The Thanksgiving Story

This year, as we sat around the table with family and friends, enjoying the American Bronze Heritage Turkey, Sibley Squash, home grown potatoes, just picked brussel sprouts, and the many more delights that graced our table, I gave thanks for the health and wellness of our group and reflected on the origins of the very first Thanksgiving.

Certainly, humans of all cultures have been giving thanks for a bountiful harvest throughout the millennia, but the holiday we Americans celebrate each November commemorates a real occurrence- the survival of Plymouth colonists due to the generosity of the native Wampanoag people, who shared their knowledge, skills and food with the starving settlers. This is where our bucolic image of the “first Thanksgiving” usually ends- a large 3 day feast of venison, wild game, pompion, and brotherly love between the Pilgrims and Indians. This story is, of course, incomplete. The “survivalist training” provided by the Wampanoag was rewarded with massacre only a generation later. The first Thanksgiving was actually a scene in a horror story.

Even so, showing gratitude at the end of a harvest season remains ever appropriate. But the story we tell ourselves about our celebrational food is often much like the fairy-tale version of Thanksgiving. On the surface (or on the package) our food appears bucolic, yet underneath it’s a bit more sinister with corresponding environmental, health, and ethical horrors. This is especially so of the industrial holiday turkeys that grace most American’s plates.

Barbara Kingsolver, in her book detailing a year of local eating, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, famously penned her quest to establish a breeding flock of heritage turkeys. In describing why, she writes about the state of the turkey industry.

“Of the 400 million turkeys Americans consume each year, more than 99 percent of them are a single breed: the Broad-Breasted White, a quick-fattening monster bred specifically for the industrial scale setting. These are the big lugs so famously dumb, they can drown by looking up at rain. (Friends of mine swear they have seen this happen.) If a Broad-Breasted white should escape slaughter, it likely wouldn’t live to be a year old: they get so heavy, their legs collapse. In mature form they’re incapable of flying, foraging, or mating. That’s right, reproduction. Genes that make turkey behave like animals are useless to a creature packed wing to wing with thousands of others, and might cause it to get uppity or suicidal, so those genes have been bred out of the pool. Docile lethargy works better, and helps them pack on the pounds. To some extent, this trend holds for all animals bred for confinement. For turkeys, this scheme that gave them an extremely breast-heavy body and ultra-rapid growth has also left them with a combination of deformity and idiocy that renders them unable to have turkey sex. Poor turkeys.”

Rather excitingly, Barbara’s Red Bourbon turkeys do end up mating naturally by the end of her story, but the lineage of the Broad Breasted Whites continue to be left up to human “sperm wranglers.” It is for this and many other frightful reasons that I gave up eating turkey even at Thanksgiving for more than decade in favor of what I presumed was the only sane alternative: vegetarianism. For much of my life I avoided factory farming and it’s moral, environmental, and health atrocities by avoiding all meat. It wasn’t until I moved to a community in Vermont, teeming with small scale farms, that I realized there existed a viable alternative to factory farming aside from altogether abstaining from meat: pasturing animals in the brilliant out of doors. In the case of birds, pastured poultry can result in a healthier animal, food, community and ecosystem.

The American Bronze heritage turkey we enjoyed (after a quick brine and simple oven roast) came from JenEhr, a local family farm whose turkeys are raised on pasture have an opportunity to do what turkeys do best: walk around in the fresh air and eat grass and bugs. In the process, their meat develops a rich flavor and healthier nutrient profile than grain fed industrial birds. Pastured poultry has increased beneficial omega 3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid, and beta carotene from the diverse diet they’ve had access to as well as less fat overall. Our Bronze turkey yielded a remarkably tiny amount of fat in the pan as it roasted, but what drippings it did yield were very rich in flavor and made a delectable gravy.

Heritage breeds are making a comeback due to dedicated conservationists- chefs, farmers, and eaters. Groups like the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and Slow Food are working to maintain biodiversity and prevent further food extinction in our food system. Our local chapter of the national organization, Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast, pairs local eaters with local growers of heritage breeds like the Standard Bronze, Red Bourbon, and Narragansett, with the Heritage Turkey Project- a basic list of heritage turkey growers. Heritage Turkeys in other parts of the country can be located on the ALBC and Local Harvest websites.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line:
It costs more to buy a heritage breed- they take more time and skill to raise. And takes more time to purchase than simply picking out a cheap bird from a pile in the freezer section of mega-mart. But it is a mistake to believe that a cheap price is a bargain. All down the food chain, the cost of cheap meat is felt- in the waters polluted by factory farm waste, in the unsafe conditions and poor wages paid the to industry workers, in the effects of chronic diseases on the eaters whose options are often limited to industrialized, processed foods. My recommendation is to buy better meat less often or just altogether skip it- and all the problems associated with cheap meat can be avoided. I choose quality over quantity and reserve my meat eating to those rare occasions when I’m comfortable it was raised in a way I can stomach. And when we do eat heritage meat, it is something we can truly be thankful for...