During the summer of 2012, the Islamic Republic of Iran was rocked by a crisis over chicken. As the world ratcheted up pressure on Iran in hopes of forcing its government to abandon its nuclear program, the fallout from the latest round of international sanctions rippled throughout the Iranian economy. The currency crashed, inflation spiked, and the primary engine of the country's wealth – its oil exports – plummeted by nearly 50 percent. Although sanctions, particularly those imposed by Washington, have been a prominent feature of the economic landscape here almost since the inception of the revolutionary state more than three decades earlier, no previous measures had delivered such an immediate, dramatic, or far-reaching blow.

In this charged environment, the skyrocketing price of chicken, which soared as high as three times its cost only a year earlier, emerged as a kind of shorthand for a newly urgent public debate over the economy, the government, and, by extension, the future of Iran. From the Friday prayers pulpit, the Iranian leadership's favored instrument of communication, clerics appealed to Iranians to abstain from chicken and eat more vegetables instead, while others denounced the price spike as an enemy plot.

The head of Iran's internal security forces took it upon himself to warn against broadcasting images of chicken on state-run television, for fear that the mere sight of morgh polo (chicken with rice, variations of which are a staple of the Iranian diet) would provoke class warfare. The issue inspired impassioned newspaper editorials, televised policy discussions, and, in classic Iranian fashion, endless jokes that circulated the country through routes both timeworn (word of mouth) and cutting-edge (Facebook and Twitter). The international media picked up the meme, and as Iranians waited for hours in long lines for government-subsidized chicken, there was at least one case of a chicken-incited riot. In an echo of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 2005 campaign slogan, a newspaper affiliated with one of his rivals jabbed that Iranians “are still waiting for oil money to come to their table in order to purchase chicken!”

The uproar seemed a suitably ironic denouement for a state whose founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had explicitly touted the primacy of moral considerations over material ones.