It seems the main reason chicken was expensive was that it was seasonal and labor-intensive. Someone on reddit writes: > Chicken, and eggs, were until the mid-

It seems the main reason chicken was expensive was that it was seasonal and labor-intensive. Someone on reddit writes: > Chicken, and eggs, were until the mid-20th century, a seasonal food. Chicken more than a year old is very tough, requiring hours of roasting or boiling to get a fairly tasteless end result. Most chickens lay their eggs in the spring and summer, petering out over the year. Old recipe books will have different instructions for "December" versus "April" eggs, given the quality of the yolks, which didn't used to be the uniformly pale color that industrial eggs look like now. So when the eggs would hatch, the young males would be culled and eaten right away by households, but the variety of cuts were few and the market to sell chickens incidental. Let's fast forward to the twentieth century. Unlike cows and pigs, who are irregular but large, chickens resisted the assembly line innovations of industrial production because they were irregular and small, which means they needed lots and lots of labor to process them. (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o72to/how_did_chicken_beef_and_pork_become_the_three/ccqd3fu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o72to/how_d...)