BIG CHICKEN: the Empire, Conspiracy, and Bird That Ate America

America eats more chicken than any other meat in the world, and almost none of it is an accident. This is the story of how a dish born in slavery's kitchens became a battlefield: bred into a bird whose skeleton can't keep pace with its own muscle, indicted in a federal courtroom where ten executives walked free while their companies quietly paid out over a billion dollars, and sold under a stereotype built by a 1915 film and a restaurant chain that operated under a racial slur for three decades. Drawing entirely from court records, DOJ filings, a landmark UK animal welfare ruling, and the published research of leading food historians, this investigation traces fried chicken from the plantation kitchens where enslaved cooks first shaped it, through the DOJ's collapsed price-fixing prosecution against Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride, and their rivals, into the genetic engineering of the modern broiler, and onto the chicken shops that now define entire neighborhoods on two continents. No trial ended in a conviction. Over a billion dollars changed hands anyway. This book asks who actually paid, and who never had a say at all. Before your next bucket of fried chicken, know exactly what's in it and what it took to get there. Get your copy today.