The mystery of the invented animal that is eaten at Christmas in only one place in the world

Is it truly a unique bird in the world? Is it bred at the North Pole? Does it grow up in nests high in the trees? Or is it a laboratory creature that doesn't even have any feathers? All sorts of legends have surrounded one of the most ubiquitous dishes on Brazilian Christmas tables for the past 30 years. There, many have heard stories about the origin of this super-chicken, the Chester, always shrouded in mystery that has given rise to the most outlandish theories (like the one about the beast without any feathers). Few can claim to have ever seen a live specimen, and that's why, when journalist Vitor Hugo Brandalise Junior, sitting among friends in a bar, blurts out, "My uncle was one of the inventors of the Chester," he knows he'll have the audience's full attention.

Chester, indeed, was born in the laboratories of one of the great – giants– Brazilian food corporations. Perdigão is the company behind a bizarre project that began in the mid-70s when executives decided to find an animal to dethrone the turkey, which was making a fortune from their main competitor. The result has ended up being one of the star roasts in millions of homes, a chicken of unconventional size that concentrates 70% of its body mass in the breast and thighs (in a normal hen it's usually 45%) and which, according to some palates, has a more succulent and less tough meat than that of the turkey.

The story of the experiment has a bit of everything: trade wars, heavy doses of industrial secrecy, and a powerful marketing campaign that even played the football rivalry card. It's no surprise, then, that one of the main producers of The Brazilian podcast, Radio Novelo, recently explained its historyBrandalise himself unravels, through his family history, one of the most recurring mysteries of the Brazilian collective imagination.

To understand the origin of it all, we need to go back to 1979, to a small town in southern Brazil, in the state of Santa Catarina. Videira, located in the middle of a vineyard area –hence the name, which comes from vine (vineyard)–, It had a completely different economic engine. There, the giant food corporation Perdigão was the dominant player: "In the supermarkets of my city, it was almost impossible to find any meat products from the competition," Brandalise explained to ARA. But beyond that power, Perdigão closely monitored every move made by its main rival, the Sadia corporation, located just 200 km away.

Sadia had been ahead of the curve and had become the largest turkey distributor in the country, a Christmas tradition that was growing rapidly thanks to the influence coming from the United States. When Christmas Eve dinner arrived, their turkey (popularly known as Peru gives Sadia, given that Peru means turkey (in Portuguese) he had no rival.

While brainstorming their options, the Perdigão executives set themselves a challenge: what if they created a product, or rather, an animal that could rival their own? To begin, they sent two employees to the US: "My uncle was one of those who went to Maryland, where they contacted a geneticist who had developed a line of exceptionally large chickens," the journalist recounts. It could be said that they brought back from that trip what would become the ancestors of the Chester. A plane landed in StoPaulo, with thousands of eggs that, after overcoming "a great deal of bureaucracy and health controls," recalls Brandalise, arrived at the company headquarters where, 21 days later, the first chicks would hatch. The giant chicken project – still unnamed at the time– It was beginning to take shape.

Silence was one of the rules imposed by Perdigão during the three years of development in the laboratory. Taking any pictures of the chickens was forbidden, and in fact, they remain almost invisible to the public even today. A Google search using the words Chester frango (chicken), almost a single image appears, distributed many years later by the company –always the same– to certify that yes, Chester did have a head and was alive, contrary to what some speculated.

According to Brandalise, the initial secrecy surrounding the project was partly for protection. On the one hand, if things went wrong, there was a lot at stake; on the other, there were health concerns: they wanted to protect the chickens they were working with from any external agent or pathogen that could ruin everything. In this regard, the journalist emphasizes that it's often like an "unwritten rule" in the food industry not to release too many images of animals on fattening farms. In the case of Chester, there was also the added argument of trade secrets, which they wanted to keep safe from potential espionage by competitors.

In fact, despite growing up in a house where the Chester chicken was a constant topic of conversation, Brandalise himself admits he has never seen a live specimen. "It's undeniable that the images weren't very appealing to the general public; they were trying to genetically improve the chicken, and nobody really knew how it would turn out," he points out. The work in the lab, as his uncle and father, also an employee of Perdigão, repeatedly told him, consisted of fattening those first chickens and breeding them together. The aim was to ensure that the desired trait—in this case, a larger-than-normal breast and thighs—would be passed on to the offspring until they achieved the super-chicken they envisioned.

His father, with whom he shares a name, was a veterinarian specializing in animal nutrition at Perdigão. He was in charge of designing the chickens' fattening diet. "They were given feed made from corn, bone and offal meal, and soy," explains Vitor Hugo Brandalise Sr. in the podcast recorded by his son. Among the theories circulating about Chester chickens was the one accusing the company of having created a large chicken by pumping it full of anabolic steroids. It's the only theory that Brandalise's father finds unacceptable, and he categorically denies it: "I never used hormones in the feed. This is all a myth, and quite a myth at that. What was done was genetic engineering," he insists in response to his son's questions. Undoubtedly, in this case, the lack of transparency didn't work in their favor.

Translated to the present day, it's clear that Chester's feat, despite meeting all the required health standards at the time, sparks controversy and raises heated ethical debates about the steps taken to bring it to market and what right they had to conduct this experimentation. "One can conclude that today, all of this would surely be unthinkable," Brandalise confirms.

Secrecy helps to sell

The mystery surrounding Chester's entire development process ultimately proved to be a major asset when it came to its market launch. Perdigão concluded that leaving some of the big questions about the new super-chicken unanswered would only increase its popularity. They weren't wrong.

However, the advertising campaign spared no expense. The goal was significant: to inject a new product into the collective consciousness so that it would become a tradition. Brandalise recalls that the food company, for example, created a band in the style of big band, the Chester Show, which dedicated itself to touring all of southern Brazil carrying as its banner the announcement of the new chicken that was born to change Christmas food forever.

But the rivalry with competitors Sadia and her turkey became a national issue when football entered the picture. To promote Chester, Perdigão came up with the idea of founding a futsal team, and that's how Videira became the Brazilian Mecca of the sport, with signings who became true idols of the masses, like the player Jackson. It was precisely thanks to this star of Perdigão's team that the Brazilian national futsal team became world champions against Spain in a final in Madrid in 1985. Everything was planned and it worked perfectly: Chester was everywhere, even printed on the players' kits, and it gave its name to its fans. Chester club.

The result of this journey is that today the super-chicken created in Brazil is a commonplace tradition. Chester chicken only appears in supermarket freezers around this time of year, neatly packaged and already seasoned with spices, ready for the oven, explains Brandalise. The efforts to outpace the competition paid off, considering that, over the years, Perdigão would eventually absorb its main competitor, Sadia. Today, both brands continue to dominate the processed food market in Brazil, and they do so under the same umbrella: that of the large agribusiness corporation Brasil Foods (BRF).

One last mystery to solve is the name: why Chester? In the middle of the discussion to name the new chicken, someone had the idea of an Anglicism: if chest is chest in English and this animal had a large chest, why not tell it ChesterThe idea was well-received despite a fundamental error, because in English, chicken breast is called... breast and not chest and therefore they would have had to tell him breasterwhich didn't sound so good to them. Finally, Chester was chosen, and other options like big-breasted (for having a large chest, again) they remained in the records of the intellectual property institute as vestiges of a very extravagant industrial project.