Why Do We Gobble Gobble Turkey on Thanksgiving?
Fall is my favorite season of the year—I mean, if we had seasons in Southern California. And Thanksgiving has to be my favorite holiday. The food, the friends, wearing a jacket—at night, a fire in the fireplace, opening the sliding glass door to cool things. It’s just so festive.
But why the hell do we eat turkey on the fourth Thursday of November? And boy do we eat a lot of it—five billion pounds worth according to the National Turkey Federation. And why do meat trade associations always sound like something out of Star Trek?
A popular article from Slate Magazine took a most pragmatic approach to the Turkey question, explaining that Turkeys were “fresh, affordable, and big enough to feed a crowd.” They were also less expensive than other game and fowl, and cheaper by the pound than chicken. BORING! There’s got to be a better yarn to spin.
It turns out that the answer to the great Turkey Mystery is both simple, and complex; truthful, and full of lies; steeped in history, and intentionally fabricated. In other words…entirely American.
The earliest accounts of turkey eating date back way before the pilgrims broke bread with the Wampanoag at Plymouth Rock. The fossil record shows that turkeys originated in North America about five million years ago. They were first domesticated in Mexico more than 2,000 years ago, where archeologists found mountains of fossilized turkey poop. Half a dozen skeletons buried under the Mayan temple of El Mirador in Guatemala suggest that Turkeys were being traded—presumably for their meat and feathers—hundreds of miles across Central and North America as early as 300 BCE.
The first European mention of turkeys wasn’t until 1525 when Spanish historian, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, mentioned them in his History of the Indies. Oviedo is also credited with “discovering” tobacco, the pineapple, and maybe the first use of the word “barbacoa,” (barbeque for us English speakers) but I hazard a few Native Americans might challenge him for that finders fee.
Before Oviedo’s words had gone to print, Spanish explorers had already taken a few turkeys back to Europe, much to the delight of the continent’s royalty who prized turkey as an elite extravagance. Queen Elizabeth I is rumored to have dined on this New Spain delicacy the night of her 1588 military victory over the Spanish Armada, just to rub their noses in it. After that, turkey was a hit in England, and even formally endorsed by the Church as a holiday feast bird.
But what about that whole Pilgrim thing?
It is possible that turkeys were on the menu at the first Thanksgiving in 1621, but most historians suggest Pilgrims and Wampanoag dined on the more common deer, goose, lobster and clam, rather than the king of white meat. But whether or not that feather- headdress-black-hat-buckle-shoe feast actually included turkey, Americans never gave up on their prized holiday bird.
Soon after Independence, and long before Lin-Manuel Miranda made Alexander Hamilton popular, our first US Treasurer declared that, “No citizen of the U.S. shall refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day.”
Another American founding father, Ben Franklin, is rumored to have been a huge fan of the turkey, even suggesting it should become America’s official bird and appear on our seal. However, I’m here to dispel that myth (thanks to a Smithsonian Magazine article in 2013). The original comments seem to be taken out of context from a pedantic and sarcastic letter to his children, where Franklin argued the eagle on the just minted US Seal looked more like a turkey, which might be a better choice because the “vain and silly” gobbler was native born with a foolhardy courage.
Twenty years after Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge generously gifted the then exotic and expensive “grand turkey” to the Cratchits in the wildly popular A Christmas Carol, President Lincoln officially proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863. Some might argue this was quite possibly his most important presidential decree, after that Gettysburg Address thing of course. But I think it was Lincoln’s tradition of issuing a presidential pardon for a “most fortunate turkey” that really settled America’s love affair with the bird.
My favorite bit of Turkey Americana was the Sisyphean plight of the turkey drover, the Gobbler Gaucho of the 19th century. His job was to herd sometimes thousands of birds, across America’s Great Plains to get them to market by Thanksgiving Day. This historic “turkey trot” sometimes lasted hundred of miles, from Kentucky to Tennessee, Vermont to Boston, Missouri to Colorado. As late as 1930, turkey drovers were still walking the Texas panhandle to get their birds to the closest processor.
By the second half of the 20th Century, America’s almost insatiable turkey demand at the holidays led to industrialization and factory farming. Much like the rest of the meat industry, turkey raising became an indoor affair. Animal welfare suffered, waste pilled up, and the suffering meat quality was simply plumped up with saline injections. Yuck!
Luckily, in the last decade, small farmers across America are fighting to return turkey to its former glory. And ECB is excited to provide the first ever GAP-5-certified turkey in America, Diestel Farm’s Pasture-Raised “freedom to forage” bird. This guy is GMO-free, no antibiotics, no growth stimulants, nor hormones, and no added salt solutions.
If you want the celebrate the heritage of the American Turkey in a way that would make the Wampanoag, Queen Elizabeth, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Dickens, and your family members proud, you better give us a call and order that bird while supplies last.
-Gobble Gobble