Are you about to enjoy your Thanksgiving turkey? Well, Salon writer Lindsay Abrams wants you to stop. Stop right now! Not content to give liberal ideology a rest even on this holiday, Abrams attempts to guilt trip her readers into giving up turkey for Thanksgiving.
Her arguments against turkey are pretty much what we've heard before. That modern Thanksgiving turkeys are not natural in that they are too fat to fly or breed. Also we get hit with guilt trips about their living conditions. Of course, such turkeys would never even exist in the first place if they were not so ideal for the Thanksgiving table in terms of weight and cost. So here is Abrams doing her best to dissuade us from enjoying turkey today:
It’s impossible to overstate what the modern, commercial turkey, or what’s affectionately known as the broad-breasted white, means for Thanksgiving. At least, for Thanksgiving the way we’re used to it. We wouldn’t be able to put a turkey on 88 percent of Americans’ Thanksgiving tables without it. But along the way, we’ve traded in a lot — too much, perhaps, to the point where turkey no longer deserves its place at the center of what’s supposed to be the year’s most mindful feast.
Perhaps the most commonly cited curiosity about modern turkeys is that they’re so disproportionately large, with 80 percent of their weight concentrated in their breast, that they’re no longer able to mate. The birds are so far removed from the (albeit ill-defined) ideal of “natural” that they’re only able to breed through artificial insemination. Forget flying; as a consequence of their disproportionate size, many can barely walk, or even stand upright. In the words of Suzanne McMillan, a poultry expert with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), commercial turkeys are “bred to suffer.”
But the concerns for factory-farmed turkeys’ well-being, McMillan told Salon, go beyond the suffering they’re born into, to the conditions in which they’re housed. This, too, will sound familiar to anyone with a working understanding of your standard factory farm: debeaked and de-toed, the birds are stuffed into cages and left with nothing to do except eat — sometimes each other, hence the reason for the debeaking. Their breeding, ironically enough, may increase the degree to which they’re impacted by their stressful conditions, weakening their immune system. The combination of both, one USDA study suggests, has made them more susceptible to disease.
Somehow it seems like these turkeys suffer a lot less than the average resident of North Korea who live in even crummier conditions but have to starve on top of that. Now the Thanksgiving party pooper literally does that with lots of poop invoked:
And that which makes turkeys sick can harm people, too. McMillan points to the months spent lying in their own waste (remember, many can’t stand), providing ample opportunity for their feces to contaminate their open wounds, or the lesions caused by the ammonia gas that can accumulate in poultry houses.
Oddly enough, Abrams also provides arguments as to why Thanksgiving turkeys are a good deal:
There’s no denying, on the other hand, that factory-farmed turkeys are incredibly efficient: They require just 2.5 pounds of feed in order to put on a pound of body weight, while the feed-conversion ratio for heritage breeds can be as high as 4-to-1. From a carbon footprint perspective, they’re much lighter on the planet than other forms of meat, particularly beef.
Abrams concludes with the final guilt trip about why people should never eat things "with a face," i.e. any meat and presents us with the supposed wonders of a turkey-less Thanksgiving future:
What’s left is a challenge not to practicality, but to our imaginations. How can it still be Thanksgiving without turkey? In his 2009 book “Eating Animals,” Jonathan Safran Foer takes a hard-line position against consuming anything with a face, but raises a point for the holiday bird that’s particularly salient here. Of all the meals we eat throughout the year, he writes, “Thanksgiving dinner is the one we try most earnestly to get right. It holds the hope of being a good meal, whose ingredients, efforts, setting and consuming are expressions of the best in us.”
And so “more than any other food,” Foer continues, “the Thanksgiving turkey embodies the paradoxes of eating animals: what we do to living turkeys is just about as bad as anything humans have ever done to any animal in the history of the world. Yet what we do with their dead bodies can feel so powerfully good and right.”
If Thanksgiving truly is a time for mindful consumption, then turkey isn’t the making of the holiday — it’s its undoing. Remove it from the center of the feast, and what we end up with can end up being even more meaningful than what we’ve given up.
Exit question: How many Salon writers and editors are actually following this silly admonition to avoid turkey today?
