Crafting a Turkey

Butterball turkeys, seventy cents a pound! Frozen or fresh, seven pounds or twenty, buying a turkey for Thanksgiving is generally a painless procedure, one that is easily checked off a “to-do” list during the week before Thanksgiving.

            In fact, the only difficult task when choosing a turkey at the local Safeway or Wal-Mart is in picking the perfect one. Piles upon piles of sanitized, plastic-wrapped, overstuffed birds patiently wait to become the main course of a gluttonous dinner. Most people just choose based on the number of guests who will be joining their table—a pound (or maybe two!) per person usually does the trick. After all, in a Butterball Turkey, size is really the only way to tell one apart from another.

Turkeys show their tail feathers. Image from http://sanfrancisco.grubstreet.com/2009/03/the_niman_turkey_project.html

            Back in the day before these sumptuous birds topped the scales at roughly the same size as a small child, the way Americans prepared for Thanksgiving happened a little differently.  A visit to the local butcher weeks or even a month before Thanksgiving was less easily checked off the task list. A family had to make holiday plans well in advance—having to pre-order the turkey was to fix the number of guests at a maximum amount. But pre-ordering the bird was necessary because farmers needed more time to prepare them for the big day. Small farms ran high risk operations, and no one wanted to take the chance of having grown too many turkeys, and then having no one to sell them to after Thanksgiving. The farmer sold to the butcher, who sold to the consumer, and everyone had money on the line.

            The mass production of meat in the United States is a relatively new phenomenon. Farming has never been a “get rich quick” business, and one of the easiest ways to keeps costs low and profits high is by streamlining the product. Even just a few decades ago, the idea of pumping hormones into pork, beer, or poultry was an unheard of concept. To get the turkeys fat, a farmer had to make sure the bird had plenty of time to eat plenty of calories. It took time to grow the perfect turkey.

            A turkey needed a balanced diet high in protein to gain prized pounds, therefore it needed a proper habitat to peck for fat grubs and other insects. A farmer first had to be a generous benefactor to his birds before getting any financial payback from them.

            Additionally, antibiotics used to be less available to farmers—and more costly. Preventative care medicine was a crucial component to turkey raising. Turkey farmers had to be both competent veterinarians and benevolent landlords to coax profit from their poultry crop.

            These days, you might still see signs suggesting that you “Order Early”, but they are more of a novelty than the norm. Mostly these signs are at farmers markets or healthfood stores and the turkeys they represent are going to cost more than 70 cents per pound.Turkey craftsmen are a dwindling breed, but for people who consider cooking to be a form or artisanship they are a small but invaluable resource.