Excerpt from Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? by Andrew Lawler, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Underdogs and unsung heroes are journalistic red meat. The chicken is so underestimated that it is legally invisible. Although its meat and eggs power our urban and industrial lives, it is not considered livestock—or even an animal—under American law if raised for food. "Chickens do not always enjoy an honorable position among city-bred people," E. B. White noted. If they thought of chickens at all, it was "as a comic prop straight out of vaudeville." Though Susan Orlean declared the chicken the "it" bird in a 2009 New Yorker article devoted to the popular backyard chicken movement, the dog and cat retain their joint title as most beloved pet.

If all canines and felines vanished tomorrow, along with the odd parakeet and gerbil, there would be much mourning but minimal impact on the global economy or international politics. A suddenly chickenless world, however, would spell immediate disaster. In 2012, as the cost of eggs shot up in Mexico City after millions of birds were culled due to disease, demonstrators took to the streets, rattling the new government. It was dubbed "The Great Egg Crisis," and no wonder, since Mexicans eat more eggs per capita than any other people. The same year in Cairo, high-priced poultry helped inspire Egypt's revolution as protestors rallied to the cry: "They are eating pigeon and chicken, but we eat beans every day!" When poultry prices tripled in Iran recently, the nation's police chief warned television producers not to broadcast images of people eating the popular meat to avoid inciting violence among those who could not afford grilled kebabs.

The chicken has, quietly but inexorably, become essential. Though it can barely fly, the fowl has become the world's most migratory bird through international imports and exports. The various parts of a single bird may end up at opposite ends of the globe. Chinese get the feet, Russians the legs, Spaniards the wings, Turks the intestines, Dutch soup makers the bones, and the breasts go to the United States and Britain. This globalized business extends to Kansan corn that plumps Brazilian birds, European antibiotics to stave off illness in American flocks, and Indian-made cages housing South African poultry.

"A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing," Karl Marx wrote. But analyze it and the commodity turns into "a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." As I pursued the chicken's trail around the world, I found it full of surprising metaphysical and theological implications. Emerging from the Asian jungle as a magical creature, it spread around the globe, performing as a celebrity in royal menageries, playing an important role as a guide to the future, and transforming into a holy messenger of light and resurrection. It entertained us as it fought to the death in the cockpit, served as an all-purpose medicine chest, and inspired warriors, lovers, and mothers. In traditions from Bali to Brooklyn, it still takes on our sins as it has done for millennia. No other animal has attracted so many legends, superstitions, and beliefs across so many societies and eras.

The chicken crossed the world because we took it with us, a journey that began thousands of years ago in Southeast Asia and required human help every step of the way. It slept in bamboo cages on dugout canoes moving down the wide Mekong River, squawked in carts pulled by oxen plodding to market towns in China, and jostled over Himalayan mountains in wicker baskets slung across the backs of traders. Sailors carried it across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, and by the seventeenth century, chickens lived in nearly every corner of every settled continent. Along the way they sustained Polynesian colonists, urbanized African society, and staved off famine at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Charles Darwin drew on it to cement his theory of evolution, and Louis Pasteur used it to create the first modern vaccine. Its egg, after more than twenty-five hundred years of study, remains the premier model organism of science, and is the vessel we use to manufacture our annual flu serum. The common fowl was the first domesticated animal to have its genome sequenced. Its bones ease our arthritis, the rooster's comb smooths the wrinkles on our faces, and transgenic chickens may soon synthesize a host of our medicines. Raising the bird also offers poor, rural women and their children vital calories and vitamins to keep malnutrition at bay, as well as an income that can help lift struggling families out of poverty.

Excerpted from Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? by Andrew Lawler. Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Lawler. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.