All views expressed are that of the writer.

“You don’t eat chicken? But everybody eats chicken!” The college chef was horrified. I saw his point – for religious reasons, some don’t eat beef, others won’t touch pork, but chicken is surely neutral. Chicken seems a default – almost a conceptual culinary ground zero – in college catering. Curried chicken, chicken salad, chicken with rice, chicken jalfrezi, chicken with wild mushroom sauce. Chicken as background, anything else as foreground. But for me, it had stopped being neutral because I had come to know chickens personally and individually.

Since 2008 we have owned chickens – a flock of thirty or so hens, of whom Ginger was the most solitary. As the flock expanded, we noticed that Ginger kept finding ways to escape from her enclosure, making herself a secret lair in an abandoned coop, and using it to lay her eggs. She had fourteen of them stored up in a nest warm with down from her belly, each one soft and a sleek golden-brown. Because Ginger was a hybrid they would never hatch, so we took the eggs and ate them – I don’t think she ever forgave us. She wandered, searching for a place safe from us. For the rest of her life she escaped daily from the garden and set out determinedly for the nearest market town. What did she want? We kept having to improve the fencing; she could locate gaps far smaller than her own body and squirm through them. She wasn’t foraging; she went the same way every day, at her best speed, always sticking to the pavement. Once I met Ginger, I couldn’t think of chickens as skeletons carrying around useful protein.

This puts me at odds with the majority of eaters in the UK. Every day Britons consume 2.2 million chickens. Around a billion chickens every year. The country has 800 ‘megafarms’, of which the biggest can house more than a million chickens. Industrialised modern chicken farms allot each chicken less than 12 square inches; Ginger was not satisfied with having a whole acre of land.

The modern domestic chicken is descended from a jungle fowl, a territorial, ground-dwelling, non-migratory bird. Powerful short-range flyers, they roosted in trees to escape predators at night, but they were themselves omnivorous, and perhaps might look to us more like dinosaurs than fat, pillowy hens. Our own chickens, loving and affectionate to us, were capable of violence, too. When a rat tried to steal their corn, they hunted it down, killed it, and devoured it.

The Ancient Romans began to take chicken out of its habitat: no more jungles, but sacrificial altars. In the imperial Roman army, the worship of Mithras was the most popular religion, and cocks were sacrificed and eaten as part of his worship, because of their association with the dawn and that of Mithras with the sun. To eat a chicken is to eat light. How can anyone not want to eat the gold and white of chickens and eggs?

Later, the cock was recast as the capon, a castrated male chicken deliberately fattened by force-feeding. This was an early attempt to overcome the dryness of the roaming jungle fowl. It also offered a way to use male chickens. You had to pair fatty capon with sourness or spicing to make it interesting. One medieval recipe it stuffed with parsley, sage, hyssop, rosemary and thyme, coloured with saffron and placed in an earthenware crock, doused with wine and more herbs, the pot set on a charcoal fire, and then the capon extracted on a spike, and served with a sauce of raisins, wine, sugar and powdered ginger.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, a pallid new ideal was rising. A new French style of cooking emerged, associated with chefs like the cookbook writer La Varenne who extensively used butter, cream, and milk as the principal ingredients of his sauces, in place of acidity or spice. Food was served in small dainty portions rather than in huge spreads. When we speak chicken we often mean white meat, by which we mean the breast, or the supreme, as it is termed. Escoffier – the celebrated chef – gave dozens of recipes for chicken supremes. Most are called after English noble families or regions of France. Like mythical King Midas, we want to eat our gold, our money. Creamy chicken tastes of class. Its purity can ennoble and enrich.

This rarefied cut became the default. Pre-jointed chicken arose from intensive chicken farming, the creation of a Californian businessman called John Kimber. The old way for the chicken was a few years of egg laying, then into the pot, but in 1934, Kimber realised that it would be more profitable to rear the birds differently – a few weeks of misery, then into the abattoir. The result was also an enormous increase in the size of the breasts and in the fat content of their meat. Ironically, the low-fat content of chicken meat was one of the reasons that it was recommended by dieticians and health experts, but the new methods made chicken as fatty as lamb.

When rationing was lifted in 1954, the production of chickens for meat grew, taking over from the protein supremacy of eggs. Chicken breasts ousted chops, steak and sausages as the fast-cooking weekday meal. The white meat added a touch of luxury, but could withstand virtually any kind of sauce. This newest iteration of the bird was more democratic than the ornate recipes for capon or Escoffier’s rich sauces. Brits couldn’t get enough.

Thanks to demand and the new industrial farms, the price of poultry plummeted – in a decade it went from being the most expensive meat to the cheapest. The independent poultry trade disappeared. The largest company involved in chicken farming in Herefordshire is Avara Foods, which is half-owned by the American commodities giant Cargill and whose customers include Tesco. About 120 farms in the county send chickens to an Avara plant in Hereford, which processes two million each week. Chicken was never a given – it was a choice we’ve repeatedly made.

All this dents the meaning of chicken, nowadays a gold and white affordable staple that tastes of nothing. On every high street, fast food chicken providers are visible, with a variety of names that are not quite the same as Kentucky Fried Chicken. It is unusual to find a restaurant menu that does not contain chicken as an option. At my college, and despite my discomfort, we typically have chicken on offer at lunch on most weekdays. It feels like a given, like there never could have been any other way.

But what might have been if we hadn’t chosen this intensively and industrially raised chicken as our favourite meat? If more diverse kinds of meat were as common – venison, say – we might be eating less fat and fewer additives. We could still be living in the era of the pork chop. Maybe goat would be the basic protein unit of a ready meal. What about Kentucky Fried Pigeon? Maybe rabbit. A feast of grey squirrel would be much more strongly flavoured in itself than white breast meat – unless, that is, we decided to farm it too on an industrial scale. In food, nothing fails like success.