A Chicken Conspiracy Theory

Good news - the Chicken Wars monograph is now available in Hebrew! Click here to download it. The English edition is still available here.

While I was researching the Chicken Wars, there were some mysteries which came up with the Braekel enterprise. If the Braekel people truly believed that all regular chickens were not kosher, then why did they keep their efforts pretty much secret until this past summer? Why weren't they publicizing all along that there is a problem with regular chickens, and that people should try to obtain Braekels?

Another question is this: There are countless old breeds of chicken. Why did they pick the Braekel? In fact, of all the old breeds of chicken, the Braekel is somewhat problematic - in the 1970s, there were so few Braekels left in the world that other lines were bred into it. So it's not even a purebred line! Why was it picked to be the kosher chicken?

Here's an explanation that I was given. I can't reveal my sources, but they are very, very good.

It was Rav Shmuel Wosner who originally raised a concern with modern chickens, twenty years ago. He was the person responsible for the hunt to find a pure, traditional chicken. But, according to what I was told, he was always emphatic that if such a chicken were to be found, it should not be presented as the *only* kosher chicken; rather, it should be presented as a preferable alternative.

Now, there's a problem with engaging in such an enterprise, from a business perspective. Any heritage breed of chicken is much less economically viable than modern chickens, which were specifically developed to grow much fatter on much less food and in much less time than traditional chickens. So the only way to make any money off it is to charge a very high price for it, and to make sure that plenty of people are going to buy it. How do you do that? Well, you're going to have to control the only supply of such chickens, so that you can charge whatever you want.

But how do you control the only supply of kosher chickens? Well, you're going to have to make sure that the breed which you sell is the only one that you have proclaimed to be kosher, and it's going to have to be a very rare breed that nobody else can get their hands on.

Thus, in order to make money here, they had to wait until Rav Wosner passed away, then pick a very rare heritage breed - the Braekel - that nobody else would be able to obtain, and then wait further until they had raised enough to start marketing them with the sole monopoly, and then declare the Braekel to be the only kosher chicken.

If all this is true, then although the Braekel is indeed a kosher breed (albeit not superior to any other), it is supreme poetic justice that the majority of the charedi rabbinic establishment declared it not to be kosher at all. Unfortunately, many people suffered as a result, since the Braekel enterprise stirred up enough controversy that there are now many hundreds of families in Israel and New York who are not eating chicken at all. I am very much hoping that my monograph will encourage people to start thinking differently about all this.

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