Some Fancy Poultry

166 A - Version 2

This old postcard just goes to show that people have been fooling around with photos a hundred years prior to the invention of Photoshop.

This postcard is a spoof on how farmers used to take poultry to market. Live chickens would be loaded up into crates and packed into a wagon, which would then all be weighed on on a scale. The chickens would then be unloaded and the wagon weighed again. Payment to the farmer (or poultry dealer) was based on the difference. This method was certainly easier than weighing each chicken individually, although it wasn’t as accurate. The man in the front here is fiddling with the scale’s weights.

Comments:

  1. Antique photo shop!

    (and, hey! I just discovered our kids are on the same team!)

  2. I went looking for a chicken to cook and eat and spotted some chicken wings that were huge. They looked like they belonged to a chicken nephilim. I have seen chicken breasts in the store larger than a turkey breast. I wonder what those birds are being fed and what eating them may be doing to us. I remember when chickens were relatively small and were very tasty. I also remember when they did not have feathers still attached and they were not full of bruises.

    • Those supermarket chickens are a specialized breed, designed to grow very fast, specifically in the breast area. They go to slaughter at between 8 and 10 weeks of age. They have almost no flavor (soup made from a typical CornishX is pallid.) Feeding them hormones is illegal, but most are on a diet laced with antibiotics.