Thursday, Millions of Americans Participate in a national ritual Many of us say We don’t particularly enjoy or find meaning in it. We collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys — factory-farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear little resemblance to wild birds. In the apocryphally written Thanksgiving Story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we’d all do it, even if turkey meat were widely considered tasteless and unappetizing.
journalist Brian McManus writes for Vice. “Deep down, we know it, but bury it under happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”
So basically the meat-eating national holiday revolves around eating an animal that is actually nobody This fact of choice collides with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to cut out meat, or even eat less of it: taste, stupid.
No doubt, it has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is much more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.
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People crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story — desires that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social miscreants who boycott a central symbol of our most cherished national holiday, reminding everyone of the animal abuse and environmental degradation that went into creating it. With what could be more humane than that, dried meat and all?
Our instinct for conformity seems particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to each other and to our shared past. And while many of us today recognize that there is something wrong with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all occasions may seem like an ideal time to forget about it for a day.
In my experience, a lot of people who are trying to cut back on meat say they eat vegetarian or vegan when they cook for themselves — but when they’re guests at other people’s houses or celebrating a special occasion, they’ll eat whatever to avoid objection. Their hosts or provoke awkward conversations about factory farming.
But this Thanksgiving, I’d like to invite you, the reader, to reverse that logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes, even more than taste, then it is in these settings that we should focus our efforts to change American food habits for the better.
“It’s eating with others where we actually have the opportunity to affect larger change, share plant-based recipes, spark conversations and make traditions more sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie LevinA board member of Indiana’s Peak Animal Sanctuary and someone I know from vegan Twitter told me.
Hundreds of years ago, a turkey at Thanksgiving could represent abundance and good news—a very rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be thankful for. Today, it is hard to see it as anything other than a symbol of our irrationality and wanton cruelty to our nonhuman animals. In a day that means embodying the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with a better symbol.
Besides, we don’t like turkey either. We should skip it this year.
The plight of the Thanksgiving turkey
In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torella published a wrenching investigation into the state of the US turkey industry. He wrote:
Broad-breasted white turkey, which accounts for 99 turkeys out of every 100 grocery storesEmphasis has been bred on — you guessed it — the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. This bird grows up Twice as fast and became almost twice as large as in the 1960s. So being top-heavy, coupled with Other health problems Rapid growth and unsanitary factory farming environments make it difficult for them to walk.
Another problem arises from their giant breasts: the males are so large that they cannot mount the hens, so they must be artificially inseminated.
Author Jim Mason describes this practice in detail in his book The ethics of what we eatCo-authored by philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with turkey giant Butterball to research the book, where, He wroteHe had to hold the male turkeys while another worker used a vacuum pump to stimulate them to eject their semen into a syringe. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, where Mason would pin the hen’s chest and another worker. Insert content Syringe into the chicken using an air compressor.
Farm workers had to do this with a chicken every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most loathsome, worst-paid work”, Mason wrote.
In the wild, turkeys “live in small groups of a dozen or so and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” says Singer, author of the new book. Take Turkeysaid in a recent episode simple heart Podcast “Turkeys sold at Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go foraging… They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around that they don’t recognize as individuals,” Pack Crowded together in the shed.
From birth to death, a factory-farmed turkey’s life is one of rot violence, including having their beaks, toes chopped off, and SnoodsA brutal trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they are roughly squeezed, tied upside down, and sent on a fast-moving conveyor belt of murder. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they are unlucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they are fully conscious.”
At Thanksgiving, Americans throw roughly its equivalent Of these, 8 lakh turkeys are in the garbageAccording to a Estimates by ReFEDA non-profit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row to be celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which millions of infected farm chickens and turkeys have been killed using stomach-churning extermination methods.
Reclaiming Thanksgiving
When I search for language for this dire state, I can describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration – of the abundance of our planet, of our humanity, of life itself. On every other day of the year, it’s vulgar enough. As a holiday that represents our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving, for many vegetarians or vegans, often described as The most isolated day of the year.
I count myself in that group, though I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a day off for creative revitalization. I usually spend it making a feast of plant-based foods (known to most people as “sides”, although there’s no reason they can’t be the main event).
To name a few: a Creamy Lentil-Stuffed Squash, Cashew Lentil BakeA Bright Autumn Brussels Sprout Salad, Roasted Red Cabbage with Walnuts and Feta (including sub Dairy-free cheese), Mushroom Clam-less Chowder (I add lots of white beans), Challa For bread rolls, one Pumpkin Miso Tart More complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had RasmalaiA Bengali sweet whose taste aligns beautifully with the holidays.
Vegan Turkey Roast Totally optional, although a lot of them have gotten pretty good in recent years — I love Roast Garden Bread And Field Roast Hazelnuts and Cranberries. you can too make your own.
The hardest part of going meatless isn’t about the food (if it were, it might not be so hard to convince Americans to give up dry roast turkey). “It’s about exposing uncomfortable truths and moral disagreements,” Levine said, about confronting grotesque inconsistencies in celebrating joy and carving out mass-produced violence.
These conversations are not easy, but they are worth having. And we don’t fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. In contrast, culture is an ongoing conversation we have with each other about our shared values—and any culture that doesn’t change is dead. I have found that in adapting to traditions that are no longer authentic to our ethics and violate our integrity, there is much more meaning. We can start with Thanksgiving.
