Unless you are eating breakfast, it’s likely that the plate in front of you contains chicken. Yet the ubiquity of chicken meat is recent, arising from technological developments in poultry rearing from the 1960s that significantly lowered the price of the golden bird. Why chicken? The meat is very nearly flavourless, especially when raised in the new way, which involves confining the animals so that muscles remain undeveloped. To be sure, the rise of chicken coincided with a health alarm about the fat in red meat, so chicken could be framed as a healthy alternative, but the point of chicken is that it is hospitable to both novel flavour variations, and to the taste for blandness. Tracing the rise of this palatable descendant of Tyrannosaurus rex also illustrates the ways that consumer choice has been subsumed by economics. Join Diane Purkiss, author of English Food: A People’s History, for a lunchtime journey into the planet of the chicken and what might lie beyond it.