineered food, increasing intervention on

ideal body types via surgery and genetic alteration, increasing reliance on chemi-

cal controls of disease and mood, which in turn create a greater dependence on

those systems that provide such necessities. Perhaps the domesticated chicken

suggests a harbinger of things to come for humans who themselves seek to

fully control their diet, their environment, and their stimulation. To live in a tech-

nologically mediated world where surprise is only bad.

Humans, it appears, are playing chicken.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Ben Cohen and Chris Henke for reading early and sub-

sequent drafts of this essay, and helping to put it into its current shape. He would

also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the contributors to this issue for

their helpful suggestions. The author would like to thank Kelly Ann Nugent for

her editorial and personal guidance. Finally, he would like to thank chicken

(alas, posthumously) for the inspiration to pursue this line of thought. Early

drafts were presented as talks at the 2005 annual meeting of the Society for the

Social Studies of Science, at Colgate University, and at Hamilton College.

Notes

1On anthropological takes on domestication, see for example Clutton-Brock (1989), and Cassidy

and Mullin (2007). Historically, see Kalof (2007) for a broad sweep of animals within human

culture; Anderson (2004) for uses of domesticated animals as tools of colonization; Pauly

(2007) on the cultivation of plant species; and Horowitz (2006) on animals as meat commod-

ities. In sociology, see Tanaka and Busch (2003) on the standardization of agricultural practices.

In philosophy, see Wolfe (2003) for a collection of essays on human relationships to animals.

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2For earlier work on the Internet as a specific kind of mediating tool, see Galusky (2003, 2004).

More recent research involves agricultural practice and rural alternative energy development in

upstate New York.3Those terms are employed, in order, by Latour (2005), Haraway (2003) and Kant (1958).4For more on humans as agents of evolutionary change, see Russell (2004).5According to Bugos (1992), the egg laying capacity of chickens has nearly tripled in just over 50

years, from an average of 93 per year in 1930, to an astounding 246 per year in 1983. The same

increase in efficiency can be found in broilers, from an average of 3.8 pounds in 112 days in

1928, to an average of 4.1 pounds in 43 days in 1990. These efficiencies also hold true for

plants, going from five acres to half an acre needed to feed a single person over a year (see

Pew Commission, 2008).6More so than you might think—as the winner of the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, a Cornish–

New Hampshire crossbreed, did not actually get adopted as the industry standard. That role

went to the runner up, a Plymouth Rock chicken, because it had white feathers, instead of

the winner’s red, which would be harder to see if a few remained after plucking (see Horowitz,

2004).7Mistakes can still be made. Some breeders simply offer a replacement guarantee—if your chick

turns out to be a rooster, you can return it for a hen.8Though this is not universal, as poultry producers in Loue, France, have taken to promoting their

free range chickens through the slogan ‘Un bon poulet est un poulet libre’, in part because they

have created a niche market for ‘free’ chickens which is now threatened by emerging external

threats (Sciolino, 2006).

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