History of Humans Eating Chicken and Chicken Sandwiches

Sharky's NSB just rolled out an $11 Lunch Chicken Sandwich (same no-hormone 6oz breast as their regular sandwich, just fewer add-ons to hit that lower price point, served with Cajun chips on a Martin's potato roll). 

 Humans figure out chickens are delicious

Chickens actually come from wild junglefowl in Southeast Asia, and despite the old story that they were domesticated 8,000+ years ago, a 2022 study says it really happened around 1500 BCE in Thailand — and it was rice farming that drew the birds in, not people wanting to eat them. In fact chickens were kept as ornamental and ritual animals for centuries before anyone regularly ate them; the shift to eating chicken as meat shows up in the archaeological record around 400-200 BCE in Israel, and even then it took hundreds of years to catch on in places like England.

The "chicken breast as prized cut" thing is surprisingly recent too. Chicken used to be expensive and roasted whole — Hoover's "chicken in every pot" was an aspirational campaign line in 1928, not a description of reality. WWII rationing pushed chicken as the patriotic substitute for beef and pork, then a 1946 breeding contest called "Chicken of Tomorrow" literally created the modern broiler chicken by selecting for meat yield, and 1960s inspection rules made it possible to buy cuts instead of whole birds. Add the low-fat health craze of the 80s and you get the boneless skinless breast dominance we know today (though thighs have been clawing back popularity the last few years).

Fried chicken itself is a fusion dish — Scottish immigrants brought deep-frying-in-fat technique, West African cooking brought the seasoning and batter tradition, and the two came together largely through enslaved African Americans in the South, since chickens were about the only livestock they were allowed to raise. That combo became the fried chicken we know, spreading from special-occasion food into an everyday staple and eventually into chains like KFC and Popeyes.

Cheers, Sharky