Tastes Like Chicken

The world has many great monuments to human ambition: the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower. And then, in the hills of the Philippines, there is a giant chicken-shaped building that doubles as a hotel. It is not a pyramid. It is not a wonder of the world. But it is - against all logic - proof that when humanity runs out of gods to worship, it will build shrines to poultry instead.

We have, after all, been chasing chickens for thousands of years. Once domesticated, they became food, sacrifice, insult, entertainment, mascot, and even battlefield advisor (ask the Romans, who consulted sacred chickens before going to war). The bird itself has been almost incidental to the mania. It isn’t that chickens matter so much; it’s that we insist on making them matter.

Which is why you can find them everywhere. They peer down from fast-food billboards, they flap through children’s cartoons, they’re immortalized in rubber, in dance crazes, snack crackers, even in tax law. No one really knows why this particular bird was chosen for the cultural spotlight - why not ducks, or goats, or some sleek, more dignified species? But chickens, humble as they are, have a way of showing up in the strangest corners of civilization.

Now this is not a story about live chickens - though you’ll find feathers scattered here and there. This is about the strange afterlife of the chicken: the monuments we build in its shape, the jokes we can’t stop telling about it, the foods we flavor like it, the costumes we wear in its honor. It’s about everything chicken, except the actual bird. Aside from a little opening background. So, grab a leg or a thigh and let’s get started.

Chicken Fact #1 - Chickens have 767 taste buds (humans have between 2,000 and 10,000), mostly located on the roof of the mouth. They can’t taste sweetness and don’t like the taste of bitterness. They can taste saltiness and are sensitive to sour foods too.

A Bit of Background

Before it was a bucket meal, the chicken was a jungle fowl roaming Southeast Asia, minding its own prehistoric business. Then humans appeared and we dragged the bird out of the trees, domesticated it, and promptly began treating it as both deity and dinner. From this fowl lineage - the red junglefowl of India, mostly - emerged the modern chicken, a creature caught somewhere between evolutionary success story and the butt of a permanent joke. It is, by numbers alone, one of the most populous vertebrates on Earth. If survival is measured in ubiquity, the chicken has already won.

It also invented office politics long before the office. Chickens live by something called the pecking order, a literal system of dominance where higher-ranking birds peck those beneath them, and so on down the ladder of misery. It’s not so different from human hierarchies, except chickens never pretend theirs is about “collaboration” or “team synergy.” They simply peck the hell out of each other until everyone knows their place. Refreshingly honest, if a little violent.

Chickens are also connoisseurs of the spa treatment, though theirs involves rolling in dirt. Dust bathing may not sound very luxurious, but it’s an effective way to clean feathers and kill parasites. Watching a hen throw herself into a patch of earth, writhing with apparent ecstasy, you realize the chicken might actually be onto something. Humans pay absurd amounts of money for mud wraps and exfoliation treatments, while chickens get theirs for free in the backyard.

And while they may not write sonnets, roosters perform a ritual known as tidbitting: a sort of clucking dance routine meant to impress hens. Combined with their surprisingly rich vocal repertoire - more than thirty distinct calls, some as nuanced as a wine list - chickens reveal themselves as highly social creatures. They see the world in color more vividly than humans, dream during REM sleep, and wake to a dawn they themselves announce with operatic absurdity. To call them “bird-brained” is less an insult than an act of projection. The chicken is far more complex than we like to admit - perhaps that’s why we keep covering it up with breadcrumbs.

Chicken Fact #2 - The heaviest, recorded egg ever laid by a chicken weighed 1 pound! For comparison, the average medium-sized chicken egg weighs about 1.75 ounces and the average goose egg weighs about 5 ounces. Keep in mind there are 16 ounces in a pound!

Structure and Art

If the chicken had any say in its legacy, it probably wouldn’t have asked to be immortalized in concrete and fiberglass. Yet across the globe, humans have repeatedly chosen the bird as architectural muse, sculptural subject, and roadside attraction. The Philippines boasts a massive chicken-shaped hotel where guests can quite literally sleep inside the carcass of their obsession.

In Indonesia, there is the so-called “Chicken Church,” a half-finished vaguely poultry-shaped building originally meant to resemble a dove.

Faith has always leaned toward mystery, but it’s hard not to suspect a certain poultry envy at work here.

America, never to be outdone in matters of kitsch, also has its altars. In Marietta, Georgia, there’s the “Big Chicken” - a 56-foot-tall red steel rooster perched atop a KFC. It features motorized eyes and a beak that opens and closes, as if to remind passing motorists that their dinner is watching them.

Los Angeles contributes the “Chicken Boy,” a fiberglass statue of a man with a chicken’s head holding a bucket of fried chicken in what can only be described as a masterpiece of unintentional cannibalism.

Locals call him the “Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles,” which is less an honor and more a confession of urban despair.

Then there are the smaller, more portable incarnations. The rubber chicken, once a staple of slapstick comedy, now dangles from college dorm ceilings and bar rafters, its very existence an ongoing inside joke no one quite remembers. There’s even a museum dedicated to the rubber chicken in Seattle, Washington. Somewhere along the way, the rubber chicken graduated from prop to symbol: the featherless ambassador of human absurdity.

Taken together, these monuments reveal less about the chicken than about ourselves: that humanity, left to its own devices, cannot resist the urge to monumentalize the ridiculous. We could have built statues to eagles, lions, or dolphins - creatures that at least suggest nobility. Instead, we chose the barnyard’s most ridiculous resident and gave it the dignity of steel, plaster, and public funding. If culture is the story a species tells about itself, then future archaeologists may puzzle over these edifices of monumental poultry, debating whether humanity worshipped the chicken or merely mocked it. The truth, of course, is both.

Chicken Fact #3 – Most hens lay eggs for 3-4 days, then skip a day. The University of Missouri created a strain of super-layers. One hen from that strain laid 371 eggs in 364 days – over an egg a day. And another from the same strain laid an egg a day for 488 days straight.

Food

If chickens were merely a curiosity of nature, their story might have ended in the jungle. Instead, we ate them - grilled, fried, roasted, butter-basted, skewered, shredded, deep-fried beyond recognition, but we didn’t stop there. Entire cuisines, national identities, and late-night cravings have been built on the back of a bird that, when cooked, tastes reassuringly like itself - plain, adaptable, a culinary blank canvas. It’s mild enough to be anything, cheap enough to be everywhere, and forgiving enough to survive every culinary experiment ever forced upon it.  Humanity has elevated chicken from a protein source into a cultural fixation, endlessly reinvented until it appears on plates as comfort food, carnival food, health food, and, occasionally, even as dessert.

Consider the American oddity of chicken and waffles.

A marriage of sweet and savory that somehow became gospel. Part Southern tradition, part diner invention, wholly implausible. Sweet syrup sliding into salty fried skin should by rights be a mistake, yet it’s a glorious one, like pairing pancakes with bourbon or opera with beer. Elsewhere, South Korea has transformed fried chicken into an entire lifestyle through chimaek: the ritual coupling of crispy poultry and cold beer. To speak of Korean chicken is to speak of community, of neon-lit nights, of entire streets devoted to deep fryers.

Other nations might revere wine or cheese; Korea reveres the crackle of chicken skin under a pint of lager.

Of course, not all chicken is chicken. There exists a parallel world of “chicken-flavored” artifacts. Lay’s sells potato chips “flavored” like roast chicken, though nothing about them has ever been near a bird.

Ramen companies market chicken broth packets that taste more like salt and msg with a passing acquaintance to poultry. Then there is a brand of chicken-flavored crackers, “Chicken in a Biskit,” whose resemblance to poultry is, at best, metaphorical.

These products suggest that chicken has transcended the need for its own flesh. The idea of chicken is now enough.

Even candy gets involved. Chocolate hens hatch around Easter, and marshmallow chicks - “Peeps” - are eaten by children who would otherwise only encounter the bird itself in nugget form.

Chicken, in these incarnations, is not sustenance but symbol: sugary effigies of a bird too deeply ingrained in human imagination to leave us alone, even in the candy aisle. That is the true triumph of the gallus domesticus - not survival, not domestication, but the ability to be consumed in spirit long after the meat is gone.

Chicken Fact #4 - A light weight chicken releases about 120 pounds of droppings per year, a heavy breed averages 180 pounds; and chickens poop even when they’re asleep.

Pop-Culture Icons

To really understand a civilization, one should also study its jokes, and no animal has been conscripted into humor more faithfully than the chicken. In place of temples, it has been enshrined in cartoons; in place of scripture, its gospel is repeated as punchline. If lions symbolize courage and doves symbolize peace, the chicken has come to symbolize the absurd. It is, in many ways, the only barnyard animal to achieve true celebrity status.

Take Foghorn Leghorn, the Southern rooster with the bombast of a filibustering senator. He is loud, self-important, endlessly talkative - less farm animal than political caricature. A reminder that Americans have always been suspicious of windbags.

Or Camilla, the chicken who appears as Gonzo’s long-suffering companion in The Muppets, proof that even puppet chickens can play the straight man.

Then there’s Chicken Boo, a recurring character in Animaniacs whose only joke is that he’s a chicken poorly disguised as a man - and yet somehow everyone is fooled. It says less about chickens and more about human gullibility.

The chicken has also become comedy’s most reliable prop. We’ve talked earlier about the rubber chicken, but it’s so iconic it deserves a second mention seeing as how it’s evolved into a totem of comedy itself. Nobody remembers why it’s funny; it just is.

Similarly, the “Funky Chicken” dance, where guests gyrate like hens having seizures, was hatched in the 1970s and continues to resurface – a choreography of deliberate indignity.

Add to this the immortal question and eternal anti-joke - “Why did the chicken cross the road?” - and you realize that the chicken is not simply present in humor; it is humor embodied.

Why chickens? Perhaps because they are so perfectly ridiculous: awkward gait, absurd wattles, a noise somewhere between crow and cough. Other animals are noble, sleek, or menacing; the chicken is inherently comic. Popular culture simply gave it a stage. And from that stage it refuses to leave, clucking and flapping through cartoons, sitcoms, jokes, and children’s parties, reminding us that sometimes the most enduring icons are the least dignified.

Chicken Fact #5 - Chickens are not dumb. They actually have a great memory and can distinguish between over 100 different faces of animals or people. They have been taught to do obstacle courses, come when called, distinguish between colors and numbers, and even learn skills by watching videos of other chickens.

Miscellaneous Oddities   

No survey of humanity’s chicken fixation would be complete without a look at some of the stranger relics - the objects and practices that resist tidy classification. If temples and cartoons suggest reverence, these oddities reveal obsession shading into the surreal. They are the fragments future archaeologists will struggle to interpret, holding up a rubber chicken to the light and wondering what kind of god demanded such offerings.

Let’s begin with the chicken suit, a costume as ubiquitous as it is undignified. At some point, it was decided that dressing as a giant chicken was the ultimate expression of humor, humiliation, or both.

Companies sent employees onto sidewalks in feathered costumes to sell sandwiches. Protesters adopted it as shorthand for cowardice. Fraternities discovered it made excellent punishment. The chicken suit is rarely flattering, never dignified, and always effective. Few animals have been forced to serve as mascot and insult simultaneously.

Even technology entered the ritual. Aerospace engineers, seeking to test the durability of airplane windshields, invented the “chicken gun” - a device that fires frozen birds at high velocity to simulate bird strikes.

It’s practical science, but hard not to imagine the indignity of the chicken - reduced to a ballistic tool, slammed into glass in the name of safety. Other animals contributed hides, bones, or labor to human progress; the chicken, apparently, volunteered for artillery duty.

Then there was “chicken-omics”. In the 1960s, a trade dispute between the United States and Europe over cheap American poultry birthed the “Chicken Tax.” Europe taxed U.S. chickens; Washington retaliated not by protecting its birds but by slapping tariffs on imported trucks.

The chicken faded from the quarrel, but the tariff remained for decades, reshaping the American auto industry. Pickup trucks, by a twist of poultry politics, became a protected species.

There are, of course, gentler relics. A 40-foot rubber chicken that floats through parades.

A board game called Chicken Cha Cha Cha that allows children to act out barnyard rivalries with cardboard feathers.

The video game Monkey Island enshrined the bird in “Ye Olde Rubber-Chicken-With-A-Pulley-in-the-Middle-Shoppe” a nonsense object that became legend simply because it was too absurd to forget.

Each example suggests that humanity, having stripped the bird of its feathers, meat, and dignity, felt compelled to reinvent it endlessly in plastic, cardboard, and code.

What we see in all this is not so much a portrait of the chicken but of ourselves. Confronted with a bird so unremarkable, we adorned it with costumes, weapons, toys, and jokes until it became a mirror for our own absurdity. The chicken, in this final form, is no longer animal, no longer meal, but a cultural reflex: a strange, enduring reminder that humans will turn almost anything into a spectacle - provided it clucks.

Chicken Fact #6 - Scientists have learned that chickens can be deceptive and cunning, they possess communication skills on par with those of some primates and that they use sophisticated signals to convey their intentions. When making decisions, the chicken takes into account its own prior experience and knowledge surrounding the situation. It can solve complex problems and empathizes with individuals that are in danger.

Tastes Like Chicken

The chicken is, by all measures, unremarkable. It doesn’t soar like the eagle, it doesn’t roar like the lion, it doesn’t even waddle with the comic dignity of a penguin. And yet, this plain, nervous bird has infiltrated not only our diets, but our architecture, our humor, and even our engineering laboratories. That is its evolutionary triumph: not majesty, but ubiquity.

But ubiquity has a price. The bird is no longer itself - it’s a commodity, an idea, a global default. We have made it into hotels, temples and toys, slogans and snacks, mascots and metaphors. Other animals fight for survival; the chicken doesn’t need to. It simply multiplies, then waits for us to do the rest - feeding it, breeding it, flavoring it, dressing up as it, launching its frozen body into airplane windshields. It has become the animal kingdom equivalent of elevator music.

The truth is, we like chickens precisely because they are absurd. They cluck, they peck, they strut without grace. They are everything humans fear being seen as: ridiculous, cowardly, laughable. So, we eat them, joke about them, build monuments to them, and in so doing, disguise the fact that we are laughing at ourselves. The chicken is the mask we put on to mock our own fragility.

Perhaps that’s the true legacy of the chicken - not as a bird, but as a mirror. In its anxious eyes, we see our own restless need to make meaning from the ordinary, to inflate the banal into something monumental. The chicken never asked for this role, but we handed it the crown of ubiquity anyway.

And maybe, in the end, there’s no deeper answer to why the chicken crossed the road - only the unsettling realization that we pushed it out there and have been following behind it ever since.

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