In the year 2026, the wealthiest country in the history of human civilization is debating whether the poorest among its citizens should be allowed to use their government food benefits to purchase a hot rotisserie chicken.
The bipartisan bill making its way through the US Congress would carve out a single exception to a long-standing SNAP rule that bars participants from using their benefits on hot prepared foods. Lawmakers have historically worried that, because hot prepared food is often more expensive than cold ingredients, benefits would evaporate too quickly if hungry people could buy them.
It is worth pausing here to note that the chicken in question is, at least in one major American retailer, a deliberately unprofitable product. In 2015, Costco’s then-CFO, Richard Galanti, told CNN that the company was willing to give up “$30 million, $40 million a year on gross margin” to keep the price of its rotating birds locked at $4.99 a pop. Why? The chicken is bait. It’s gets people through Costco’s front doors and walking by jumbo tequila bottles and TV screens.
Not everyone thinks folding rotisserie chicken into SNAP is a good idea. As Jerry Hagstrom pointed out in The Hagstrom Report, Jerold Mande, a former USDA official, has warned that without additional SNAP funding, expanding hot food access “will be a windfall for certain retailers and harm SNAP recipients.” The USDA actually has an existing pilot hot-food program for the elderly and disabled, but it never gained traction because participants quickly realized their roughly $2-per-meal benefits would vanish within a week.
So how did we get here? How did the humble rotisserie chicken become the synecdoche for American hunger policy, and a protein that can potentially unite Republicans and Democrats?
The short answer is that, over the last hundred years, chicken ate the country.
And while we’re looking back, let’s cast our gaze even further — because, why not?
The technique behind making rotisserie chicken itself is ancient. Spit-roasting evidence dates back to roughly 800 BCE among Egyptians, Greeks, and proto-Romans, who used large skewers to roast meat over open fires. The actual word “rotisserie,” however, is a much later invention: it comes from French, first appearing in Paris shops around 1450. Yes, a cooking method that predates the Roman Empire had to wait until the early Renaissance to get a proper rebrand.
Delicious as it was, the pre-modern rotisserie had a bit of a labor problem. Roasting evenly over an open fire requires constant rotation. Someone has to do it, and for long periods of time. The original solution was the spit boy, a kitchen servant whose main job was to stand near the fireplace for hours.
Thankfully, the British entered the chat, and proved they could put their talents toward not just human suffering, but also canine. They called it the turnspit dog. Canis vertigus. These creatures were forced to run inside wall-mounted hamster wheels, sometimes for hours, all in service of making food spin.
The rotisserie’s celebrity era arrived courtesy of Napoleon, who absolutely loved the stuff. His Paris kitchen staff were kept busy producing a constant supply, and he was known to wrap the chicken in paper and take them along on campaign — the original girl dinner, except the girl was busy sacking Vienna.
The modern bird, the one being debated in the US Congress, is more an invention from the 1950s, driven by Swiss immigrants to Peru, Roger Schuler and Franz Ulrich, who, while there, developed pollo a la brasa. Originally, it was supposed to be a high-end delicacy seasoned only with salt and cooked on a spit over charcoal.
America didn’t catch on until around 1985, when Arthur Cores and Steven Kolow opened Boston Chicken in Newton, Mass., then proceeded to do what every promising American food concept does: expand to over a thousand locations, rebrand as Boston Market, file for bankruptcy in 1998, and get bought by McDonald’s in 2000.
Boston Market has closed 95% of its remaining locations since 2022, basically killed off by the very grocery stores that copied its homework. Costco, meanwhile, debuted its rotisserie chickens around 2000 at $4.99, a price point at which they have remained ever since. If adjusted for inflation, that bird should cost $8.31. In 2023, the company sold 137 million of them.
So here we are: a 2,800-year-old cooking method, perfected by Peruvian Swiss immigrants, killed in the chain-restaurant market by a warehouse club, now elevated to the floor of the US Congress as one puzzle piece to address American hunger.
And in the end, the debate is sort of moot. While Congress might make a big deal over a single SKU in the grocery store, evidence suggests we could do more to solve hunger and promote healthier eating just by — wait for it — giving people who rely on food stamps more money and more control over their own purchasing decisions.
So what’s the lesson?
Maybe history itself is just one big rotisserie. And everyone in it gets cooked.